The business of asking what one must know

One of the great lessons my father taught me when I started working for the family business was to go around the office to visit and talk to the rank and file employees at their desks rather than call them up to see the "boss." He said that this is the best way to have a hands-on feel of the business. No wonder one often sees Shoe Mart founder Henry Sy walking around his department stores on Sundays. Or my partners, Rikki Dee and Ricco Ocampo, at their many restaurants, observing the challenges the service staff face day in and day out. I have great admiration for these businessmen because this simple practice is actually very hard to do.

The more obvious benefits of "watching" the business, like a good storekeeper would, is to have a direct understanding and experience of the customers’ needs and wishes. Henry Sy once told me how he developed the gift of being able to guess quite accurately a person’s shoe size by looking at the customer’s hands. This talent for observation must be one of the factors that have contributed to his overwhelming success today.

There is a dimension to my father’s lesson that is often missed. It is so much more comfortable to work from the seat of authority, giving instructions based on indirect knowledge that is brought up through official channels. Unfortunately, there is just too much important information that falls by the wayside if we do not make the effort to have direct contact with the people who know what is really going on. "People," my father said, "tend to be more open in sharing their views and speaking up their ideas when they are in their comfort zone." Somehow, when the boss sits at his desk, or at the head of the conference table, the aura of authority could very well crush the initiative of employees to speak up. Worse of all, we fail to ask people what they know for fear of looking stupid.

I recently had a very pointed experience of this phenomenon. One of our company’s vessels was caught in the sudden shift of direction of a major typhoon, which was so devastating that the ship started to take in water. Our crisis response team reacted quickly and by remote control instructed the captain and crew how to bring the vessel and cargo to safety. We were all so happy and grateful especially because we felt we had succeeded in overcoming the crisis by giving the master and crew the moral support they needed. During our post-crisis assessment, I was surprised to find out from the master that we actually had the opposite effect. Our concept of moral support was to tell the master what to do. The master told us that what he needed in this crisis situation was for us to listen to him, to ask his recommendation of what had to be done, especially since we could not see what was happening and he was right there in the middle of the storm.

Listening to the master made me realize how easy it is to fall into the habit of making decisions based on what we think we know. It showed me how important it is to ask and listen to important information that could very well be the missing piece to a puzzle. This takes a great deal of humility born out of inner confidence – a suppression of one’s ego, as well as plain hard work.

Since it is difficult to make the rounds visiting the rank and file especially in large organizations, we should reassess whether the systems within our organizations allow everyone’s voice and opinion to be heard – unadulterated – without fear. Employees must trust that someone is listening. This led me to think about the recent young officers’ rebellion. We need a system that allows us to hear their voices. We must encourage more profound levels of communication and listen carefully to every level of society.