Dad Gives the Boy Some Sound Advice Regarding Team Work
Dear Hal:
When Mother read me your letter announcing that you had at last been appointed a Branch House Manager, as well as your comments on just what it meant to you, I thought I’d take time tonight to unburden myself of some of my views in that connection, that might be interesting to you at a time when you were just starting the new work.
I am wondering if you fully appreciate the difference in your position from a standpoint of responsibility.
Up to now, you have been working entirely for someone else and while you are still subject to considerable supervision, in addition thereto, you will now have others under your supervision—working under you.
Of course, you’ve been through the different stages of your company selling and around branch houses long enough to have a good working idea of the general routine of the work and I don’t doubt at all, but what you will handle that end of your work in good shape, but right now, at the start, Boy, let’s look at the bigger, broader things that are expected of you.
One of the first things that will impress you is just how poor a salesman Smith is, over in the East territory and what great weaknesses that new man over South is already demonstrating. Your hands will just fairly itch to grab hold and do it all yourself, in your own way, which, of course, you think is the only way, but WHOA—throw on the emergency, Old Top, you’re skidding! You’re a hustler all right and a good man, which you admit yourself, but, Boy, you just cannot spread yourself out over the whole territory and run the branch too, and again, if your company had wanted you to do all the selling they’d have told you so.
No, your job is to teach and lead others to do most of the selling, reserving only the hard-boiled and nursing-bottle customers that the other boys cannot land, or for some reason seem to avoid.
I want to bear down a little on that remark “teach and lead.” You know, back in the old days before Bryan ever ran for President, which is longer than you can remember, the popular belief was that the best way to get the best results out of a man on any job was for the Boss to be sort of a mixture of Simon Legree, pyrotechnic cuss-words, bar-room sarcasm and “Drill ye Terriers, Drill” policy, but thanks to a revolutionary era which was directed by common hog-sense, instead of the kind that the butcher buys in five pound pails, that kind of man-management has been tabooed.