Currently I am reading a book The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack. Something from the book has been disturbing my mind. Jack recommends sharing equity with employees. The book asserts that “using equity interests as your way of providing a stake in the outcome is likely to be the superior option”. The inferior option, to Jack, is sharing profits among the employees. Of course Jack is not a Ugandan, otherwise even sharing profits among employees is rocket science to many employers in our country. I have many friends who have not received a salary for more than six months yet their employers are driving the latest Range Rovers. Anyway, what do I know about money? Let me concentrate on what I know best and have practiced for so long.
Most of us may not have equity to share in the first place. But there is something we can share. And that is the knowledge we have. I am always surprised that many senior engineers are not willing to teach their juniors what they know. This is all in the name of competition. Jack in his book states that actually sharing equity creates more profits in the long run. And this is not just theory. The book is based on the practice at SRC Holdings Corporation, where Jack is the Founder, President and CEO (https://www.greatgame.com/jack-stack). The average estimated productivity difference between companies that share equity and those that don’t was 6.2% in 2004.
From my ten years experience, of freely sharing knowledge with everyone around me, I can confer that actually it increases your productivity as a person. There is nothing you gain from holding onto information which you also obtained from someone else. Many engineers sleep in office and at the same time are not able to deliver reports on time just because they refused to train junior engineers to assist them. Just because they fear that they will take away their work. I accept the fear is real but it has a solution. The solution is to make sure that as a person you also develop yourself everyday. Every person has a unique value that can never be copied from them. And that is your competitive advantage. Otherwise the junior engineer you are refusing to share knowledge with will be trained by someone else and still take away your work.
I am privileged to have many junior engineers around me whom I can always rely on to produce reports to the same level of quality as I could. Or even better. This has enhanced my productivity as a professional. It has also allowed me to embark on many ventures. A relatable example I can share is the one of my mentor Prof. Denis Kalumba. There is no academic paper I have published without his name as an author. This has contributed greatly to his academic career. It is all I can pay for the great knowledge he invested in me.
About sharing equity with my employees, as I said in the first paragraph; Anyway, what do I know about money? I will have a befitting answer ten years from now. As Ap. Moses Mukisa always says: The only thing you know is what you are practicing.