“If you are the smartest person in the room – you haven’t
hired well.”
- Rory Brown – President, Bleacher Report
Any leader worth their salt has got to be open to other people’s ideas and more specifically open to dissenting opinions. Your staff has got to be able to speak their mind and let you know where the weaknesses are in your plan – it’s just good business. Better they figure out the problems in advance than launching a full campaign only to have customers and bad reviews on-line ruin what might have been a good product. If it had been vetted properly by staff who felt comfortable telling you where the draw-backs were, much of the issues your company might be facing could have been avoided. Worse, you will hear in hindsight that there was staff who knew from the get-go that it was a bad idea but because they had been shot down so many times before, they wanted to see the latest campaign go up in smoke in a misguided sense of vindication.
In a recent article by the Harvard Business Review, Edgar Schein, a professor emeritus at MIT Sloan School of Management asked a group of students why they wanted a role in management. They replied that “it means I can now tell others what to do.” That’s the wrong answer if you truly want to be a leader. Schein warned that the “tacit assumption” among executives “is that life is fundamentally and always a competition,” hurts not helps organizations. If that is the sort of climate you are cultivating at your business, than you are guilty leading your organization off into a deep crevice of half-assery.
Encouraging your staff to compete rather than collaborate will only raise the specter of suspicion and animosity. It will close communication and people will hoard information because they are afraid of being undermined by another staff member. They will end up telling you what you want to hear because the one who curries the most favor with the boss wins.
You’d think the
days of the yes men are over but as we’ve seen too many times in the business
and political world, people who surround themselves with those that cannot
or will not speak up can lead to failure.
Sure many managers can blame it on their underlings but at the end of
the day, it’s ultimately your ass that has to answer for a poor decision. Placing the blame on those who work under you
shows that you are either someone who can’t manage people well or won’t listen
when they try to offer you good advice.
Neither quality bodes well for a person in who is supposed to lead a
successful organization.
A couple of years ago, I worked for a man who wanted to remodel the office space where the main administrative area was. He had seen some models of an open floor plan where the staff sat at tables and worked – not in cubicles or in private spaces but everyone out in the open work stations with phones in one central area. These open-office configurations have been all the rage for the last few years. They also supposedly saved money by not putting up walls or allowing staff to have some privacy while they work. For an insecure manager like my boss at the time, they could look over their employee’s shoulder at a moment’s notice to see if they are working or completing a bracket for the Final Four during March madness. Part of my bosses’ great plan was to have the women out in the open because most of them were administration while the senior managers who were men had their own offices.
I pointed out that having all the men and women literally segregated looked really, really bad – like workplace discrimination that could lead to a lawsuit kind of bad. He offered to give me an office as well just to balance out the estrogen vs. testosterone equation so he could counter a potential lawsuit. I just shook my head and said that I would still get push back from staff because many of them felt that they could not be productive in the type of office space that he was promoting. The women felt like they would be discriminated against and for many the openness of the office would be too distracting. Finally, he begrudgingly scrapped the plan. Since then, the whole concept of open office space has come under attack from such publications as Forbes, Inc., Bloomberg and Fortune magazines. The publications have reported that the concept can make employees miserable, communicate a lack of trust, cause a higher transmission of germs which result in an increase in sick days and in the end cost more in lost productivity than if companies had just spent the money building walls for the office. My opposition was a risk but in the end saved the organization from low employee morale and a reduced bottom line. Of course, my boss might not have seen it like that at the time but the staff appreciated that I went to bat for them. I expressed their views as well as my own on the weaknesses of the plan - I offered dissent which kept a bad decision from being made - it did not make me disloyal if anything it proved my value.
As someone who
facilitates team building – I’m always emphasizing collaboration and the open
sharing of ideas. It comes from my
background in improvisational theatre.
In improv - one of the cardinal rules is the importance of making the
other person look good and vice versa.
It takes the ego out of the scene and the actors have to work together
and not try to out-do one another - its simple collaboration and not competition. Games like “Yes, and…” help establish a
simple idea that everyone has to build on – and no one’s idea is denied or
blocked. For instance, someone could
start with “I want our new ad campaign to have a horse in it.” The next person
might say, “Yes and the horse’s best friend is a golden retriever puppy,” the
next person would add “Yes, and when someone tries to adopt the puppy from the farm,
the horses chase after the car,” and so on (FYI- this was a 2014 Superbowl
commercial for Budweiser – it didn’t talk about beer but created a buzz on
social media and a sequel for the next Superbowl – check it out)
“Yes and…” is a
great tool to develop ideas because nothing is too outlandish to be considered
and everyone’s ideas are valid. Think
back to the year 2000 when the Aflac Duck was first introduced. That was some serious out of the box thinking
that probably came from people building on some crazy ass idea and now it’s one
of the most recognizable symbols in the corporate world. Now think what would have happened in those
meetings if every crazy idea was put down and the only person whose opinion
counted was the person in charge. You
probably would not have had the collaborative effect of those commercials which
have been incredibly successful.
So it goes with managing people – if you are humble enough to allow other ideas– amazing things will happen for your organization. As a leader you need to be open to dissent, guide and nurture it. Sure, there are going to be naysayers for the sake of vetoing things that are not their idea but the more open you keep the line of communication; the less likely your team is to be on the defensive and that naysayer will eventually learn to work with and not against the group. When criticism does need to be used – your team will be open to it because you have created that sort of symbiotic relationship of trust.
