Nipping ideas in the bud ..

I keep on coming across managers who tell me their team members have no ideas or inputs when asked for them. I wrote a blog sometime earlier about what you can do to create an environment where people are more comfortable to share their ideas. With a rote learning education and associated culture, many folks in organizations in Asia are not used to ask, challenge or propose.

Illustration by Saul Steinberg

So managers should put extra effort in inviting their team members to share their ideas. But I have come to think that the real problem is elsewhere. The real problem lies in the reaction the manager offers when someone brings up an idea. The courage to share the idea is often squashed but the very first things the manager does while the words are still floating in the air.

Those first things can be ...

1. the body language ... What does your FACE say when someone shares an idea ? Does it show genuine interest or does it show that this idea is not what you expected ?

2. the dreaded "but" ... as in "Great idea, but ....". But is then followed by "let me explain you why this won't work", "I have tried this in my years of experience and ..." or "this is not compatible with the main plan" ... or a combination thereof !

3. the follow up ... If you do not act upon the ideas your team proposes, or better still, give them the green light to act upon their own ideas, you are sending the message that you had the better answers anyway.

Next you find yourself frustrated with your team members' lack of ideas, input or creativity, think about how you react when they do propose something.

What Google's research DID NOT say about high-performance teams

Amy Edmondson's concept of team psychological safety has been around for 15 years. But it takes a company like Google mentioning it to bring the topic in the mainstream ! Google spent a lot of time to analyze what differentiates high-performance teams from mediocre ones. Although many interesting characteristics were looked at, none of them was really the differentiating factor. What really set high-performance teams apart from others was "a shared belief by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking".

Unfortunately this complex team dynamic is already being reduced to one-liners and simplifications. One of the articles I came across discussed Google's finding with the eye-catching title

"Google spends years figuring out that the secret to a good working environment is just to be nice."

Well, no ... First of all Google didn't try to find out what a good working environment looks like, but what high-performance teams look like and behave like. Secondly, the title leads to a serious misunderstanding. Being nice is not what makes a team excellent. If that were the case, I would know of numerous high-performance teams. Especially in Asia, being nice is very important and doing the opposite creates tensions. But being nice in itself does not result in excellence. When being nice means not challenging one another (for fear of losing face), not speaking up when you really should (for fear of standing out) or faking agreement (for fear of creating tensions), you have a team with lots of niceness but little excellence.

Nothing wrong with being nice. But do not equate that with a high-performance team !