Air crashes rarely result from the crew simply not knowing how to fly. Pilots pass incredibly difficult tests, undergo countless hours of training, and know the procedures and their aircraft inside out. A far greater problem is the overconfidence that builds up over the years. At some point, an experienced captain is ready to trust his intuition more than the instrument readings and the stubbornly flashing warning light on the dashboard. To prevent such situations, modern aviation operates under a protocol that, in case of doubt, not only allows but actually compels the first officer to openly question the captain’s decisions.
Business does not formally have such protocols.
In most companies I’ve worked with, the leader tells the team where they’re going and expects, at most, confirmation of their vision. I call this the management infallibility syndrome. It’s a troubling mechanism in which decision-makers are convinced that since they run the company from the top-floor office, they have the most complete picture of it. In reality, they see only a certain projection of it – usually one that confirms their own imagination.
The team knows more than you’d like to admit
Let’s start with an apparent cliché, which in my opinion is not a cliché at all. The rank-and-file employee – the one who solves minor customer problems every day, extracts leads from a leaky CRM, and explains a pricing policy they didn’t design themselves – sees things that the CEO, owner, or board member will never see. And they won’t see them because they view every process from a distance, with a completely different perspective.
It’s a bit like an airplane crew. The captain sets the course and watches the instruments. But it’s the mechanic working in the hangar who’ll be the first to hear something rattling in the engine. No sensible person would tell the pilot to check the landing gear and tighten every bolt on their own. This means that the captain, despite their position, must acknowledge the superior knowledge of the mechanics’ team in this situation. At least if they want to reach their destination in one piece.
„The captain sets the course and watches the instruments. But it’s the mechanic working in the hangar who’ll be the first to hear something rattling in the engine”.
Let’s leave the metaphors behind and get down to earth. Most organizational problems aren’t major strategic dilemmas. They’re usually “low-hanging fruit” – minor, technical issues that bother the company every day, slow down processes, irritate employees, and can occasionally lead to disaster. If we eliminate these minor issues, the company will start running more smoothly without any revolution, transformation, or half-million-zloty consulting. All it takes is for people to stop wasting energy on glitches that could have been fixed in three days.
Streamlining day-to-day operations is definitely the domain of the people on the ground, not the board. Without their input, even a manager who leads a given team on a daily basis often has no idea what exactly needs fixing.
One problem, four ideas, zero whining
Let’s say an employee comes up with an idea to solve problem X. Then a second one comes along. And then a third and a fourth. Everyone has their own solution. The classic trap is that the manager chooses one (usually the one that best aligns with his vision) and signals to the other three that their voices don’t matter. In doing so, he silences them, discouraging them from sharing their thoughts for the next few months.
I encourage you to approach this differently. First, if we have four different ideas on the board, then… let’s conduct four experiments! Of course, not all at once and not all to the same depth – but the top-down assumption that one of them is silly usually stems from laziness, not serious analysis. I’m against assuming something is pointless before we’ve even looked at it.
Second, it’s worth bringing those four employees together for a joint workshop. Let’s add a few more people who work in the same area and might see similar things. Let’s conduct an honest brainstorming session and let them decide for themselves which solution looks most promising from their perspective.
Prioritization then takes place along several axes at once: the quality of the idea as assessed by the team, ease of implementation, the number of resources required, and the likelihood that it will work at all. Ideas that devour half the annual budget go to the back of the line. Those that can be launched in two weeks land at the top.
Third – and this is the least pleasant part – I ask each participant to justify their idea. Since you’re making a diagnosis, prepare the remedy as well. With a description, estimated cost, and a list of necessary resources. I know this sounds a bit like bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake. However, it’s a necessary filter that separates ideas from mere grumbling. Interestingly, it’s at this stage that half the people usually drop out, unwilling to take responsibility for potential changes.
The Originator as the Implementer
What works really well is assigning the originator the role of an internal delivery guy – someone who will oversee the implementation process, facilitate it, and ensure it’s carried out.
For two reasons. The first is obvious. How else can you tell if someone truly believes in their solution, if not by giving them responsibility for implementing it? The second is more subtle – an idea often takes on a completely different form in practice than it did in a meeting. The person who came up with it understands the original intention best and will be the first to notice that the implementation has gone off track.
The moment of truth is approaching. If the person no longer wants to be the “delivery guy” for their idea, we have two options. Either someone else steps up to the plate, or the idea ends up at the bottom of a drawer. If no one wants to take it on, it’s probably not as good as it seemed during those coffee-break chats.
It’s important to keep an eye on the KPIs. If we’re looking for a solution to problem X and one of them starts to actually close the metrics, we stop generating more solutions to the same problem and move on to the next one. Otherwise, we fall into a cycle of weekly implementation of ideas that lead nowhere. People get lost, projects stall, and the company starts to look like a chaotic laboratory. That’s why it’s so important to queue up ideas and manage that queue skillfully.
Fear of Moving Up to the Big Leagues
All right, but what about when employees don’t want to share ideas at all, even when they have them (and they certainly do)? I can list at least a few reasons, and none of them are surprising, yet each is easy to overlook.
- The first is common fear. The fear that the idea will be bad, that someone will hear it and say, “You’re dumber than I thought,” and ultimately, that it will hurt their career path. In companies where the knee-jerk reaction to a mistake is a scolding from a supervisor, this fear is rational. In that case, even a hundred articles about safe spaces won’t change a thing.
- The second reason is a lack of identification with the organization. An employee who treats the company like a pay-check dispenser has no interest in improving it. They come in, leave, take their money, and are glad to have something to do. This is also a sign – not so much about the employee, but about the organizational culture that hasn’t given the employee a reason to care.
- The third reason is perhaps the least intuitive. It is our own opportunism. I remember a conversation with the coach of a soccer club (I won’t say which one) who told me that the players deliberately don’t want to be promoted to the top league. They’re afraid that if they get promoted, it will turn out they’re too weak to play in the starting lineup, and then they’ll be traded. They’d rather stay half a step below, where it’s safer.
I see the same mechanism regularly in small and medium-sized businesses. An employee may have an idea on how to improve the company, but he thinks it through to the very end. They come to the conclusion that if everything works out, the company will jump to a higher level – and at that level, management will start looking for someone more experienced to implement it. They themselves will become the victim of their own initiative. So, prudently, they prefer to keep it in their head.
On a macro scale, this means that deep within the company lies a treasure trove of ideas that will never be brought to light. Because sharing them externally is pure risk for the creator. I’ve seen plenty of such cases, both as a strategist and as the director of a creative agency. The ideas are there within the team, but people sabotage them from within, protecting their own comfort zone.
Don't just fix the symptoms. Start with a diagnosis
A confessor who doesn’t assign penance
There’s no single button that will blow these walls up. What’s needed is long-term work on the organization’s culture – a culture that experiments, is at peace with mistakes, and accepts that not every decision will be a success. Most ideas sound great in theory, just as most startups look sensational on a pitch deck. It’s only when they collide with grim reality that the gaps and flaws become apparent.
If we have built a culture of experimentation – and in many companies we work with, it is not built at all or is only superficially built – an intermediary model remains. Someone from the outside. A facilitator, a strategist, a consultant. A person to whom employees can say things they would never say to the CEO’s face.
A new person in the organization may initially arouse distrust, but they have one key advantage: they are from the outside. They do not issue performance reviews, they do not award bonuses, and they do not decide on layoffs. This makes a difference and gets people talking.
We take a very concrete approach: we conduct interviews and workshops with the board, hold discussions with management, and administer special, anonymous surveys to the rank-and-file team. The key word here is “anonymous.” Not for us – it doesn’t matter to us who filled out the survey – but for the board. The CEO receives the results on his desk, not names. And when people see that after such a conversation their ideas are actually being implemented, there’s a real chance they’ll open up even more, including to their supervisors. This is a step toward developing a new organizational culture.
Symptoms and Problems
When you start listening, it turns out that employees can do something the owners themselves can’t: they can distinguish symptoms from problems. Management says, “Our sales are terrible.” That’s just a symptom. You go to the sales team and hear: “We don’t have a decent tool for scheduling meetings, the proposals suck, the lead handoff between marketing and sales is broken, and by the time we call, the customer has already bought from the competition.” These are the problems.
Moving from symptoms to problems is the essence of the discovery process we specialize in. A client comes to us saying “not enough leads,” and we discover that the problem isn’t the leads, but rather that, for example, the salespeople lack the motivation, process, or tools to turn those leads into revenue. So fixing the situation plays out completely differently than what the client imagined.
An anecdote comes to mind – silly yet thought-provoking. It was about… a coffee machine. Once, while working with a company, as many as fifteen employees told me that the available coffee was undrinkable. Indeed, it was awful. Even a signal like that shouldn’t be dismissed. If fifteen people start their day with a bad taste in their mouths every day, it inevitably affects the atmosphere. Buying a better coffee machine doesn’t cost a fortune, and it would be fantastic proof that their needs are being taken into account.
Trust is built through small, everyday gestures. Think of it this way: an employee won’t believe you’re willing to discuss a million-dollar problem with them if you haven’t taken care of a trivial matter worth a thousand times less.
In strategy, every voice carries equal weight
This leads me to a thesis I will defend with my life. The strategic process is perhaps the only circumstance in a company where one can (and must) feel the spirit of democracy. It doesn’t matter if you’re the CEO or a newly hired salesperson. In this process, your voice carries exactly the same weight. A good external facilitator weighs every insight with the same measure. In every other situation, the CEO always has the final say – and that’s what annoys employees the most.
„The strategic process is probably the only situation in a company where you can (and must) feel the spirit of democracy”.
Someone might counter: great, but an ordinary employee hasn’t seen the financial data, doesn’t know the management context, and has no idea about the constraints – so their ideas are detached from reality. I won’t say there isn’t a grain of truth in that, but my answer is “let’s organize the data.”
In practice, it’s a matter of basic administrative hygiene. We categorize data by sensitivity: publicly available, requiring authorization or transformation, and, of course, strictly confidential. An employee doesn’t need to know every colleague’s salary to see that the lead transfer process is broken. They don’t need to see the entire P&L to understand where the company is headed. However, they must see the purpose of their work, because without that, even the best team starts to drift.
Besides, a lot happens at the level of conversation. The true test of a good manager is the ability to tell an employee “we won’t implement this idea” with a well-thought-out justification. Under no circumstances should they hear “no, just because” or “sure, I’ll think about it sometime.” A concrete answer, with arguments. Then the employee leaves the meeting feeling that they were taken seriously. Even if their idea isn’t put into practice.
It often turns out that during such a conversation, you’ll find a version of the solution together that can be implemented.
Heading for the North Star
Finally, a story I’d love to carve into the wall of every conference room. We recently ran an exercise at one of our clients’ offices. The task seemed simple: twenty-one employees were asked to answer a single question. What does this company really want to achieve?
I swear that each of the twenty-one people gave a different answer. What’s more, the two people at the helm of the organization – the CEO and his right-hand man – also gave different answers.
In the strategic field, we sometimes talk about the North Star – that one bright point in the sky toward which everyone in the organization should navigate, regardless of position or department. The company I’m referring to had a total of twenty-three North Stars. It was like a ship where every sailor sets their own sail at a different angle.
Now try steering a ship like that!
A study once appeared in the European Journal of Innovation Management indicating that autonomy and a sense of security motivate employees to generate ideas. At the same time, the same study revealed something else. An environment characterized by freedom, if not complemented by coordinated, focused action, quickly descends into extreme unproductivity.
Hence the conclusion that I sometimes have to explain twice in conversations with clients: participation does not mean letting go of the reins. On the contrary, the more grassroots energy we unleash, the more important it becomes for someone to coordinate that energy – to set goals, keep track of the schedule, and assess what worked and what didn’t. In this model, formal leadership doesn’t disappear; it simply changes its role. It ceases to be the sole source of ideas and becomes their conductor.
Good ideas can be the wind that propels our ship forward. But only if we point all the sails in the same direction.
Every company we sit down with for a strategic process is initially certain that it knows everything about itself. The first thing we do at Louder Higher is to gently dismantle that certainty. If your organization is ready for such a process, let us know.
