Not Every Great Employee Shares Ideas

 

"Dear Dan,

I lead a team of designers, and I want to foster an environment where everyone feels comfortable speaking up when they have concerns or new product ideas. I thought about holding a weekly "coffee chat," where I invite employees to share input on a topic of the week. Do you think that's a good idea?

-- Hansen

The key word is here is "everyone": Getting your whole team to participate will be difficult. And most managers will tend to overvalue such participation, rewarding and promoting the employees who exhibit it over the ones who don't.

This finding comes from a study of employees and their managers at a large technology company. Managers were asked to rate the degree to which each employee spoke up to suggest new ideas or offer solutions. The researchers found that employees who were seen as proactive in this regard tended to be rewarded with promotions and salary increases. An employee's level of day-to-day productivity, on the other hand, was not rewarded to the same degree.

We don't really want to reward people more for one kind of contribution than for another that is at least as valuable. But managers tend to notice the proactive employees and thus to favor them. So if you want a free flow of ideas but don't want to fall prey to this bias, you should ask the people working with you to have such meetings over coffee, but you yourself should be absent, and you should ask your employees to share with you the ideas from the group as a whole without noting who contributed which ideas." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Ask Ariely: Not Every Great Employee Shares Ideas

Ariely, Dan. 

Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 04 June 2022: C.5.