Best Ideas Emerge with Open-minded Leadership
As a leader, where do the best ideas for your organization come from?
I once heard that the mind is like a parachute. It works best when it’s open.
Through the years I have found that if you keep an open mind, you will find that you never know where the best ideas will come from.
When I served in high school administration, we always had a student, a senior, in our administrative cabinet. Each year it was a different student. I thought the best ideas annually came from that student.
I saw the same thing when, as the Athletic Chair at the university level serving close to 400 student-athletes in 14 sports, we established a Student Athletic Advisory Board composed of an athlete from each team. Some of the very best ideas we had for our Athletic Department came from these students. They brought ideas to our Athletic Department that we, as athletic administrators, never thought of.
As a collegiate basketball coach, we had to beat a certain team to advance to the national tournament. They had the best offense I had coached against in my forty-four years of basketball coaching. The coach with the least basketball coaching experience on our staff came up with the best idea to defend their offense. It was the singular best idea that advanced our team to the nationals.
In a recent blog post, Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter calls for business leaders to “encourage new ideas, especially from below and from unexpected sources.” In short, she says that innovation is inclusive, not exclusive, and that it’s a mistake to assume that all of the good ideas come from an elite group of insiders. (Source)
The key, I believe, is for leaders to have an open mind and to be respectful of the resources you have around you. Everyone has unique experiences and insights that can be used to advance the greater good of the organization.
Keeping that parachute open can be the best thing a leader can do.
Excellent. I often pose to our leadership team in my business: “who best knows the work”? It is, of course, a loaded question meant to remind those of us in “leadership” that we don’t necessarily have the best answers. Lean Enterprise philosophy follows this tenet closely with an expression of “going to the Gemba”. Gemba is a Japanese term for “where the work is done”. If you want to know best how to solve a problem, quite often the solution is to ask those doing the work. Seems simple but is often lost on us in the urgency of business and in the aura of the executive committee.
Over the years as I coached my sons’ baseball teams, I learned to talk less and instead ask more questions of the players. Especially as the boys advanced in age and their “baseball IQs” rose, it became evident that it is better to ask them why we take the approach we do on the field. Once the player can answer why it makes sense to sacrifice bunt or position himself on the field based on a situation, then the coaching part becomes mostly about putting the players in the right positions to be successful.
The same works in business. Talk less and listen more….