Page 208 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

Why We Need to Develop All Sectors 199

I have worked with many top management teams who complain that
their underlings rarely offer fresh ideas, yet those at the top often fail
to see their own reluctance to accept challenges as the reason the next
level contributes so little in this area.

Provide Lots of Encouragement
Look at the word encouragement. The root, of course, is courage. It takes
guts to come up with new ideas. And even more guts to say them aloud.
“What if I’m wrong?” “What if no one likes it?” “What if it fails?”
These are strong emotional reactions, to be sure.
To induce your people to explore the great unknown, with few assur-
ances of which ideas will work, requires a great deal of encouragement on
the part of management. And what’s the opposite of encouragement?
Discouragement, right? The quick-on-the-trigger manager who instantly
judges an employee’s idea to be less than wonderful once too often (which
might be only once if done too harshly) may provide all the discourage-
ment that individual needs to remain a crafter or rational the rest of his or
her professional life, robbing the organization of a potentially powerful
resource.
Consciously provide encouragement, and consciously refrain from
discouragement. And insist that your top managers do so as well.
You’ll be fostering an environment in which people will volunteer ideas
to make your products and services, and all aspects of your company,
better and better and better.
One simple tactic I have used as a manager when trying to get peo-
ple to stretch creatively is to say, “I know you can do better than this.”
If I instead said, “This isn’t good,” or even, “This isn’t there yet,” I may
sound more discouraging than is necessary.

Give People Freedom
Another way to develop creative thinkers and problem solvers in your
organization is to give your people freedom. Lots of it. Freedom to think
beyond the known, the tried-and-true. And, perhaps more important,
you must give your people freedom to fail.
Few people like to fail. Yet there are organizations, even industries,
where failure is accepted, even encouraged. Engineering and science
are two fields where failure is simply a part of the exploration process
in problem solving.
One of the most overpromised, underdelivered practices I see in my
consulting work is this so-called freedom to fail. It’s easy for many
managers to give it lip service, but when failure happens, it’s often very