Imagine you have a fantastic idea that you think will do great things for your organization. You choose to proactively share the idea with your boss and she agrees it will do great things.
And then she assigns implementing the idea to…you. This might not be a bad thing, but you already have more work to do than you have hours in the day.
So what do you do next time you have a great idea? Do you share it, knowing that you might be asked again to lead another task force? Or do you keep it to yourself?
Many of us have found ourselves in this situation. It’s happened to me, when I’ve come up with a new idea. I’ve seen it on the other end, too, when someone shared a new idea with me and—rather than separate the idea from the speaker—I assumed they were volunteering to enact the idea themselves.
Although we might be tempted to think this phenomenon is benign, there could be a cost to organizations, as the silence leaves a lot of great ideas unexplored—ideas that could help managers and organizations.
To assess the frequency of this experience and measure its impact, I recently led a team of researchers that surveyed more than 1,000 employees in the United States and China, a group that included both staff members and managers. Part of what we wanted to know was, who does the heavy lifting in implementing change in an organization after employees speak up with a new way of doing things?
Employees may have the illusion that if they come up with a new idea, the manager will magically make it happen. But managers are strapped for time themselves. So if a manager receives an idea and gives it back to the employee to implement, what does the employee think about that and how will they respond in the future?
Consistent with our predictions, we found that employees who offered a suggestion and were told by the manager to “run with that” and “make it happen” were less likely to voice ideas in the future because they felt overloaded with the additional work and regretted speaking up in the first place.
However, this experience doesn’t only have to trigger negative consequences. We found that when managers also offered their own encouragement, guidance, and additional resources after delegating, employees were more likely to feel better about speaking up and were more likely to keep communicating ideas. If the supervisor says, ‘great idea, let’s do it, I’m going to be here right alongside you giving you support,’ employees felt less overload and experienced less regret.
This led us to some interesting insights about delegation and the voice process. We found a few simple strategies to help managers keep lines of communication open so employees don’t regret sharing a good idea.
—Employees should recognize that managers are busy and may delegate assignments to them. If you get work delegated to you, be willing to keep the manager in the loop and ask for help and assistance.
—Managers should give employees the power to run with their ideas by being there and “running” with them. Don’t leave your employees alone with no continued guidance and support.
— Encouraging employee participation in the decision-making process is huge. So it’s helpful if managers ask employees what they think during the decision-making process, so they feel psychologically empowered in the project and give them a sense of ownership.
—It also hurts morale when an employee’s idea isn’t implemented. If a manager doesn’t go with someone’s idea, explain why. That way, the employee doesn’t think their idea went into a black hole and disappeared. It shows their idea was given due consideration and leadership wants to keep hearing from them.
Daniel Newton is assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship in the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business.
