
A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams Right Now
A wake up call to any leader that needs to innovate to thrive
By: Lynda McNutt Foster and Richard Hammer
Issue: Teams back in the office.
What if they don’t feel safe coming back in, someone says in the meeting.
Ok, why don’t we ask employees what they think.
No, we don’t have time for that.
Sure we do.
Yeah, right, like we have time to talk to every employee right now?
No, we don’t have to time talk to every person.
Maybe we could use our text system or google forms or something to take a for sort of pulse survey on what they’re thinking right now.
What? No. That would take too much time. We’ve never done that.
Let’s just stick to the plan we have.
And there it is. BAM! Death of an idea in less than 30 seconds. Maybe it was a bad one. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked, and who knows if there was a better one that could quickly be built on from that one.
No.
Yes, but.
There’s no time for that.
You need to understand how things work around here.
Sometimes the death of a new idea comes from people in the meeting simply ignoring the suggestion or other times by someone in authority just not responding to the email that it was sent in.
These were the key types words and exchanges in small, micro-conversations we studied that occur when people try to share a thought or different perspective in meetings at work, and that occur between managers and their team members during a crisis like the one we’re in right now. These words and phrases seem to quickly shut down exactly what 94% of senior leaders say they want more of – fresh, new ideas to solve the biggest issues that their organizations are facing, especially during a crisis and transition of the type all organizations are going through right now.
These are 4 main conclusions from the newest research just released by Cortex:
A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams Right Now A wake up call to any leader that needs to innovate to thrive, released in partnership with the Roanoke-Blacksburg Technology Council
about how to get teams to work more collaboratively together to more effectively problem solve:
- Micro interactions and conversations are the key factors in creating a high trust working environment that leads to team members being willing to co-create and share their new ideas and for others to experiment with them.
- A high emphasis on organizational values, mission, or goals don’t create engagement or an agile work environmentunless the senior leadership team, along with their managers on the frontlines, are held accountable to practicing them.
- The ability of senior leaders and their managers to remain curious by actively seeking different perspectives from all levels of the organization is a key factor in the volume and quality of idea generation that leads to profitable innovation.
- Specific types of team training, coaching, reinforcement, and individual support that is designed to build trust and accountability in adhering to the new behaviors, can make almost any team capable of generating more and higher quality ideas.
Cortex has spent the greater part of the last 5 years tracking the impact of almost unnoticeable interactions between team members during meetings. We collected more than 100,000 pieces of data from assessments of leaders and their teams and mapping conversations in meetings they were having while also tracking the evolution of leader’s thought process in solving problems at work over long periods of time.
The studies found that it doesn’t take long for new team members to learn that sharing fresh ideas and perspectives came with a label of being a waste of time, resources, and could result in being seen as not a good cultural fit. We found the results counter to what leaders say they want in Leadership and Innovationby McKinsey and Company which stated that:
70% of senior executives said that innovation was going to be the main driver in their companies, yet 65% of them were “somewhat”, “a little”, or “not at all” confident about the decisions they make in that area, According to the McKinsey & Company report Leadership and Innovation. The report went on to say:
The structures and processes that many leaders reflexively use to encourage innovation are important, we find, but not sufficient. On the contrary, senior executives almost unanimously—94 percent—say that people and corporate culture are the most important drivers of innovation.
From McKinsey’s reportregarding what leaders need to do in order to create agile transformation for their organizations, they stated that leaders should learn to help teams work in new ways and to do that they needed learn how to build enterprise agility into the design and culture of the whole organization. It needed to start with the leader adopting new mindsets and behaviors. What Cortex found was that changing those behaviors had a significant impact on the ability for the leader and their teams to quickly adapt to marketplace and other significant flucuations.
One of the data points pointed to the root of what may be blocking established organizations from being able to shift to a culture comfortable with experimentation that is at the heart of agility.
The number was 58.
Idea avoidance.

58% of leaders and team members actively avoided the generating of ideas and those people with a strength in ideation were often avoided as well. This avoidance of the brainstorming of new ways and perspectives of looking at problems lead to a stagnation of forward progress necessary for maintaining a competitive advantage.
Sometimes the people on teams in the study that did had new ideas were ostracized by their fellow team members. This avoidance to the generation of new ideas and of the ideators themselves isn’t recognized by some leaders. When this type of culture persists on a team or becomes the corporate culture, innovation becomes almost non-existent except at smaller tactical levels. In some cases, when an executive leader or even a manager with authority is strong in idea generation, there seems to become a learned helplessness type of response by team members. It appears that the team expects their leader to generate the ideas and they believe there job is to plan what they are told to execute.
Assess Your Ideation Tolerance
As a leader, ask yourself these questions to determine the ideation tolerance level in your organization:
- How many new ideas to solve your toughest challenges have each of your leaders considered from their team members in the last month, 3 months, 6 months?
- Do the consultants you use work directly with senior leaders and their teams to generate new ideas?
- If polled, what percentage of meetings would people in your organization think are a waste of their time?
- Measure your failure tolerance by finding out how many experiments do you actively support in a year and how many have failed?
- Do you budget for and provide the resources of time and support for experimentation?
You can find useful information that can increase your team’s and organization’s ability to creatively problem solve and be more agile in the full report that you can download for free here.
In the FULL report, A Leader’s Guide to Getting More, Fresh, High Quality Ideas from Their Teams Right Now you will be given the following tools you can put into use right now:
- An Idea Generation one sheet you can use to start generating ideas with your teams right now.
- An example of rules of inclusion that can be used by any team.
- Instructions for a Team On! exercise that teams can use to creatively problem solve.
- An Idea Generation one sheet you can use to start generating ideas with your teams right now.
You’ll discover solutions like:
- What leaders can do to get their teams in an idea generation state of mind
- What type of leadership behaviors build trust and which types jeopardize it
- What leaders can do immediately to create more effective meetings
- The types of pivots a leader can make in their behavior that have the biggest impact in the creative problem solving results from their teams
- And so much more!
To receive a FREE DOWNLOAD of the entire report of findings for
The Case for Ideation in a Work World That is Obsessed with Planning
A wake up call to leaders that need to innovate to thrive in today’s marketplace
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