Insecure Managers Don’t Want Your Suggestions

Organizational studies show that employee voice — speaking up with ideas for improvement to those with the power to make changes — helps managers and companies perform better. This is not a controversial finding, nor is it particularly surprising that organizations in which people speak up outperform those in which ideas are stifled. After all, those on the front lines are typically best positioned to generate ideas to make the organization more effective. What is surprising, however, is that many managers actually work hard to avoid voice — they fail to solicit ideas for improvement, punish those who speak up, or both. We decided to find out not only which managers are reticent to hear about ideas but also why.

Before we started our study, our intuition was that, in general, some managers feel more secure in their roles and therefore see suggestions for improvement as a positive way for them and the organization to get better. And that those who feel insecure — those who don’t feel competent (or lack what psychologists call “self-efficacy” in their roles) feel that employee suggestions are a personal and negative commentary on their ability to do their job. In short, they feel threatened by people asking for changes to be made and send signals that opinions aren’t welcome or actively discourage employees from speaking up as a way to defend their egos.

Indeed, this is just what we found in our study at a large multi-national oil company. We surveyed 41 managers and their 148 employees and found that managers who didn’t feel competent were less likely than others to solicit or accept employee input. This is particularly surprising, as these managers were highly educated, highly trained professionals in the hard sciences (chemists, geologists, petroleum engineers, etc.) and business (procurement officers, accountants, etc.) who should know the personal and organizational benefits of accessing potentially innovative ideas. Still, their egos got in the way.

This may seem like despairing news for anyone who works for a boss who doesn't feel competent in his or her job and is therefore ego-defensive. But there are ways to influence an insecure manager’s willingness to hear employees’ ideas. In a follow-up experiment, we found that allowing managers to “self-affirm” — think and write about their core values (an exercise psychologists use to reduce ego defensiveness) — made these managers more willing to solicit employee input, and more likely to validate and reward employees who spoke up. In fact, the act of affirming their values negated the effect of their lack of competence.

In other words, providing an opportunity for managers to validate an important and valuable aspect of their personal identity inoculates them, so to speak, from the potential threat of employee opinions.

So what should you do if your manager is stifling your voice? Here are a few suggestions.

• Take steps to disarm defensiveness: When you do speak up, consider doing it in private, rather than in front of others. This will help your manager to “save face” and minimize any feelings of threat.

• Give your manager a morale boost before offering constructive criticism:Compliments can go a long way. Highlighting your manager’s strengths affirms his or her ego and may reduce the degree to which he or she is threatened by your opinion.

• Pitch the positive: Frame improvements by simultaneously emphasizing potential gains for the company and deemphasizing your managers’ liability. And certainly, avoid implying that the situation that needs improving is your manager’s fault.

Of course, it’s not all on the employee to make things better. Leaders need to take responsibility for establishing norms that help managers feel more secure. They can create a climate marked by psychological safety and positive norms (e.g., learning from, rather than punishing, mistakes) and thereby increase the tendency for managers who feel incompetent to solicit ideas.

Sometimes the Best Ideas Come from Outside Your Industry

It’s a strange thought, but the solution to your business’s innovation problem may be walking around in the head of someone who applies theatrical makeup for a living.
Or plays robot soccer. Or installs heavy machinery in mines. Or does something else that’s apparently unrelated to the problem you've been struggling with.
Over the course of years of studying innovation, we've found that there’s great power in bringing together people who work in fields that are different from one another yet that are analogous on a deep structural level. Such as makeup and surgical infections, surprisingly. Or inventory management and robot games. Or malls and mines.
Bringing in ideas from analogous fields turns out to be a potential source of radical innovation. When you’re working on a problem and you pool insights from analogous areas, you’re likely to get significantly greater novelty in the proposed solutions, for two reasons: People versed in analogous fields can draw on different pools of knowledge, and they’re not mentally constrained by existing, “known” solutions to the problem in the target field. The greater the distance between the problem and the analogous field, the greater the novelty of the solutions.
This is a finding that applies across a variety of contexts, and we've found that it has wide applicability in businesses.




















To get a sense of the value of accessing and implementing knowledge from analogous fields, consider our recent study in which we recruited hundreds of roofers, carpenters, and inline skaters to contribute their insights to the problem of workers’ reluctance to use safety gear because of discomfort. We won’t go into the details about how we found all these people — suffice it to say that we now know a lot about the roofing and carpentry trades and about inline-skating clubs and competitions.
We conducted standardized interviews with the participants, presenting the problem of lack of safety-gear compliance as it pertains to each of the fields (essentially we asked how roofers’ safety belts, carpenters’ respirator masks, and skaters’ knee pads could be redesigned to increase their comfort and use). We gave the participants a few minutes to suggest solutions, collected the responses, then had a panel of experts evaluate the suggestions on novelty and usefulness.
Each group was significantly better at thinking of novel solutions for the other fields than for its own.

There are some great examples in industry of creative solutions that arose out of analogous fields. More than a decade ago, 3M developed a breakthrough concept for preventing infections associated with surgery after getting input from a theatrical-makeup specialist who was knowledgeable about preventing facial skin infections. Other examples from our own industry experience include a company that needed a solution for tracking inventory and borrowed ideas from the sensors on miniature robot-soccer players, and an escalator company that borrowed a solution from the mining industry in figuring out how to install escalators in shopping malls.
We’re often asked by people in businesses how they can find appropriately analogous fields to tap for ideas and expertise. Admittedly, that can be difficult. First, we recommend that managers search not just for close analogies to the problem at hand but also go farther, to more-distant fields, as long as there remain similarities based on deep-structure analogies.
To identify distant analogous fields, first carve out the deep-structure elements of your problem before starting your search. Clear away the details and ask yourself: What is the essence of the problem? Then describe it in such a way that potential solvers from analogous markets can connect their knowledge to it.

.

Let’s say you’re seeking novel traffic-engineering solutions for a given city. If your description is too domain-specific, you might deter solvers from distant fields, so frame the problem broadly — for example, as a search for how to “coordinate a smooth flow of elements in a complex system.” That way you might be able to get medical doctors or circulatory-system researchers to contribute their knowledge.
Then consider applying search methods that have proven effective for identifying distant knowledge sources. Pyramiding involves sequentially asking people for referrals until you reach the top of a knowledge pyramid; broadcast search refers to widely disseminating a problem to activate self-selection among problem solvers.
Also, use your internal search team’s creativity to identify potential analogous fields and begin your pyramiding or broadcast search in these areas. It is more likely that pyramiding will lead you to far-distant analogous markets if you start your search outside your own field.
Next, we suggest that managers select analogous fields that are more “advanced” — that are marked by greater technological advancement or higher stakes, for example, than the target problem’s field. An example we mention in our roofers-carpenters-skaters paper: If a firm in the inline-skating market were looking for ideas for protective gear, it might do best to investigate reality-TV shows that feature extreme stunts, where the protection problem is dire, or safety gear for patients with brittle-bone disease. Then, within these analogous fields, companies should look for thinkers who display high levels of personal creativity, or those whose leading-edge needs drive them to solve similar problems in their own areas.
We also tell managers to bear in mind an important caveat from our research: We find that, on average, analogous-field solutions for all but the very best ideas show lo

oil prices slashes and market reaction

Almost nobody predicted such a sudden crash in the oil price, so there’s no point trying to guess when and where the falls stop

Another day, another sharp fall in the oil price. Brent crude traded below $79 a barrel on Thursday, completing a 30% fall from June’s $113 and recording a new four-year low. Some spy a great US/Saudi plot to ramp up the political pressure on Russia and Iran, big oil producers, but there is nothing wrong with the conventional explanation: there are few output disruptions and the global economy is weakening.

Throw in Saudi Arabia’s apparent lack of concern – its oil minister’s latest comments were a masterclass in obfuscation – and all the old certainties about the “price floor” being $90, $80 or $70 seem redundant.

Yes, US shale producers, the new actors in the game, may need at least $80 to justify new projects, but investment doesn’t stop and start overnight. Some new shale operations are being moth-balled, but few of the older ones. As for the Saudis’ apparent need to balance their budget at $90, nobody really knows for how long the country’s rulers would be prepared to run an unbalanced budget.

Almost nobody predicted such a sudden crash in the oil price, so there’s no point trying to guess when and where the falls stop. What can be said is that falling prices are good news for consumers of oil. Pump prices are falling in the UK and the low level of general inflation is the main reason why – by the smallest of margins, and only on one measure – real incomes are rising for the first time in five years.

Bank of England governor Mark Carney said this week that it is “more likely than not” that he will have to write an open letter to the chancellor in the next six months to explain why the rate of inflation is below 1%. It could be sooner than that.

Inflation on the CPI measure was 1.2% in September but Brent stood close to $100 when those readings were taken. Petrol and diesel has only a small direct weighting in the CPI index (3.5%) but the oil price causes impacts elsewhere. Energy prices for consumers are static and, by rights, should be falling soon.

Meanwhile, food prices are still coming down, the supermarkets tell us. And it’s a brave clothing retailer that attempts to push up the price of winter clobber in the current warm autumn (clothing is 7.2% of the CPI basket). Get your biro ready, Mr Carney.