Are You Building Walls Around Yourself – and Keeping Ideas Out?

One of the temptations for any senior executive or manager is to protect his or her “time” and “calendar” from unwarranted interruptions. That’s a necessary step to ensure that you are not consumed by the tactical urgencies of the day, every day – but in fact have some time reserved to think and act strategically.

But it is possible to take that protectionism too far, and create a barrier around yourself that co-workers, and those outside the company, cannot penetrate. As a result, the flow of new ideas can be cut off. If that happens, you as a leader cannot do your job well. In fact, you can probably think of a few examples of failure triggered by out-of-touch leaders, both in business and in politics. I can think of several; that is one reason I felt it timely to revisit this topic.

Is there a way to avoid the pitfall? Absolutely, if you are willing to be a bit of a risk taker.

Try this:

• inform your assistant that you are willing to meet with anyone (internal or external to your company) who says they have a good, value-adding idea. Your assistant should serve as the screening person; if he or she is convinced the meeting topic might be of interest, they are empowered to schedule it.
• encourage your direct reports to do the same.
• ground rules (all of these points should be explained to the person asking for the meeting):

o the person requesting the meetings gets one opportunity to present the idea, so make it good, with supporting detail
o “sales pitches” without supporting examples or business cases are likely to fail
o the meeting is strictly limited to 60 minutes max, including time for Q & A and discussion. If the “pitch” takes all 60 minutes, the meeting will conclude with no discussion (and not much likelihood of a further discussion)
o hard copies should be provided at the meeting

I employed that type of approach when I was a CPO, and it served the company’s interests very well. In fact, I employed it earlier in my career, before I achieved the CPO level, and it probably helped me on the journey up the corporate ladder.

We live in a world where fresh ideas – and their effective implementation – can be the difference between success and failure. Given that reality, leaders must ensure that they make it easy for good ideas to come to their attention.

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