5

Soliciting Input

Hand in hand with wanting work that matters is a consistent desire among Millennials to be able to contribute right now to the shape of the business. And they also want to contribute any ideas they have—which, I promise you, is a good thing. We want engaged employees; when people find their ideas are used, they become more engaged; when managers see more engaged employees, they are more likely to give those employees more authority and responsibility. It’s a positive circle of energy that builds goodwill, productivity, and morale.

Asking for input is easy to do, yet it is hard to do well.

The most important thing about soliciting ideas is making sure you loop back and tell people what you did with their thoughts. Nothing squelches enthusiasm more than letting that enthusiasm disappear into a big black hole of unresponsiveness. If you are not willing to explain what you are (or are not) doing with people’s suggestions, then it’d be better if you didn’t ask for input. Of course, don’t expect young people to stick around. In fact, don’t expect anyone really good to stick around.

“Every time I suggested a change in the work flow, I was told that I wasn’t allowed to give input on how to do my job or how the work would be divided in the team,” says Madison. “I had to get out of there.”

Mary describes how her last company couldn’t keep any of the “really talented” Millennials they had hired over a three-year period, because these young employees were not listened to: “Once they realized they weren’t able to give ideas that would actually be used, they’d leave.” According to Mary, the company had a revolving door of great young people who consistently, six to nine months after they were brought in, would “flame out” because the company couldn’t figure out what to do with them or their ideas.

In her new position, Mary has built in time so her younger staff members can have a bigger voice in the process: “It takes longer up front, but we get lots of good ideas and everyone is happier when they start the projects, even if we can’t use all of the ideas that people suggest. It’s made a huge difference in morale and productivity compared to my last job.”

Get Feedback Day to Day

While soliciting input may seem like an invitation to disaster if you’re not accustomed to it, the positive energy you will create by doing so is priceless. And input need not be chaotic: a little structure goes a long way to productively engaging your team in the what and how you do things.

Be Open to New Ideas

“How can we do this better?” should not just be on the tip of every manager’s tongue, it should be hanging in the air after it’s been spoken.

We can’t assume that a process we learned five, never mind fifteen, years ago hasn’t been improved! It’s probably been improved four or five times by now. The people closest to the work and newest to the organization may look at our processes with the incredulity of savvy wielders of technology, social tools, and services. Of course, they don’t have the benefit of institutional history. So how do we meld the two?

I ask that every new person learn the way we’re doing something so he can see the steps we take to reach certain milestones or granularity. After the new team member has done something once, it’s okay to propose ways of streamlining the process or improving the outcome.

The beginning of projects is a perfect time to solicit ideas on the desired outcome, process, or methods. Here you can learn a lot about how well your team is prepared for the task at hand. Sit on your hands if you have to, so that you don’t tell people what to do! After you’ve laid out the goals of a program, set a time a couple of days later for people to come together again to share their ideas about how to proceed.

Workshop the program instead of dictating it. Using a coaching leadership style at the front end of a project offers the perfect opportunity for the team to provide input and for you to hear new ideas and help instead of dictate. Following are questions you can ask to get the group moving in the right direction:

• How would you approach this?
• What timeline do you think will help meet the deadline without having to rush at the end?
• What else do we need to know?
• What can we get started on now?
• How do you see the team conquering and dividing?
• What kind of elements do you think we should include in this project? How do they build on each other?

Listen to it all. Let people surprise you.

Think about this process as providing care on the front end instead of triage on the back end. You may have to redirect people. However, with this approach you will most likely have engaged teammates who are more invested in the outcome and the process than they would be if you simply dictated the steps, elements, and timeline. And if some people don’t engage and then complain later, you have a perfect stage for resetting their expectations on how to participate.

At the end of projects, get input from the team on what they learned that they could apply the next time to make the process easier, better, or more efficient. When ideas come up, put a plan in place to put them into action. As you go through the “new” way, assess how it’s working: Did the team get what it wanted? Is the person or people who came up with the new process happy with the result? How can we further tweak it to improve? Often we move so quickly from project to project that we fail to take a moment and think about what could have gone better or what we could have done differently. (More on double-loop and single-loop learning in chapter 9.)

Be Available

Encourage people to bring their ideas forward. Offer office hours or open invitations for those who are in open-plan offices so that it’s easy for people to bring ideas to you. If someone comes forward: listen, triage, and follow up.

Unless it’s an urgent issue, don’t feel like you need to instantly act on an idea. Articulate a way forward so that the person knows you’re taking the idea seriously. If you know you can’t act on it in the next three months, say so. Tell the person to loop back with you in a defined time frame to revisit the idea. After the meeting, e-mail that person and thank him for bringing the idea forward—if you’re not that person’s manager, loop the manager in so she knows what’s come up and can help either move the idea forward or manage expectations with her employee.

Some ideas are easy! I overheard someone in the kitchen say how much her team likes iced tea, and voilà, we had an iced tea maker the next day: it’s a $40 investment that we use every day. Our office manager noticed that many people were mixing protein shakes in the morning, but couldn’t get them as smooth as they wanted. One Silver Bullet blender later, and everyone has a smooth shake. That was a pretty inexpensive and easy way to make the kitchen a bit better.

Other ideas are harder to implement but pay off in spades. One Double Forte employee came forward with an idea that would allow everyone on the staff to get more opportunities to practice presenting in front of a large group. Now we reserve five to ten minutes of each weekly staff meeting for a short presentation by a staff member. Everyone takes a turn and puts together a presentation that he creates, practices, and presents. To help people get more comfortable giving and receiving feedback, two other staff members give positive reinforcement and constructive suggestions for improvement to the presenter after each staff meeting. One idea, two birds killed: improved performance.

Get People to Participate

Our office is in a hermetically sealed office building with acoustic tiles and triple-pane windows. When no one’s talking, it is like being in a Kleenex box, and all you can hear is typing. To put some energy into the air, we installed an audio system and have a low volume of music playing all day long in the background.

Every week we randomly select five people who choose a Pandora or Spotify music station or provide their playlists from their phones or iPods for the office background music. They can choose whatever they like, within reason, which leaves 99 percent of all options open to people: no NSFW soundtracks, no lullabies, no explicit-warning songs. Everyone gets a turn.

Happy Hour is Friday, around 3:30 p.m. Each week a different person chooses a beverage (alcohol-based and its nonalcoholic companion) for everyone to enjoy.

Every workplace has events or traditions that everyone can participate in or take turns leading. Find yours and get everyone involved.

Get Feedback Annually

Do you really know what your employees think? Do you know how happy or engaged they are with their jobs and the company? Do they like the culture? Would they like to introduce something new into the office? Are they proud to work there?¹ I’m going to say no, you don’t know.

Plan to solicit real input from everyone in the company once a year. Use online survey tools such as SurveyMonkey.com or KwikSurveys.com so that gathering feedback and tabulating answers is simple for the employees and for you.

Survey Steps

1. Plan a survey of thirty-five to forty questions that takes no more than thirty minutes to answer (unless someone has a lot to say), and use a mix of qualitative, open-ended questions and quantitative questions that ask people to rate their opinions on a five-point scale. (Sample questionnaires available at leecaraher.com.)

2. Make sure you ask demographic questions such as age range, gender, location, and job status (e.g., full-time, part-time, contractor, seasonal, etc.) so you can group the answers and find trends among different groups. As Tim Donnelly, freelance writer for Inc. Magazine² says, “Most surveys will inquire as to whether the employee has a good work–life balance, whether they are proud to work for the organization, and how much effort they put into their work.”

3. Make your survey anonymous with the option of providing a name—this helps ensure the most candid feedback possible.

4. Give your team two weeks do the survey, and choose a time outside your busiest months. During the two weeks, keep people updated on survey tracking numbers, encouraging people to fill it out.

5. Within two to three weeks after the survey closes, bring the broad learnings and trends forward. Identify any immediate action plans or long-term projects you are considering, so that people know you’re taking the input seriously. It would be too bad to get great ideas, implement them, and not let anyone know the impact they’ve had.

Brainstorms

Brainstorming is a great way to kill one, two, or more good ideas, and demotivate your team. Truly.

In our rush to get the answers we need to get the job done, we sometimes unintentionally squash good ideas—and the environment that encourages them—as soon as they start. “I stopped participating in brainstorms. Our manager doesn’t want to hear my ideas—he just wants to have gone through the process so he can say he did,” says Mariah, twenty-six.

Stop trying to problem solve in a brainstorming session. The point is to get as many ideas as possible on the board—think forty to sixty ideas—so that you can workshop them in a smaller group and whittle them down to the one or two ideas that your team will take forward.

Next time you plan a brainstorm, choose someone on your team to lead a small-group idea session. Coach the person beforehand on what you want to get out of the session and what information people will need in order to generate relevant ideas. Have the leader plan a five-minute icebreaker at the beginning of the session, to provide a break from whatever people have been working on and get them into a mode of creative thinking and idea generation.

Other resources to help you generate great ideas from people in the office include:

• Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All by Tom Kelley and David Kelley
• Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity by David Sibbet

Ask for Fully Formed Ideas

Ideas—shared and not shared—about how to improve the work environment, a process, or an outcome are everywhere, floating around in thought bubbles over people’s heads as they go through the day. One way to encourage responsible “complaining” is to require that ideas be accompanied by a project plan.³

“Ideas are fine,” says Brian Klapper, president and founder of the Klapper Institute, “but you want submitters to go further, presenting a simplified project plan. That forces them to strengthen weaker ideas by dealing with the practical aspects of implementation. You’re not after a fancy, multipage business plan, but a clear indication of objectives, competitive advantages offered, degrees of difficulty to implement, estimated timelines, costs, and revenues, size of the team needed to implement, and a risk assessment.”

Soliciting input from colleagues, putting good ideas into play, and tweaking to improve them will not only improve your work but also the morale of the group.

Management Dos and Don’ts

• Do keep an open mind to ideas no matter where they come from. Just because Millennials don’t have a lot of experience doesn’t mean they don’t have good ideas.
• Do loop back with individuals and groups to let them know where their idea stands. If the idea can’t be implemented now, say so, and encourage them to keep the ideas coming.
• Don’t ever say, “You’re too young to know …” unless you want people beating a path to the exit door.
• Do encourage people to think through their ideas before they present them.
• Do conduct an audit or survey of your team or company once a year to get a good look at what’s going on.
• Do show people how to do things, and then be ready to get their input on how to make things better.
• Do let other people lead brainstorms.

Millennial Dos and Don’ts

• Do give your ideas in a constructive way—put together a detailed project plan for your idea before you take it to the boss.
• Do tasks their way the first time, and then suggest changes—sometimes things are done in a particular way for reasons you may not be able to see until you do them.
• Do know that not everything can be implemented right away.
• Do fill out surveys honestly and thoughtfully.