Motivate Your Employees to Go Big or Go Home
In my professional life, age has crept up on me.
Early in my career, I kept my head down and my mouth shut. I watched and learned. I unjammed the copy machine and befriended the guys in the mail room. Above all, I made sure there was always a cover sheet on my TPS report.
Then – suddenly, it seemed — people started asking for my expertise.
Wait. I have expertise? It occurred to me that I’ve been working for fifteen years. It occurred to me that that’s a long time; maybe I do know a thing or two about a thing or two.
Huh.
Something really interesting happens on the way up the corporate ladder. You start taking on projects and making decisions, which usually involves working with a few young guns, and it’s difficult to remember that you’re not one of them anymore. You think back to the managers you worked with back in the day – they were smart, they were put together, they were… old. You do some mental math, and it strikes you that they must have been in their mid-thirties at the time. You gasp as realize that you are in your mid-thirties. You’re “that guy” – that old manager. See how it creeps up?
Okay, fine. You’re old and you have more responsibility. That leads to another realization – you suddenly know full well those young’uns are criticizing you at the water cooler. You see the way they look at you; those pre-pubescent punks think your job is easy. They think they have all the answers.
Hey!, you want to shout in their direction as you sprint by the water cooler, late for a meeting, this isn’t as easy as it looks! There are budget restraints and politics and too many board members and not enough minions…
You can’t say that, of course. Didn’t I mention that there aren’t enough minions?
The thing is, they’re probably right, at least on some level. They likely have some really good ideas – fresh takes on old problems, insights on new ones. Heck, they probably even know what cloud computing is. If you’re smart, you’ll tap into those ideas, sift through them, and put the good ones to work.
But how? The smart kids – the ones with the first-class ideas – know that their safest course of action is to keep quiet. Speaking up is risky.
In fact, soliciting ideas within your organization is such a prevalent management issue that The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece about it. The article, written by Rachel Emma Silverman, discusses methods ranging from the wearisome suggestion box to online idea-submission systems to dedicated ATM-like kiosks situated in high-traffic employee areas.
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