How the Best Teams Keep Good Ideas Alive

Unleashing the power of collective creativity is a game-changer in any organization. Explore how top-performing teams foster innovation, keep good ideas alive, and transform them into actionable strategies, without letting them get lost in the daily grind.

Many leaders feel stuck

They know that employee perspectives are crucial for retention and innovation, but they struggle to single-handedly create a culture where employees are empowered both to speak up with ideas and to see them through.

Several tactics leaders and their teams can use to help ensure good ideas make it to implementation.

Issue-raising

Supporting an idea does not mean unconditional support.

Publicly calling out the weaknesses associated with an idea can keep it alive by providing allies the chance to openly generate solutions and address concerns directly
Acknowledging all the barriers an idea would face helped the idea holder prepare and helped allies engage in joint problem solving

Choose the right tactics

Sharing the concept of voice cultivation with their teams and helping team members reflect on opportunities to implement cultivation tactics sets the stage for active voice cultivation.

Doing so may offer leaders the secondary benefit of setting a tone of psychological safety and inclusiveness on their teams, by emphasizing that they believe everyone has important contributions to make in both raising ideas and seeing them through.

Consider the environment

Voice cultivating tactics are most powerful when they’re responsive to why an idea was initially rejected

For example, if those with the power to greenlight an idea don’t think the idea is important or possible, amplifying is the wrong tactic, but legitimizing it could provide the support needed to push it forward

Legitimizing

Vouching for ideas that you believe in is critical for their success

Team members keep ideas alive by sharing examples of a similar personal experience or of how a similar idea worked at a competitor or admired peer institution
It prevented ideas from lower-power members from being dismissed

Voice cultivation can overcome initial rejection

A team in a health care organization tracked instances of “upward voice” – that is, employees’ constructive ideas for improving organizational or team functioning

Around a quarter of the ideas they tracked were ultimately implemented
They developed a collective, social process through which employees help lower-power team members’ voiced ideas reach implementation
There were five specific tactics they saw team members engage in to resuscitate initially rejected ideas and then keep them alive over time

Exemplifying

Show preliminary evidence that a previously rejected idea is feasible and important

Example: A receptionist proposes that staff should have a seat in leadership team meetings
After being rejected initially, the receptionist volunteers to liaise between the team and leadership, making herself indispensable to both and earning a seat at the leadership table

Promoting voice cultivation

To make sure their employees’ good ideas get a better chance at implementation, leaders should train their teams to engage in voice cultivation.

By introducing voice cultivation to their teams, leaders: set the tone that team members can build each other up
Promote teamwork rather than competition by rewarding team members for developing others’ good ideas
Provide practical behaviors the team can engage in and recognize
Create accountability structures outside of the leaders’ own good intentions

Amplifying

Publicly repeating someone else’s good idea, especially at later times and through multiple communication channels, can help push an idea forward

This is particularly true for those trying to influence authority figures
Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg overcame constant interruptions and appropriation of their ideas by amplifying each other’s ideas