Traditional leadership hierarchies can stifle new ideas, according to an Aug. 23 Harvard Business Review article by Dr. Timothy Clark, CEO of Leaderfactor, a leadership consulting firm.
Innovation is inherently collaborative, and nonmanagement workers often hold the key to new ideas, Dr. Clark writes. He warns of authority bias — overvaluing opinions from top management — and undervaluing opinions from other workers. This discourages employees from contributing, ultimately halting innovation, according to the article.
Dr. Clark recommends valuing an idea's substance over source to encourage "cultural flatness," where structure does not restrict the flow of information.
Four of Dr. Clark's tips for bottom-up innovation:
1. Differentiate between participation rights and decision rights; explicitly grant participation rights and provide opportunities to use them.
2. Get comfortable with disrupting the status quo. Ask, "Why do we do it this way?" or "What if we tried this instead?" or "How might we do it differently?"
3. Normalize disagreement by publicly critiquing your own decisions; openly thank dissenters who speak up.
4. Exercise empathy to make employees comfortable uprooting norms.