Home Worship & Creative Leaders Worship & Creative Blogs Are You Listening to Your Own Team?

Are You Listening to Your Own Team?

Now that Steve Jobs has stepped down, everyone’s talking about finding a visionary genius to lead their company.  But the truth is, creativity isn’t just a top down thing.  For most companies and nonprofits, the best ideas come up from the bottom.  But sadly, most leaders are ignoring their own people.  Research has found that with most companies in America, the average employee’s ideas are only implemented once every 5 or 6 years.

But the most successful companies encourage ideas from everyone – including the guys on the loading dock.  Companies like Google let their engineers use up to 20% of their time to work on any company-related project of their choosing.  Others, have regular times to listen to everyone on the staff.

You don’t want to let it degrade to “idea fests” where everyone is tossing out stupid ideas and chaos reigns. But you can set up structured times for listening that will really give your organization a creative shot in the arm.

The point to remember is that you never know where the idea that will save your organization will come from, so start listening to everyone – not just the people at the top.