How Leaders Need to Evaluate New Ideas
Posted December 14th, 2015
For people in leadership roles, there is a delicate balance to maintain when trying to foster innovation. On one hand, you want to encourage innovation, and so you need to be careful how you criticize ideas that people come up with. If the criticism is too harsh or demeaning, you will stifle new ideas. On the other hand, you do need to evaluate new ideas, to probe them for the benefits they might deliver to the company, and if they are found wanting, to dismiss them.
To make criticism and evaluation more productive and effective, you need, first of all, to avoid criticism that is sweeping in its generalization. In other words, you want to avoid language that condemns the entire idea in one fell swoop. Simply dismissing something by calling it a lousy idea or a bad idea is not the kind of assessment that is constructive. Moreover, brushing aside proposals you don’t like in a high-handed, contemptuous manner will do little to encourage suggestions in the future.
Criticism becomes more purposeful and effective if you take the time to analyze the idea for qualities that are good and for those that are lacking. Some management experts suggest applying a rating system to be more effective. For example, you could create a scoring system from 1 to 10, and then rate the idea or proposal on different criteria — creativity, profitability, practicality, for example — and assign a score for each of these. That way, you take the focus off the person who made the idea and put it on the idea itself.
And then if the proposal generates a low score on one of the criteria, ask how the score can be raised to make the proposal more useful.
Another approach that could be used is to look at a proposal from two different perspectives – what you like or is good about the idea and what needs to be improved.
Another approach to take the onus of criticism off the leader is to assign a person to be a kind of devil’s advocate for new ideas. The job of this person is to look for problems or flaws in the idea that need to be addressed. Similarly, the leader could require that any new idea or proposal be reviewed by two additional people before being presented to leadership. Again, this gets more people involved in looking at new ideas.
These approaches are all designed to replace a shoot-from-the-hip reaction to an idea with a more consistent, organized approach, one that will not stifle people’s desire to contribute new ideas.
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