Why does your boss reject all your good ideas?

“Ideas have not changed, but I have changed,” said my former student.

After hearing similar stories from others, I decided to document the bias, understand what drives it, and ultimately figure out how to overcome it.

Two colleagues, Tanya Menon and Hoon-Sok Choi, and I designed a series of studies in which we asked people to evaluate ideas supposedly coming from colleagues in their own organizations (insiders) and people working in other companies (outsiders). Of course, we found the same result: people devalued ideas generated from within, but accepted ideas that they thought came from outside.

To understand why, we asked managers across industries and levels about their reactions to ideas from different sources. We’ve found that one of the main reasons leaders can discount insider ideas is that insiders (and their ideas) are a big threat. “Their ideas are so good that upper management might want to fire me and put them in my job!”

Our research has shown that simply having a great idea from an internal subordinate activates a threat response from that employee’s manager. We measured threat by managers’ responses to questions about how comfortable, safe, and confident they felt immediately after being presented with an idea from an insider or outsider.

Of course, insider ideas caused a great deal of threat, and managers avoided insider knowledge, meaning they minimized the time they spent learning about the idea and, more notably, cut back on the R&D they would invest in. exploring an idea. Conversely, when confronted with viable ideas from outside, managers felt less personally threatened and were more willing to implement the ideas.

Then my colleagues and I began to think about how best to deactivate this bias and encourage leaders to be more open to internal ideas.

Through our series of studies, we have the power of a simple self-assertion exercise that will help leaders feel less threatened by an innovative, proven subordinate. In particular, before presenting the idea of ​​subordinates to managers, we asked some of them to read a list of things that people value, such as aesthetic appreciation, relationships with family and friends, social skills, sense of humor, living life in the moment, and identify one value that was most important to them personally, and briefly describe why. We gave other leaders the same list of values, but asked them to identify the least personally important value and explain why it might be important to someone else.

We know from self-identity research that when we focus on our most important values, we assert ourselves; however, when we think about our least important values, or those that are important to someone else, this does not confirm. So our hypothesis was that the leaders in the first group above would feel better – they would be more confident in who they are. are what they stand for, and thus are less likely to be threatened by a smart subordinate than are managers who have not affirmed their most important values.

So what happened? The self-affirmation technique did not lessen the degree to which people felt threatened, but it did lessen their defensive posture. And these managers were ultimately more likely to accept the insider’s idea.

I believe there are two practical implications of our study. If you want to pitch an idea to your boss, focus on the merits of the idea (rather than yourself) and ideally support your boss and the company. For example, instead of running to your manager’s office and saying something like, “I’m so confident about this new idea,” say, “I’ve been thinking a lot about your vision for the company, and I have an idea that speaks to you.” . to what.” If you are an idea recipient and find yourself struggling to accept inner ideas, try to assert yourself to inoculate yourself against natural bias. For example, you can remind yourself of the values ​​that matter most to you before rather than joining a brainstorming session with subordinates to promote greater open-mindedness.