Are You Saving Your Ideas?
Posted by Laddie Blaskowski on Mar 17, 2008
I’m often amazed at how many great ideas a business can have when its people get together for a meeting. This is especially true when rabbit trails creep into the agenda.
We’re told that when someone veers from the topic at a meeting, we’re supposed to stop that person and get back to the task at hand. Well, that’s both true and false.
You see, if Joe just brought up a great idea on how to save the company a ton of money, or how to provide a new service, or how to give better customer service, and the response was, “Well, that’s nice but we need to get back to the purpose of the meeting,” three things just happened:
1. Joe was told that his idea was unimportant.
2. What could be a great idea was left hanging and will most likely be lost.
3. Employees get the message that they may be made to appear unimportant if they present an idea.
Not very positive, is it?
Try this instead. Since you do need to keep your meeting productive, keep an idea list. Use the list whenever an idea is floated that might not otherwise be captured. Tell Joe that his idea is worth looking into further, flip to the idea list and write it down, and explain you can revisit it later. Then you can go back to the purpose of the meeting.
What does this accomplish?
- You capture what could be a great idea. At the very least, the idea could help to jumpstart a future brainstorming session when everyone is looking around because their minds have gone blank.
- Your actions tell the employee that his or her ideas were important enough to write down.
- You also tell the other employees that their ideas will be treated in a respectful manner.
Is this important?
Well, your actions can either say, “Just go back to your desk—we don’t have time for other ideas,” or they can say, “We value your opinions and ideas.” If you only received one new idea from ten employees each week, that would be over 500 ideas a year. I’ll bet there would be some winners in that pile. It’s your call.