My goal with this blog was to put out at least one post per month. I’m clearly falling short on that as this is my first post since May. I’m ok with that, and I hope you are too, as I’ve been busy with family and getting back to some semblance of a normal life as we move forward through the pandemic. I’ve started eating in restaurants again, and I began playing pick up soccer again, one of my passions in life. Over the last few months there’s been a lot of great sporting events on TV taking up a lot of my free time starting with the UEFA Euros, the Copa America the Gold Cup, and ending with the Summer Olympics. I’ve had the idea of this post since I wrote the last one and I’m excited to finally sit down and write it. I hope you find it worth the wait.
Imagine you are sitting in your team’s annual planning meeting with your peers and your manager. You are in a brainstorming session and the topic is next year’s priorities. You are super excited about a few great ideas you have, let’s say they are in the realm of efficiency or employee experience. And your manager starts out by saying that they see the top 3 priorities are in the area of revenue, innovation, and customer experience.
Now your likely reaction is that you don’t want to challenge your boss. The great ideas you had when you came to the meeting may not seem as great since none of them align to your are in your boss’ top 3. This likely leaves you unsure or possibly unwilling to throw any of your ideas out and share them with the team. Whether your manager intended it or not they set a direction. Even managers who create great psychological safety, are likely to find their reports unwilling to go against the direction they set.
Now reimagine the situation and you are the manager sitting in the same type of meeting with your direct reports. How would you do this differently? Would you go around the room and ask each team member to share their ideas? Would you complement each person’s idea and appreciate that they are contributing?
In these situations I recommend two things. First, whenever I start a brainstorming session I let my team know that I value their input. I usually say something like “I don’t have all of the answers and I want to hear your ideas. As a group, we are likely to come up with the best possible solution than any of us would on our own.” Second, even though I try to create an environment of safety and encourage my reports to challenge me on decisions they don’t agree with or find ways to improve on an idea I have, I know they won’t always do that, very few of us will. In the end, we are still humans and they may subconsciously decide not to challenge my idea. To prevent this from happening I go around the room and ask for ideas before I give any of mine out. This avoids the team feeling that I set any explicit or implicit direction that they need to follow.
So what does all of this have to do with the post’s main picture of hippopotamus? Nothing with the animal, but it is all about the concept of the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion or HiPPO. This concept can show its head in more than one way. I described one of the common ones where a leader shares their view which intentionally or unintentionally moves the team towards a decision.
Another common one is that the leader explicitly makes decisions. Recently, I found myself unintentionally making this mistake. We were discussing how to use our team’s annual morale budget. We were having a pretty open discussion, debating what was the best way to use the money. And rather than letting the team set the direction, I had. Given that we are still in the middle of a pandemic, I felt that this was an important decision and wanted to make sure that we made the best one possible.
The truth is that I had forgotten that my team is more likely to come up with the best idea than I am. It took a little bravery from one of my direct reports to pull me aside and set me straight and I’m extremely grateful that they did. They reminded me that they are an extremely capable team and that I need to leave some decisions, especially one as small as this, to them. And I did and the team has spent the money wisely.
For me this was a great reminder of why the HiPPO method of decision making is a bad one. It also reminded me how easy it is to accidentally use it. Whether it is by speaking first in a meeting, overruling your team, or not asking questions. Leaders, teams, and businesses will always be better off relying on the collective wisdom of their team along with data to make decisions.
I had a similar experience yesterday with my team, instead of brainstorming ideas, I ended up giving directions on how to create an article for other teams to identify and route cases to us sooner. I realized soon after that I should have first asked the team to provide suggestions on how to go about it rather than putting across my thoughts.
Thanks for sharing this. 😊
Important points here, Scott. I also appreciate your candor and sharing of your learning in real-time.
I'm glad that you recognized what you could have done better. Now you need to put that in practice next time and please let me know if you get better ideas!
Hi Karen! Thanks for taking the time to read my blog, that means a lot to me that one of my leadership "sherpas" is taking an interest in what I have to say about leadership. As always thank you for the encouragement!