How to ask for suggestions (as a manager)

A scene I’ve seen too many times: on a Monday, a manager puts a ballot box somewhere in the room, instructing his employees to drop in any suggestion for improvement. Then, the manager sets himself a reminder to check the box on Friday. On that day, he takes out the slips of paper with the suggestions and moves them to his office, where they will lie on his desk for another week. By the time he looks at them, his employees will have learned the lesson that the manager didn’t really care and that effort spent providing suggestions goes to waste. Even worse, they might have learned the lesson that the company doesn’t care about its workers or that any effort is wasted.

This might sound surprising to the well-meaning manager, and perhaps even unfair – not his fault if he’s so busy! – but, care is in the eye of the beholder.

Whenever a manager asks his people for suggestions, he must ensure that they won’t think, “I shouldn’t have put any effort into giving this suggestion.” Here is how to do that:

• Review the suggestions within a day or preemptively and explicitly communicate when he will review them. Remember: the goal is to prevent people from doubting that it was a waste of effort. If they are allowed to believe that a same-day acknowledgement is possible, some might be disappointed when they don’t get it in time; if it’s clear since the beginning that suggestions are reviewed on the second Monday of the month (say), no one will expect any earlier acknowledgement.
• When you review a suggestion, always let the suggester know you did. This doesn’t mean to condescendly compliment them. It means to prevent them from thinking that suggestions aren’t considered. Do not use “automatic responses” – they don’t prevent people from thinking that suggestions aren’t considered.
• If you review a bad suggestion, explain why it is a bad suggestion. The reason you, as a manager, get to give objectives to your subordinates is not because of a title but because you have a larger overview of what’s going on in the organization and what matters for success. Most bad suggestions come from not knowing that. So, explain the criteria you use to judge suggestions, why a particular one will have to be discarded, and what, if anything, would have made it implementable.

Of course, never criticize anyone (you can criticize ideas and behaviors but not people) nor do anything that might embarrass the other person. And remember: reviewing suggestions well doesn’t just mean to separate the good ones from the bad ones; it mostly means to encourage more and better suggestions in the future.