Why Does Your Boss Reject All of Your Good Ideas?
4 min read . Updated: 16 Apr 2023, 11:16 AM IST 
Premium- Research finds managers are less likely to pursue viable ideas that come from internal versus external sources. But there are ways to minimize the bias.
A former executive M.B.A. student of mine recently shared a story with implications for anyone who works for someone else. Previously, as a midlevel manager in a services business, she had frequently presented to senior leaders what she thought were creative, innovative ideas. The executives were dismissive of each. Ultimately, my student grew frustrated and left the company and started her own consulting firm. When her old employer became a client, she presented her favorite previously dismissed ideas to the same leaders—and this time they loved them!
“The ideas hadn’t changed, but I had," my former student said.
Having heard similar stories from others, I set out to document the bias, understand what drives it and ultimately figure out how to overcome it.
Two colleagues, Tanya Menon and Hoon-Seok Choi, and I designed a series of research studies in which we asked people to evaluate ideas purportedly originating from colleagues within their own organizations (insiders) versus people who work for other companies (outsiders). Sure enough, we found the same result: People devalued ideas generated from within but embraced ideas they thought came from outside.
To understand why, we interviewed managers from a range of industries and levels about their reactions to ideas from different sources. We found that one of the biggest reasons leaders may devalue the ideas of insiders is that these insiders (and their ideas) represent more of a threat. “Their ideas are so good that upper management may want to fire me and promote them into my job!"
Our research showed that the mere presence of a splendid idea from an internal subordinate activates a threat response from that employee’s leader. We measured threat by managers’ responses to questions about how comfortable, secure and confident they felt right after they were presented with an idea from an insider or outsider.
Sure enough, insiders’ ideas triggered more threat and the managers avoided the insiders’ knowledge—that is, they minimized the time they invested in learning about the idea and, even more notably, reduced the research-and-development funds they would invest in exploring the idea. Conversely, when faced with viable ideas from outsiders, managers didn’t feel as personally threatened and were more willing to pursue the ideas.
My colleagues and I then started thinking about how best to deactivate this bias and prompt leaders to be more open to inside ideas.
As part of our series of studies, we tested the power of a simple self-affirmation exercise to help leaders feel less threatened by an innovative subordinate. Specifically, before presenting leaders with a subordinate’s idea, we asked some of them to read a list of things people value—such as aesthetic appreciation, relations with family and friends, social skills, sense of humor, living life in the moment—and identify one value that was most personally important to them 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.
What we know from research on self-identity is that when we focus on our most important values, we affirm ourselves; however, when we think about our least important values or those that matter to someone else, it isn’t affirming.So, our hypothesis was that the leaders in the first group above would feel better about themselves—more confident in who they are and what they stand for, and thus less likely to be threatened by a smart subordinate than the managers who didn’t affirm their most important values.
So what happened? The self-affirmation technique didn’t mitigate the degree to which people experienced threat, but it reduced their defensiveness. And these managers ultimately were more willing to embrace the insider’s idea.
I believe there are two practical takeaways from our research. If you want to pitch an idea to your boss, keep the focus on the merits of the idea (versus you), and ideally affirm your boss and the company. For example, instead of running into your manager’s office and saying something like, “I’m so confident about this new idea," go with, “I’ve been thinking a lot about your vision for the company and have an idea that speaks to that." If you are the idea receiver, and find yourself struggling to embrace internal ideas, try to affirm yourself to inoculate against the natural bias. For example, you might remind yourself of the values that matter most to you before joining a brainstorming session with subordinates, to promote more open-mindedness.