Whose Idea Is It?

One of my passions is managing high-performance, collaborative teams. Accordingly, I like to note the subtleties that distinguish one team from another and affect overall success. Here’s an observation I made recently.

In collaborative environments, there’s a huge difference between saying “John’s idea” and “the idea John suggested.” A small semantic difference, perhaps. But consider the object of each phrase. And the effect.

“John’s idea”
In the first phrase, the object is the person. It is their idea. Their comment. Their opinion. Put this in context of an open and contentious dialogue about, say… how to implement a product feature. In this scenario, you are pitting people against each other. It is my idea against his idea. Someone wins. Someone loses. Moreover, even casual feedback and comments become associated with a person, who eventually has to defend what was merely a contribution thrown into the mix.

This is a destructive way to manage team dynamics. Not only does it create adversarial conditions, it frustrates coming to agreement on great ideas that are actually a fusion of contributions from several people. Instead of ‘this great idea we came up with’ you end up with ‘my idea with some of his thrown in’ is the idea that won.

Let’s contrast the first scenario with this second one…

“The idea John suggested”
In this scenario, the object is clearly the idea. Authorship is secondary, and only as a label. In fact, in these situations it good to get to a description of this idea that separates it from the contributor. What you end up with here is a gathering of people, all contributing and ‘playing’ with an idea— the thing being discussed. Think of this as the stewed pot that everyone is gathering around. What are people focused on? Not each other. The focus is on the thing being formed. And, if someone introduces a great idea (or a bad one), it’s more detached from the person.

Moreover, because the focus isn’t on individuals, but on the merits of the idea, people do feel more at ease to both contribute and comment on the ‘thing’ everyone is discussing. You get more ideas, because people feel at ease throwing in things that they would keep to themselves if their identity was tied to the merits of the idea. And it’s far easier for others to criticize an idea when it isn’t so inextricably linked to a person. End result? More conversation, for starters. And when you reach the ‘end result’, it was a collaborative effort. No one won or lost. And everyone (who participated) gets credit. They were part of a team.

One lingering question…
Does John ever get credit and recognition for his great idea?
Of course. If the great idea that saves the day can be traced back to an individual (and it’s not the result of a group effort), isn’t it obvious who came up the idea? They know it. You know it as their manager. And so does everyone else. But it’s not during a session that’s supposed to produce great ideas that you should recognize individual contributors. Or call out bad contributors. No. Save performance feedback for later. Use these collaborative sessions to produce ideas. And to create the best conditions for generating good ideas.