How can organizations improve themselves to create a better work environment? How high is the potential of businesses?
Individuals aren’t the only ones who can reach their full potential. Organizations can always achieve more on a larger scale.
Here are two tips that organizations can use to identify and utilize all their workers’ potential.
Tip #1: Encourage Good Ideas From Everyone in the Organization
Adam Grant argues that if the high potential of businesses wants to be reached, they need to encourage and empower all their employees to share their best ideas with workers who can act on them. In most organizations, however, this doesn’t happen. When an employee suggests a way to improve the organization, their boss will typically ignore it. Why? They may feel threatened by the idea that their subordinate could offer better ideas than them. Alternatively, they may worry that if the idea fails, they’ll be held responsible.
To fix this problem, Grant proposes a system where employees can freely share ideas with multiple leaders across the organization, increasing the odds that someone will approve and implement those ideas. In this system, even if many high-ranking managers reject your idea, all it takes is one “yes” to get your idea tested and implemented. Consequently, the organization acts on many more valuable ideas, allowing it to rapidly innovate and improve.
| A More Extreme Philosophy: Bosses Can’t Say No In No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings also advocates a workplace philosophy centered around empowering employees to pursue their ideas without unanimous top-down approval. However, Hastings’ approach goes even further by giving employees the autonomy to work full-time pursuing whatever ideas they think are the most valuable to the company—even if all their bosses think those ideas will fail. This system allows organizations to avoid the pitfalls that Grant describes: First, bosses don’t have the authority to completely shut down any ideas, even if their egos are threatened. Second, bosses don’t need to worry about being held responsible for their subordinates’ bad ideas because it’s widely understood that every employee is fully responsible for the success or failure of their own ideas. Hastings believes that managers should be relatively lenient when their subordinates fail—no one is right 100% of the time—but he asserts that employees should face consequences if they consistently invest in bad ideas. |
Tip #2: Hire on the Basis of Potential, Not Superficial Success
Grant contends that when organizations are hiring, they often overlook the applicants with the most potential to help them achieve their goals. This happens for two reasons:
First, organizations typically place too much value on prestigious college degrees, which Grant suggests are poor predictors of future performance. Studies show that on a technical level, there are few differences between the work done by graduates of elite universities and the work done by graduates of less prestigious ones.
Furthermore, job postings that require college degrees exclude large segments of the workforce. Many people gain valuable, employable skills outside of college. For instance, they might learn directly from experts or teach themselves.
Second, Grant argues that organizations often make the mistake of judging candidates solely by their prior work experience: how long they’ve worked a similar job or how well they did at that job. However, this experience doesn’t necessarily translate to success in a new role—the years someone has worked don’t prove that they learned anything during that time. Additionally, you can only judge candidates by the quality of their past work if you’re hiring them for a job that requires those exact same skills. Often, organizations falsely assume that if an applicant did well in their previous job, they’ll similarly thrive in any job.
