Overcoming your own hierarchy

(music playing) - Despite your best efforts, and the fact that you're a a really nice person, your role as a senior leader is going to intimidate people, particularly in a hierarchical organization. The issue with that is you don't hear truth. People aren't going to necessarily present to you what's really happening. That was the issue for my friend Carl, who took over as the senior leader in a very hierarchical organization. The hierarchy was part of the organizational culture. And here's the issue. He thought his team members had great ideas, and he wasn't hearing them. They were filtered by the time they got to him. I think you have good ideas that I'm not hearing. So, to address this, he had to engage in a bit of intelligent disobedience. Temporarily, at least, rejecting the hierarchy. That bit of culture in his organization. So he had meetings where he doesn't sit at the head of the table. He sits someplace else. And in fact, he even created a symbolic way to describe it. He called them badge in the box meetings, where they took their ID badges, which indicated whether they were managers or not, put them in the box. And they had discussions just between people that were trying to do the right thing and move the business forward. Team, I need your help. What happens at your desks, and what appears on my desk, gets altered and edited and filtered. I need to know what's really happening, and I need to hear your ideas as to how we can improve. These badge in the box meetings ultimately gave Carl the opportunity to get real, unfiltered ideas. - So this is a product that we haven't even considered yet. - If we cut out those three steps, we'll save time, and money, and still deliver. - He told his people, you can criticize the business, you can criticize him. Ultimately, that needed to be the truth that he needed to ultimately move the business forward. Now, the first couple were okay, he was starting (crickets) to hear some things. But then people realized, there was no repercussions from this, and in fact it was a very positive thing. And, they did indeed move the business forward. So here's my question to you. Are you hearing truth? Do you have a method, maybe a badge in the box meeting, where you can get unfiltered ideas from the people that ultimately are going to execute them and move your business forward?