I have had the opportunity to work with and observe many different leaders in a variety of different organisations, and one characteristic I have noticed in effective leaders is that they don’t feel the need to have all the good ideas themselves.  Instead, they identify problems that need to be solved or objectives that need to be met and draw upon the creativity and experience of their team and others around them.  They encourage everyone to propose ideas and then they apply their judgement to decide which idea should be resourced and taken forward.

By contrast I have observed leaders who feel that having the good ideas is an essential role of the leader.  They therefore put themselves under pressure to generate ideas and choose to implement these without considering whether doing so is the best use of time and resources.  Leaders with this approach can also be dismissive of other people’s ideas and block their implementation.  This in turn can have a toxic influence on their team, killing creativity, de-motivating people and damaging moral.  Leaders that display this behaviour tend to be insecure.  They appear to believe that conceiving ideas is a marker of creativity and intellect, and as the leader they must always demonstrate that they are cleverer than those they consider subordinates by having the better ideas.

If you are an existing or aspiring leader and want to avoid this pitfall you need to work on developing a different mind-set.  As a leader your role is to look at the high-level strategy of the organisation or team you work within.  What are its Mission, Vision and Values?  Your job as a leader is to set objectives that align with this high-level strategy and then formulate initiatives that will help achieve those objectives.

When formulating initiatives, it is not important whether you have all the good ideas yourself.  It is important that you understand the strategic goals of your organisation or team and set appropriate objectives that will help to achieve those goals.  It is more important that you recognise good ideas and lead a team to deliver on them rather than focusing on having all the good ideas.  This requires discussing objectives and nascent ideas with others inside and outside your team so that they can suggest improvements to your ideas or offer better ones.

You need to learn not to be precious about your ideas and that the idea is not King.  Good ideas are ten-a-penny, but an idea without implementation is just an idea.  Goals are met and businesses are built by implementing ideas.  And good leaders are those who can inspire and motivate a team to implement good ideas and achieve their goals.

It is also important that the organisation recognises and rewards this kind of real leadership and does not fall into the trap of believing the idea is King.  This can be the downfall of an organisation just as it was with the once feted Enron.  In that organisation the greatest value was put on ideas and on those who had them.  This incentivised people to push through their own ideas, suppress the ideas of others, and to keep going even when this wasn’t in the best interests of the business.  It also meant there was a lack of incentives for people to focus on doing what was in the best interests of the business.

The best leaders I have worked with and observed are those who understand their role as a leader.  They are secure in the knowledge that they add value by motivating and inspiring their team, and by applying sound decision-making and judgement in choosing which ideas to implement.  They therefore welcome others’ ideas and are perceived as more inclusive and receptive by their team members.