How Receptive Are You to New Ideas?

We carried out a survey to assess attitudes towards receptiveness to new ideas within organizations. There were 203 respondents of whom 82% were from private sector companies and 18% from the public sector.

The results indicate that most people consider themselves to be much more receptive to new ideas than their bosses are. So whereas 95% of people think that they would welcome or consider ideas from outside their department, only 77% thought that their manager would.

If they had implemented a new policy and someone suggested there might be a better way to do the whole thing, then 52% of respondents would consider the suggestion carefully and be prepared to try it. However they thought that under similar circumstances only 18% of bosses would do the same. Similarly when it comes to implementing other people’s ideas, 94% of respondents said they would give the credit to the person who came up with the idea. But only 73% thought their boss would do so; 27% thought the boss would claim the credit.

When faced with a difficult problem for some time respondents believed that they were more likely to look outside their department for ideas (43%) than their managers were (24%). They thought that the managers were more likely to ask the department to make more suggestions or to try some more of their own ideas. The most common things that were seen to be preventing new ideas from being adopted were lack of time and money, poor communication and a variety of cultural issues including risk aversion and fear of failure. A picture of poor leadership in this area emerges.

Overall people see their managers as being less open to new ideas than they are. This begs the question – do people become less receptive as they move up the management chain or is it a perception issue? Do we view ourselves as more receptive than we really are? Are we just as bad as our bosses but we don’t see it?

Click here to view the full report.

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This post was previously published on Destination Innovation.

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