Fresh Eyes, Fresh Ideas: Why Ignoring New Staff Could Be Costing You Big

When we think of discoveries, we think of brave explorers forging deep into mysterious jungles or high into snow-covered misty mountains in far-off and exotic lands.

Or we think of journies of discovery into our own minds, Einstein developing E = mc², Newton discovering Gravity, or Marie Curie discovering Radium and Polonium.

The romantic narrative is that these discoveries are in distant lands or created by scientific gods, whose level of thought far exceeds that of the common people.

However, this is a limiting belief.

Discoveries are all around you if you look for them.

In 2018, R. Tory McMullin conducted a survey in the arboretum, (a botanical garden devoted to trees, yes I had to look that up too), at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

They were looking for lichen, which is a small staked species (0.1 to 0.2 mm tall) that look like facial hair on the trunks of trees or on branches.

In total, they discovered 111 species of lichens and allied fungi living in the arboretum and one completely new species.

So how does a discovery in their backyard help us get the most out of our team?

Discoveries Are Everywhere

The fancy consultancies have bewitched us with the idea that they have some special esoteric knowledge that can transform your business into a superstar enterprise.

The logical fallacy is that they are offering that service to everyone and everyone can’t be superstars.

What you do have is a lot of people who are very close to the problem. Like they are in your backyard right now. And they have insights if you would just listen to them.

But They Are Not Important

We are all quick to listen to billionaires and ‘successful’ people but they might have got one thing right once. It doesn’t mean they are right about everything all the time.

There is a term called Illusory Superiority which is a cognitive bias that people overestimate their own abilities over other people.

We also do that to people lower down the hierarchy. This intern can’t possibly have good ideas about the project I have made them think about endlessly for three months.

Every CEO, board member, exec, General Manager, you name it was at some point the lowest person on the hierarchy, but insight isn’t given by job title, but by playing with the challenge. Living and breathing with it.

Your responsibility as a leader is to make it ok for those junior members to offer their insights. They may be wrong, and that is ok, that is part of the learning process to help them become the CEO of the future.

Even though they will get some things wrong, they will get some things right, and listening to them could change your project around, as they say out of the mouths of babes.