Ownership of Ideas

My eldest daughter Madelyn (9) just received her first school assignment, which requires her to research a theme and choose from a number of different topics and presentation methods. On the weekend, I was enlisted to help out.

Helping was much more difficult than anticipated because, whilst I was able to come up with many great concepts and ideas; I found myself acting like it was MY assignment. My role in this excercise was to assist Madelyn to come up with her own ideas and thoughts and provide her with some direction, not to add my own ideas.

During this experience, I was reminded of an article that I read recently, which discusses the temptation to impose one’s own ideas on other people in the persuit of adding value and the effect that this has on the committment and ownership of ideas.

Therein lies the fallacy of added value: Whatever is gained in the form of a better idea may be lost six times over in the employee’s diminished enthusiasm for the concept.

So–upon reflection–I learned a couple of valuable lessons:

1. Be careful how you ‘encourage’
2. It’s better to “teach someonehow to fish” rather than to “feed them the fish”.

This is probably a lot harder to put into pracice than it sounds. So, do you let other people be winners?

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