More than once, I’ve watched a CEO lose some of his best engineers without any prior clues. Usually, the leader couldn’t understand why. The company would often be growing. Salaries were competitive. The product was exciting.
In one instance, as a board member (with permission of the CEO), I sat in on a team meeting.
An engineer proposed a new approach to a performance problem. Before she finished her second sentence, the CEO interrupted: “We tried something like that in 2019. It didn’t work. Next topic.”
The engineer sat down. The room went quiet. Nobody else offered ideas for the rest of the meeting.
That CEO thought he was being efficient. What he was actually doing was teaching his team that innovation wasn’t welcome.
Here’s what fifty years of board work taught me: Most leaders don’t kill innovation intentionally. They kill it by accident, through a dozen small behaviors they don’t even notice.
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The instant “no” before the full idea is heard. The “we tried that before” without asking what’s different now. The “that’s not how we do things here” that shuts down exploration.
The request for a full business plan before you’ll consider a concept. The need to be the smartest person in the room. The inability to say “I don’t know, but let’s find out.”
I’ve watched brilliant leaders accidentally create innovation deserts. They hire smart people, then train them—through a thousand small rejections—to stop bringing ideas.
The best leaders I’ve backed do something different. They respond to new ideas with questions, not judgments.
Instead of “That won’t work,” they ask “What problem are you trying to solve?”
Instead of “We tried that,” they ask “What would you do differently?”
Instead of “That’s too expensive,” they ask “What’s the smallest version we could test?”
One CEO I worked with instituted a rule: No one—including him—could say no to an idea in the meeting where it was first proposed. You could ask questions. You could identify concerns. But you couldn’t reject it outright.
Ideas had to survive at least 24 hours before they could be killed.
