Creating the Innovation Culture: Leveraging Visionaries, Dissenters and Other Useful Troublemakers

Chapter 5. Ways You'd Never Suppress Dissent—Would You?

Managers are very effective at shutting down dissent.

Even when they're not trying to, their actions may be interpreted that way and the net effect will be the same.

This chapter will outline how managers shut down dissent and how to avoid doing so.

Introduction

This chapter and the next focus on your first task as a manager—avoiding the suppression of naturally occurring dissent. Usually, this dissent is situational, i.e., it occurs when an employee who supports the strategic direction tells you about a disconnect. If most dissent could be kept situational, you'd probably increase your level of innovation while remaining efficient. But while this is desirable, it's surprisingly difficult to do because, as I think these examples will show, it is easy to suppress.

Shooting messengers, sending mixed messages, playing politics, and intimidating are tactics that some—not many, but some—managers use with regularity in the workplace. Not good at the best of times, but they have the added problem of suppressing dissent. I know you don't engage in them. You're not That Kind of Person. But a surprising number of managers don't realize that the purest of motives can be interpreted by the recipients in exactly those ways. It doesn't take much for politically savvy employees to know when to shut up. And while it's efficient to have everybody do what they're told, it's not a source of innovation. So keep reading—this might apply to you after ...