Your Ideas Are Great- But Do You Also Know How To Get Them Implemented? I love people who come to me with ideas. But I hate people who come to me with only ideas.
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I love people who come to me with ideas. But I hate people who come to me with only ideas. Does that make any sense? I feel like the above sentiment will strike a chord with those of you who work with those amazingly imaginative folk who are seemingly always abounding with ideas on how the business can do better for itself. I've found that these apparently enterprising thinkers are often the bosses or entrepreneurs running the show, and as a result, one feels almost obliged to take their thoughts seriously, given that it was their ideas that got the whole enterprise started in the first place.
However, as the oft-repeated aphorism goes, ideas are worth nothing if not executed properly, and a complaint that I often hear from people who work at startups and corporates alike is how their employers come up with fantastic new schemes to build up their companies, but then fail to offer any sort of roadmap or plan for the same. After all, such ideas require time, resources, and yes, a lot of work to be properly implemented- but more often than not, such considerations are sadly overlooked or ignored. And when this happens, the workforce -especially those at a startup- find themselves grappling with the extra workload, which then soon leads to things falling through the cracks, and a pervading sense of frustration in the team at large.
So how do you avoid this from happening in your enterprise? Well, I'm no management expert, but the answer, I think, lies in first respecting the people you have on board, and the work that they do for you. Sure, it's important that you, as the leader, keep spurring your employees to go above and beyond what they might think themselves capable of doing, but do understand that there are limits to how much you can do this as well. Take time to understand your personnel's day-to-day workloads, and know that for every new task you throw on their heads, they have to reassign time and resources from their existing ones. Being appreciative of this will allow you to add a dose of reality to the ideas you come up with for building up your company- this way, you won't affect business as usual, and your team morale will stay positive as well.
By the way, all of this is not to say that you should put a stop to the stream of ideas that flow out of you- my only suggestion is that you devise plans for their execution as well. Doing that will see you better equipped to realize those ambitions of yours- and that's always a good thing.
