Have you ever felt frustrated when you found a problem worth solving but it was not picked up by your colleagues nor supported by your boss? Deep inside you knew you were onto addressing something important, leading to a breakthrough, or just going to have a positive impact on the company, but you failed and don’t know why. This post provides insights on why your ideas may have been rejected along with tips on how to find the right problems to solve.
Why do managers reject your ideas?
Your personal view on the problems that are important will differ from your manager’s view. Your position, role, and size of the company determine your understanding of the strategic goals of a team, department, or organization and influences the easiness of access to relevant, oftentimes strategic information. Therefore, it’s crucial to understand that not all of the problems that you will identify are worth addressing due to a multitude of reasons:
- Approach: The way in which you raised the problem was ineffective. You chose the wrong medium, were too forward and crossed boundaries (e.g. cultural, personal) or just spoke to the wrong person.
- Contracts & regulations: Solving the issue would stand in conflict with the way the company does business due to contractual relationships with customers, the way customers are billed for, or because of regulatory requirements. You may need to build a stronger business case on the positive impacts when addressed, so that the pain points are addressed eventually.
- Cost: Solving the problem would incur too high costs for the company.
- Experience: You’ve joined the team quite recently and/or your manager perceives you as a member of the team who is still learning and trying to understand the mechanics and context of the team. In case you’ve been on the team for a longer time, this may mean that you’re crossing a certain boundary and you should better understand the expectations of your boss, e.g. the areas/problems you should focus on. Also, reflect on the relation with your manager as trust makes a difference.
- Focus: There is another team already working on this challenge and your manager would prefer to keep you focused on the main team’s responsibilities.
- Isolation: You’re the only one that sees this issue and without further support, the idea won’t get further traction.
- Priority: You misunderstood the team’s context and the problem you’re seeing is not worth being solved at this point in time. There may be other opportunities already known that would bring bigger benefits.
- Strategy: Addressing the problem would be in conflict with other, upcoming, more strategic changes you are unaware of. Such changes may be being planned either by your manager or the company.
- Value: It’s unclear what the impact of solving the problem is due to lack of sufficient data points to support your idea.
Understand which problems are important
In order for you to increase chances of a meaningful discussion about the issues you find worth solving, you need a solid understanding of the overall business context and environment. This will help you better showcase the value of resolving the issue to potential supporters. You can start by asking your manager (or other, more senior colleagues) open-ended questions that will help you acquire insights on the big picture and also show the boundaries in which you move in. Here some guiding questions:
- What is the biggest problem in our team that you see is worth addressing? Why?
- I find X annoying/inefficient and would like to help changing that. How could I help finding a solution? Whom in the company would you recommend reaching out to in order to get support?
- I think X is an issue in our company. What’s your opinion? Who is responsible within the company to address such problems? With whom beyond this team could I talk to in order to exchange ideas?
- When would be a good time to address issue X? Why not earlier?
- I have been bringing to you problems that I see as worth solving, but you don’t seem to be interested. Why do you think they’re not worth addressing at this point in time? How would you like me to raise similar issues moving forward?
Get support within the organization
Usually, you’re not the only person in the organization that recognized a problem. You just may be the one that is willing to act. However, this does not mean that you’re alone. You can reach out to your colleagues in order to sound your ideas and verify whether others also have this issue and whether they’re willing to support you. This can be as easy as stating that you work on problem X and asking if someone is interested to help. Having support within the organization is crucial as your peers can provide you more context or help addressing the problem in a different way than you would have.
Bring solutions, not problems
It’s common, especially for less experienced colleagues, to constantly point out problems and deficiencies. Over time, this will lead to fatigue on both sides. You will be frustrated because the problems you raised don’t resonate with your manager and for your boss as well, because you’re likely not the only one to talk about problems. If you never approach your boss with ideas on how to address the problem, you risk being perceived as a complainer and your voice is likely to be ignored over time. Especially from senior team members, managers expect solution suggestions to be brought forward for discussion. Coming with concrete proposals and asking for feedback, context that you may have missed, or for guidance how to proceed in bringing the solution to life will dramatically change the type of discussion you will be having and increase your chances for success. To be on the safe side, you can first validate the idea and come back with a solution proposal only afterwards, which will allow you to focus your attention on the important problems.
It’s not the problem — it’s the timing
Large organizations are complex systems composed of people. Though a stable state of the organization is not desired, there is a limit to the total amount of change an organization can simultaneously cope with. It may well be, that the problem you found or your idea how to solve a problem is brilliant, but the timing is just not right. This may depend on the company’s current strategic goals, the environment (e.g. market conditions), other ongoing structural or cultural changes, or even the management team itself. In such situations, you can either wait for the circumstances to change or try to vastly reduce the scope of the change and thus aim to make small, incremental steps forward instead.
What if all attempts fail?
Surely, the environment or organization you’re in may not be ready to address the issues you’re raising or for the changes you’re willing to drive. If you feel that you’ve been trying for too long and all your attempts failed, you may be better off by changing the environment to another one with a different mindset that is more open for change. This may be a different team, department, or even another organization.
Further reading
This post focused mostly on providing you more understanding on why your ideas would not resonate with others and contains simple guidance on finding the right problems to solve. However, this is just the first step of driving a change. To succeed, you must learn how to define a problem, support it with sufficient context and data, and be able to showcase the impact of solving it.
If you’re more broadly interested in change management, check out Rebels at Work: A Handbook for Leading Change from Within for ideas on building an alliance for change within your organization or Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas for an extensive collection of patterns and approaches for driving change.
See also advice on Communicating major changes and tips for Accepting and supporting changes for individuals.
