How to Pitch An Idea Your Boss Will Like

Too often, workers get encouraged to make suggestions, only to have them fall on deaf ears

Based on the research of Ethan Burris

Your boss wants you to speak up more — except when she doesn’t.

That’s a confusion faced by many workers. Their managers might talk a good game about encouraging employee voice. But once front-line workers start talking, they get a frustrating feeling that management isn’t listening.

“In research on employee voice, there’s been an assumption that if you get people to speak up more often, good things will happen at the end of it,” says Ethan Burris, associate professor of management at Texas McCombs. “Employees will feel good getting problems off their chest, and leaders will pick up good ideas. But it hasn’t been clear when managers value voice and when they don’t.”

In a new study, with colleague Kevin Rockman of George Mason University and Yurianna Kimmons, a former McCombs Ph.D. student now at Oklahoma State University, Burris finds a reason for the confusion: the complexity of the idea and the viewpoint. What workers want to talk about is not always what their superiors want to hear.

To get the benefits of employee voice, Burris says, both sides need to reach across that gap. They need to understand “what leads employees to speak up about one topic versus another, and what makes managers more likely to value one topic versus others.”

Employees Contribute Ideas Differently

The researchers interviewed 35 staffers in a hospital emergency room, including physicians, nurses, and clinical technicians. Despite differences in duties and backgrounds, a common pattern emerged from their answers. The workers fell into two distinct tribes. Says Burris: “Which group they identified with dictated the types of issues they noticed at work.”

One group was professionally focused. They found pride and meaning in being members of their profession, like being doctors or nurses. Those workers raised ideas that were wide in scope and might cost a lot to implement, like hiring more nurses round-the-clock or adding more beds.

The other group was work unit focused. They identified more with their work team or area of responsibility, such as the ER. Its members tended to bring up pragmatic problems, ones that could be solved with few resources and without approvals from higher-ups. Their solutions ran from speeding up the flow of patients to building a glass partition at the check-in counter.

Selective Listening by Managers

In a second study, the researchers surveyed employees and managers at two firms, again measuring how strongly they identified with their professions or work units. Their managers were asked to grade each worker confidentially, on how much they valued that employee’s ideas.

The results showed a marked difference between the workers’ tribes. Those who identified strongly with their work units were more persuasive within their organization than the professionally focused group. Managers placed 18 percent more value on their ideas, compared to those whose workplace ID was low.

On the flip side, says Burris, “If you speak up about professional issues, your voice is valued less.” Identifying with your profession made your manager 7 percent less likely to lend you an ear.

Simple Fixes Get Heard

It turns out that managers prefer to hear ideas that are easier to implement and narrower in focus — those ideas are most often coming from employees who identify with their work team rather than their profession.

The researchers verified this by asking 384 managers to look at three scenarios and rate employees’ ideas for dealing with them. The suggestions differed in respects like the resources used to solve the problem and the number of parties who would have to sign off.

The managers leaned toward solutions that involved fewer resources and fewer stakeholders. The widest gap was in resources required. On an ascending scale of 1 to 5, they rated low-resource ideas an average 4.13, versus 3.27 for high-resource ideas.

“People who identify with work units are more aware of constraints on resources and interdependencies with other departments. They speak up about issues their boss can actually address.” — Ethan Burris

The professional group, on the other hand, suggests fixes that are harder for managers to carry out. “These are decisions in which lots of different departments are involved, not just the ER,” he says. “It’s not something the shift supervisor has control over.”

Amplifying Employee Voice

The studies help to explain why well-intentioned efforts to promote employee voice often fall short, Burris says. Bridging the workplace divide requires more reflection from idea contributors and more openness from listeners.

Burris warns managers against knee-jerk reactions to suggestions that look too expensive or complex. “Think about blind spots you might have,” he says. “Just because an initial idea would require significant resources doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. You might be able to go back to the employee and find a version that’s less costly to implement.”

Employees should consider how to frame their suggestions, to make them more appealing to an executive’s ears. “Don’t highlight how much it will cost or how hard it will be to implement,” says Burris. “Pitch ideas that a manager can implement directly without involving other decision makers. It’s all about how you frame your ideas.”

“The Value of Voice to Managers: Employee Identification and the Content of Voice” was published in the Academy of Management Journal.

Story by Steve Brooks