The Art of Balancing Cynicism and Openness Without Being a Jerk

The bigger the city you live in, the more you need to think out of the box to make your small business thrive.  When there are ten businesses just like yours in the same area, creativity is key for standing out. Personally, I hate that “c” word – creativity.  It’s uncharted territory. The vulnerable underbelly that’s easy to protect when there is minimal competition needs to grow a callous if you’re going to succeed. It’s humbling.  As a leader, you need to be open to creative ideas while protecting your business and evaluating what will work. Openness and cynicism are opposites when building a business and a successful balance can be tough.  The balance is what will separate you from the rest.

Here are four tips to help encourage creative ideas while keeping your sanity.

1.       Accept all ideas.  

I make it a point not to squash anyone right out the gate.  This fosters an environment where the team can feel safe pitching ideas.  After all, a degree of bravery was shown in sharing the idea to begin with and leadership includes protecting your team.  Along with this, also assume that every idea has the potential to be great. An idea can start out terribly, but it can inspire a great one.

2.       Don’t criticize! Focus on improving ideas.  

We call it massaging ideas. This is done by encouraging a lively debate on improving ideas better. The original idea might be bizarre, but by massaging it, you can bring up specific concerns and solutions that help hone the idea.  With each improvement, the idea becomes stronger and more feasible. Here is a secret, I like to work with the team on improving an idea as much as possible before passing any judgment

3.       Test it out.  

After we have massaged the ideas into some actual action plans, pick out a few that are most exciting to your team. Make sure that some are easy and some are risky, but all of them are relatively cheap to test out.  Then, give it some time to come to life. I’ve found that some ideas that seem silly on paper, work out very well. On the flip side, we have certainly had ideas that were awesome on paper turn into an embarrassing belly flop.

4.       Keep your eyes wide open when reaching in your wallet.  

Be cynical before spending. This is the time to be ruthless -- a fun idea is not necessarily good business.  Your responsibility is in protecting your livelihood and your team’s jobs. Before making any big leap, I remind myself of how many kids in total the team has to support.  All of those kids are depending on their parent’s paychecks – carry that responsibility with honor.

What crazy ideas have worked out well?  Which ones were a belly flop? What did you learn?