Listening to innovative ideas means you care; acting on them proves it.

Organizations have many touch-points where good ideas can come in from. How these ideas are processed makes the difference between the positive outcomes of innovation and the negative outcomes of in-action; like for starters: not listening.

I remember one of my business mentors telling me early-on in my career that “you have two ears and only one mouth – so you should listen twice as much as you should speak”. Wise words indeed, as trying to convince people of what they need without first querying their situation is infinitely less effective than understanding it first and only then moving into position to remediate through product or service – this is true whether facing internally or externally.

It would appear that a good many companies who once knew how and when to listen have forgotten this vital part of the success equation. Whether this is a by-product of merged cultures, the pace of contemporary business or the magnitude and complexity brought on by scale, the right hand frequently doesn’t know what the left hand is doing; and the customer…well they can increasingly be left to feel like inconvenient necessities. As the jocular but flawed saying goes: “this would be the ideal business were it not for those pesky customers”.

Well anyone with customers today should be thankful for their loyal patronage and as for the peskiness, maybe one should start listening better instead of opining. Because a customer’s point of view is unique and critically appropriate – they are the ultimate judges of value when it comes to your offering. If they are saying something you don’t want to hear, you should be listening harder - if many are saying the same thing, you know that something has to be done quickly – response is a must. Increasingly, the act of listening seems to have innocuously been replaced by merely being heard; and by lowering the importance of listening to the tokenism of simply hearing makes it simpler to dismiss as noise – thereby turning it into a distraction that can eventually be ignored. Listening implies that there will be follow-up action to satisfy the issue – that demonstrates caring. From an internal perspective, when an employee has an idea, where does it go in your organization? Better yet, where does it stop? Or when supplier has an idea, how does that turn into measurable value? And the customer idea, at what point do the disparate pieces of the organization come together to work on it and bring the whole to a successful outcome? At what point do people stop listening? If you can answer that question definitively, you have found an exact point were the organization stops to care; and where innovation is lost.