Every employee in their career heard something in between of: „I kind of get what you’re going for here, but it’s just not quite there yet.”

Am I right?

The magic words of millions of CEOs around the world. But what to do with this kind of input?! Employee hearing it gets confused and as my experience shows there are hardly a few people in the world who at that moment clarify expectations. More often they finish the conversation and no one knows what to do with this shit.

If this situation happens more times, employees will begin doing less than they’re capable of because they don’t want to deal with the consequences of disapproval at the end of the process. They will tend to ignore their own creative discretion and would instead just do whatever they thought was likely to “make the cut.”

My solution: establish an “idea culture,” meaning a culture that values the process of perpetual idea generation and development, rather than one that’s driven solely by the end product.