How can you encourage employees to share their unique perspectives?

Create a culture of innovation and give public recognition and praise for employee contributions to this mission. This will show others the positive reinforcement they'll get for putting their ideas out there. Let the team know what kinds of challenges the company is tackling, remind them them that they were hired for their unique perspective, and encourage them to bring suggestions and feedback to the table to add value.

One regular way of sharing your views with employees and asking them to share their is regular interactions. There is no better way to understand the viewpoint of employees than a two way communication. The regular feedback sessions, the encouragement to share views helps an employee to grow and open up. It guides the employee the direction for skill enhancement and carving the development path ahead. Another critical tool is to appreciate. Recognising the uniqueness of the views shared by employees not only make them feel valued, but also motivated them to participate more with ideas towards the betterment Organisation.

Give positive recognition publicly, encourage everyone else on the team to give positive recognition as well. Provide constructive criticism privately. Encourage people to collaborate and build on each others' ideas and recognition.

To encourage our team members to share it starts from the leader. We need to provide psyschological safety for the team members to undertake interpersonal risk taking without being judged or ignored if they share different perspectives. -Leaders must practice active listening. This is about being curious to understand their perspective rather than correcting and judging their perspective if it differs from you. -Thank the team members for their perspectives. Through affirmation, they will be motivated to share the next time. If the leader shows consistent efforts of listening, and being inclusive by valuing different perspectives, it will provide confidence to the team members that it is truly safe to share.

As a starting point - consistently ask for people's input on various topics of discussion, challenges, and business discussions - but don't force it publicly if they aren't comfortable. For the people who don't offer ideas publicly, reach out to them privately and ask for their perspectives. If they still don't have anything, try to drill down into a more specific aspect of what you are looking for input on. Sometimes general topics don't spark people's thinking and they need a narrower set of constraints to think/innovate within. Every time people contribute ideas, thank and reward them for it by engaging with them, encouraging them to pursue, lead, and run with good ideas. This positive feedback loop will create a flywheel effect.

Invite individuals who don't share to privately collaborate with you 1-on-1 on a brainstorm session. Talk through how you approach problems like that, generate ideas, work through viability of each idea, etc. Demonstrate to them how you don't always have the answers by sharing your bad ideas and asking them to speak up during the collaboration if they disagree or see a way to make your idea more effective. This will lower the barrier to contributions by showing them that nobody has all the answers and even terrible ideas are worth sharing, and not something to be afraid of. The process of sharing, scrapping, and refining ideas is what achieves optimal outcomes. Good ideas are rarely conceived perfectly the first time.

One thing I’ve found helpful in leading a culture is: turning the values of an organisation into something that can be observed. How you ask? Well imagine that one of your values was RESPECT. It’s tricky see RESPECT right, that’s until you say: We live our value of respect by……. So now let’s test that. If you said “we show respect by having our cameras turned on in all virtual meetings”. Could you now live that value in at least that situation and see if the value is being played out and lived in your business? Walking the talk is easier to live by doing than by observing an ideal captured in your ‘reception’ as a word on the wall. What do you think? 🙃

Generate tons of ideas and ask for input and invite people to build on them or tear them down. Share your bad ideas too - to show that it's okay and that there's value in doing so. Listen to the ideas of others, regardless of who they are and their qualifications. If someone else has the same idea as you, as a leader, you should give them the credit (that's leadership).