Taking a bottom-up leadership approach can positively shake up your company and help bring some of the best ideas out of the shadows and into the market.

Most companies operate under a top-down management approach, in which visions and business plans are set at the highest levels and passed down through the organization. This can be great in theory, but it can also leave some of the most innovative and breakthrough ideas locked inside the people on the front lines. When those people feel disconnected from or shut down by leadership, the company can be doomed to irrelevance, especially in an era that demands innovation.

Build A Strong Core Team

W.L. Gore & Associates, a company known for its innovation and made famous for Gore-Tex, uses sponsors to help new hires untangle the system and find their place in the organization. They help make connections and find links so people are set up to succeed from the beginning. The company further allows employees to choose their assignments and follow their passions. Once an employee selects a project or team, they’re pretty well locked into the commitment. From that point on, their accountability is to their teams, not to their bosses. But great ideas often come from passionate individuals and strong teams.

Listen. Repeat. Act.

When current General Motors CEO, Mary Barra, first started at GM, she was an 18-year-old student co-op full of new ideas. She had the good fortune of working with mentors and managers who helped her learn and grow—and who listened to her ideas. As she moved through the company she saw the value of staying in touch with and open to the ideas of those on the front lines.

With a father who worked as a die maker for Pontiac for 39 years, Mrs. Barra fully understood what could be learned from those who touch the product every day, even in adjusting minor details that affect the people on the front lines. In an interview recently with Business Insider, Mrs. Barra proudly stated how as VP of Global Human Resources for GM, she shortened the unwieldy language of the dress code to just two words: Dress Appropriately. While something like this might seem trivial to some, it can be a sign of respect to those who feel patronized by the language passed down by managers who have lost sight of what life is like in the trenches.

Remember That Great Ideas Come From Anywhere

Passionate people with their hands in the work have a better chance of making connections between seemingly disconnected dots. Many people are familiar with how 3M’s Arthur Fry used an experimental light adhesive to create a better bookmark and thereby invented Post-it Notes. Mr. Fry’s inventiveness was evidence of a 3M culture where ideas, even ones that aren’t immediate successes, are shared in order to make the collective output even better.

The same can be said of the Gore Company. Dave Myers, an engineer with Gore’s medical teams, thought the company’s technology being used on mountain bike cables to block out gunk might work on guitar strings as well, since guitar strings lose tone and quality over time due to oils in the skin. After a bit of of exploration, Mr. Myer and his team introduced Gore’s industry-leading Elixir guitar strings.

In these and myriad other examples, success comes from sharing ideas and staying open to contributions from all areas of the company. Keeping employees locked into silos significantly diminishes the organization’s chances of regularly discovering breakthrough ideas.

Watch Out For Management Bias

Far too often managers miss the great ideas generated on the front lines. NPR host and author Shankar Vedantam believes he knows why.

In his book The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives, Mr. Vedantam’s research shows that managers often put more weight behind ideas from distant sources than ideas from their own employees. Simply put, it’s easier—and often more attractive—to hire high profile consultants than to ask for ideas from within the organization.

Vedantam goes on to discuss how managers can rush forward with “confirmation bias”, seeing only the ideas that support their own theories while discarding proof that their idea isn’t the strongest one on the table. This can be a culture killer because employees quickly see their ideas being pushed aside in favor of hierarchy and management. When this happens morale plummets as key employees face a cruel choice: stay with a company that undervalues their contributions or take their ideas elsewhere.

Be Wary Of Superstars

In a 2014 interview with The New York Times, Google’s Senior Vice President of People Operations, Laszlo Bock, talked about the problem with shooting stars. “Successful bright people rarely experience failure,” he said, “so they don’t learn how to learn from that failure.”

Bock continued: “They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved.”

By contrast, “We’ve seen that the people who are the most successful here, who we want to hire, will have a fierce position. They’ll argue like hell. They’ll be zealots about their point of view. But then you say, ‘here’s a new fact,’ and they’ll go, ‘Oh, well, that changes things; you’re right.”

Ask Yourself: What Could Bottom-Up Thinking Do For Us?

Far too many management programs today emphasize action over listening, and title over experience. Most tend to prefer the sanitary approach of using consultants because writing a check is easier than building forums. When this happens, we communicate to our employees that they and their ideas don’t matter.

Management has to listen and act.

We think using these simple ideas can make a big difference. What do you think?