Your best employee might be keeping their best ideas to themselves.
And honestly, I kinda understand why.
Let me explain.
☎️ ⚡️Today Inside the Phone Booth, in 5 minutes or less… we're talking about why smart, talented people sometimes keep their best ideas to themselves, how leaders might be encouraging it without realizing, and one uncomfortable question worth asking about the culture you've created.Why Good People Hoard What They Know
The uncomfortable truth about competition, collaboration, and the cultures we create.
Imagine you figured out how to get eight hours of work done in five.
Seriously. You’ve found a better process, discovered some totally new technology, or just figured out a way smarter way to do something you’ve been doing forever. FOR.EV.ER…
You’ve essentially given yourself three hours back. (pretty freaking awesome, right?)
Now imagine walking into your boss’s office to share your discovery.
“Hey, El Hefe! I figured out how to get this done in five hours instead of eight!”
And your boss responds…
“That’s AMAZING! So you can take on three more hours of work!”
Well, congratulations. 🎉
You just got rewarded for being more efficient with… MORE WORK. 😂
Now, here’s my question.
How excited are you going to be to share your next big discovery?
Yeah. Exactly.
And while that example might seem a tiny bit ridiculous, I think it reveals something happening inside a whole lot of organizations.
We’re asking people to share their knowledge, help their coworkers, and contribute to the team’s overall success.
But I’m not convinced we’ve created environments where doing those things always feels like a smart decision.
Sometimes being helpful comes with a price.
Think about your best salesperson.
They’ve spent years figuring out how to connect with buyers, navigate difficult conversations, and close deals.
They’ve developed their own little system. And it WORKS.
Now you want them to teach everybody else how to do it.
Which sounds super reasonable.
But consider what might be going through their head.
“If I teach everybody what I know, what makes me special anymore?”
Or maybe…
“If everybody starts producing like me, am I still going to be the top performer?”
And perhaps the most uncomfortable one…
“Why should I spend my time helping someone else hit their numbers when I’m being paid to hit mine?”
Ouch.
But seriously, can you blame them for wondering?
I’ve spent nearly 20 years in sales and leadership, and I LOVE healthy competition. Seriously. Give me a scoreboard and I’m probably going to want my name somewhere near the top. (Hey, I said NEAR the top. I’m trying to be humble here. 😂)
But I’ve also come to really appreciate how much a company’s definition of success influences the way people behave.
And that’s where real (Heroic) leadership comes in.
We teach people what’s valuable by what we celebrate.
Think about your last company meeting.
Who got recognized?
Who received the applause?
Who got the bonus, the promotion, or the big public shoutout?
Now think about the person who spent an afternoon helping a struggling coworker figure something out.
The employee who shared a process that made everybody’s job easier.
The experienced leader who took time to mentor somebody who was still figuring things out.
Did anybody celebrate them?
Did that contribution show up anywhere in their performance review?
Or was it just something we expected good people to do?
Listen, I’m not suggesting we stop rewarding individual achievement. (hell no actually)
Please don’t take away the sales contests. Poppa C likes winning stuff. 😂
I’m asking whether our definition of achievement is big enough to include the people who help others succeed.
Because people pay attention to what gets rewarded. Always have… always will.
And eventually, those rewards start shaping how they see themselves and their place in the organization. Let that sink in for a minute.
Here’s where identity enters the conversation.
One of the things I talk about through The HERO Factor is how our identity shapes our performance.
The beliefs we carry about who we are influence how we think, how we behave, and ultimately what we produce.
And I’ve been thinking about how this plays out at work.
What happens when someone builds their entire professional identity around being the person who knows?
The expert.
The problem solver.
The one everybody needs.
There’s a certain amount of confidence that comes with being that person.
But there’s also a potential trap.
If your value comes from being the only person who can do something, helping other people learn how to do it might feel threatening.
And that’s a pretty uncomfortable place to operate from.
Especially when your organization has spent years and years reinforcing that identity.
There’s actually research behind this.
A 2019 study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior examined what happens when leaders signal that withholding knowledge is normal or acceptable. Across two studies, researchers found that those leadership signals were associated with more knowledge hiding among employees. Which brings me back to something I asked you earlier this week.
Who created the scoreboard in the first place?
Because we can’t ignore the role our systems play in shaping our people’s behavior.
And we sure as sh*t can’t expect people to feel safe sharing what makes them valuable if we’ve given them reasons to believe doing so could make them less valuable…
☎️ YOUR PHONE BOOTH MOMENT
Here’s something I’d love for you to think about today.
Imagine your very best employee walked into work tomorrow and taught everybody else how to do the thing that makes them exceptional.
What happens to that employee afterward?
Do they become more valuable to your organization?
Do they receive recognition for helping the team improve?
Does that contribution create new opportunities for them?
Or have they just made themselves a little easier to replace?
Be careful with that last question.
Because your answer might tell you more about your culture than your company’s entire mission statement.
So what do we actually DO about it?
For starters, I’d encourage leaders to examine what happens when people share something valuable. And I mean what ACTUALLY happens.
If somebody finds a way to save five hours every week, maybe the first conversation shouldn’t be about how to fill those five hours.
Maybe it’s about recognizing their initiative, giving them an opportunity to develop the idea further, or asking how that improvement could benefit the team.
And when somebody takes time to help a coworker improve, acknowledge it.
Publicly, when appropriate.
Make those contributions part of how you evaluate leadership potential and performance.
Also, recognize that people have worked hard to develop their expertise. Give them credit. Respect their time. And make sure sharing what they’ve learned doesn’t become another unpaid responsibility that gets piled onto an already full plate.
You don’t need to create some elaborate new recognition program.
Start paying attention to the people who make the people around them better.
And make sure they know you noticed.
Because here’s what I keep coming back to…
I want people to feel proud of what they’ve accomplished individually.
Hell, I want them to be GREAT at what they do.
But imagine how much more capable our organizations could become if helping someone else improve actually strengthened your position within the team.
I think that’s a culture worth working toward.
And I’m curious what you think.
Have you ever worked somewhere that made you hesitant to share what you knew?
Or better yet, have you experienced a leader who genuinely rewarded people for helping others get better?
Hit reply. I’d love to hear about it.
Thats all for today kids… If you don’t know, now you know! And as always, ✌️❤️🌍
⚡️ Kxng Cory – Provocational Speaker | Founder, The SuperHero Mindset
