Avoiding mistakes: line managers should ask employees for their opinions. | Image: Fotolia/Jacob Lund.

A 20-year-old patient in the casualty department has suffered major injuries in a car accident. The surgeon wants to do a CT scan straightaway. But this could cause grave harm to the patient, because his breathing and circulation are not stable. The assisting doctors and nurses on the scene ought to contradict the surgeon. But will they do it? This was a decisive question for the psychologist Dr Mona Weiss at the University of Leipzig. Luckily, the patient in question was just a mannequin. Before the simulation began, Weiss had already taught the participants how to raise objections in an emergency. And after she’d finished training them, they did it more often than they had before.

Expressing dissent can save the life of a patient, and in the business world it can save a company from taking the wrong decisions. But many employees don’t dare do it, even though offering constructive criticism can lead to them being valued more highly – as Weiss has found in the course of several studies. Before engaging in one particular role-play, she instructed the youngest member of the team in a meeting to champion a different advertising strategy from the time-honoured one. “Assistants who offered their opinion got more respect, they were judged to be performing better, and the others preferred working with them than with colleagues who refrained from expressing criticism or their own ideas”.

What’s more, line managers have a big influence on their employees. “The manner in which they communicate has an impact on the whole organisational culture”, says Weiss. “If managers ask employees for their opinion and say ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, those employees are more likely to produce new ideas and address mistakes”.