Intellectual Stimulation: Making It Safe to Question Everything

By Mats Kallmyr | Kallmyr.com

We continue our walk through Bass and Avolio’s (1994) Four I’s with the one leaders most often say they value and least often practise: Intellectual Stimulation. It is the willingness to have your own assumptions challenged, and to actively invite your team to question the way things have always been done.

Beyond Brainstorming

Bass and Riggio (2006) define Intellectual Stimulation as a leader’s efforts to encourage followers to question assumptions, reframe problems, and approach old situations in genuinely new ways, without public criticism when an idea does not work out. This is a harder standard than it sounds. Many managers ask for ideas in a workshop and then quietly default back to the original plan. Intellectual Stimulation means the leader is prepared to be the one whose idea gets challenged, and to treat that as a sign the team is functioning well, not as a threat to their authority.

A Legacy Assumption, Questioned

Working with an engineering team inside a telecom company, I watched a senior architect openly invite two junior engineers to challenge a network design assumption that had gone unquestioned for over a decade, on the basis that “we built it, but you use it every day, so you’ll see what we can’t.” The redesign that followed came from that junior perspective, not from the architect’s own plan. What made it possible was not the engineers’ technical skill; the team already had that. It was that the leader had made disagreement with him feel safe and, more than that, useful.

The Innovation Dividend

Amabile and Kramer’s (2011) research on workplace creativity found that people do their most original thinking on days when they feel genuine progress is possible and their contribution is taken seriously, not on days when they are simply told to “be innovative.” My own MALIC research (Kallmyr, 2017) reached a compatible conclusion: teams led transformationally reported significantly more willingness to propose changes to established process, largely because they trusted that a proposal, even a flawed one, would be heard rather than dismissed.

Practising Intellectual Stimulation

• Ask “what would we do if we were starting from scratch today?” before defending an existing process.
• Respond to a failed experiment with a debrief on what was learned, not a search for who to blame.
• Deliberately invite the newest or most junior voice in the room to speak first, before seniority anchors the discussion.

References

• Amabile, T.M. and Kramer, S.J. (2011) The Progress Principle. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
• Bass, B.M. and Avolio, B.J. (1994) Improving Organizational Effectiveness Through Transformational Leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Bass, B.M. and Riggio, R.E. (2006) Transformational Leadership. 2nd edn. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Kallmyr, M. (2017) Leading Innovation and Change: How Transactional and Transformational Leaders Influence Organisational Innovation and Change. MA dissertation. York St John University.

Mats Kallmyr is a senior leader and management consultant with a background spanning telecom, e-commerce, and public sector transformation. Read more at Kallmyr.com or connect via LinkedIn.