At one of my past companies, we ran into problems with our sales process, so we decided to toss the old sales playbook and create a new one.

All of the sales leaders got together for a bunch of meetings, then divided the tasks and gradually built new PowerPoint presentations, sales pitch templates, email campaigns, and oodles of other collateral.

They excitedly began to roll it out to the sales team but ran into one small problem…

It didn’t work.

The PowerPoint slides were missing key information, the sales pitches sounded stilted and robotic, and the email campaigns didn’t feel authentic. The top sales reps didn’t want to use the new materials, so people went back to using many of the old sales materials.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen this type of problem happen several times in different companies and different teams. It’s a predictable problem that has the potential to teach all leaders a great management lesson:

The best business decisions are never made from the comfort of an ivory tower.

The “ivory tower” often refers to intellectuals and professors who debate best practices and philosophy without the benefit of real-world experience, but anyone who’s served in management for a while often falls prey to the same philosophical thinking that plagues academics.

As managers get promoted through an organization, we get further and further from the company’s core operations. We lose touch with elements of the day-to-day work. It’s no wonder a McKinsey survey found that 60 percent of executives felt their company made bad decisions as often as good ones.

Suffering from “Ivory Tower Syndrome”

I first felt the effects of ivory tower syndrome when a past employer promoted me from Account Manager to Team Lead to Director of a 160-person team. With each promotion, I was tasked with making more company decisions, but I also hosted fewer client calls, sent fewer client emails, and dealt with fewer “everyday” situations.

When you’re the director of a large team, anything that lands on your desk is either an uncommon exception or absolutely on fire. You’re only dealing with the weird stuff and the massive problems.

By the very nature of your role, you’re removed from the minutiae of everyday work. In fact, if you don’t extract yourself from the daily tasks, you’ll never be successful. There isn’t enough time in the day amidst all of the meetings, strategic projects, performance reviews, and hundreds of other management tasks.

But unfortunately, many managers (myself included) forget how far removed we are from the day-to-day. It’s easy to make decisions that are untethered from reality without checking in with the troops.

This is why so many employees cock their heads when they hear about company decisions: “Why would management ever do something like that? Don’t they know [this super obvious thing]?”

Nope. We probably don’t. Or we’ve forgotten because it’s been so long since we were standing in our team’s shoes.

Indeed, managers need to make company decisions. Lots of them. But we shouldn’t do that in isolation, sipping Dom Pérignon in our ivory tower while our troops cross sabers hundreds of feet below on the battlefield.

So if you’re reading this and you’re a manager, director, or executive, let this be your wake-up call:

You need to find a way to involve your team in your most important decisions.

Your team understands many nuances you don’t. It’s in your best interest to consult them and ensure your decisions are “battle-proof.”

4 Ways to Avoid “Ivory Tower Syndrome”

These tactics aren’t mutually exclusive. The best leaders collect input in several ways from the people doing the work.

1. Get your hands dirty

One of the best ways to prevent dumb decisions is to involve yourself intimately in the daily work. There are many ways to do this:

• If you’re a sales manager, set a goal of making a certain number of sales calls or client touchpoints every month.
• If you’re a software manager, carve out a few hours every week for coding. Join other devs for pair programming or code reviews.
• If you’re a customer service manager, join 2–3 client calls each week or accompany your team on 1–2 onsite client visits each quarter.
• If you’re an IT or operations manager, assign yourself 10-20 tickets every month to see what types of requests are coming into the team queue.
• If you’re a warehouse manager, help the receiving team unload the incoming trucks. Volunteer for the toughest job for a few hours.

By staying connected to the work, you’ll make wiser decisions and garner your team’s respect because they’ll see you getting your hands dirty.

2. Delegate decisions to the employees closest to the client

Who knows which type of sales script will close more business: the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) or the sales rep making daily calls?

While the CRO has developed a gut feeling for how to smooth-talk clients, I’d be willing to bet that most tenured sales reps who are on the phones every day could create a better script than the CRO.

Why?

Because they know the sections of the current script that fall flat and cause prospects to tune out. They can sense which phrases will make clients’ ears perk up. They live and breathe this stuff.

Find ways to delegate more decisions to those on the front lines.

3. Bring individual contributors into the planning process

If you think fully delegating the decision to team members is going too far, consider bringing one or two of them into the decision process. You can do this by asking for volunteers or designating one of your top performers to join the group assigned to tackle a major project.

For example, a couple of years ago, my startup decided to establish core values. Rather than conducting a top-down decision from the C-Suite, we asked our cross-functional Culture Committee to run the process.

The Committee included individual contributors and managers from all segments of the business. The group’s diversity helped them approach the question from multiple angles and create a set of values true to who we were, from the top to the bottom of the organization.

4. Ask your team for feedback once you’ve developed a plan

If you think the management team is the right group to make a specific decision, consider at least running your proposed plan past several team members before implementing it. Doing so can help you avoid the embarrassment of launching a plan that doesn’t work when the rubber meets the road.

If you do ask for feedback, ask genuinely. You must be open to criticism, even if you’ve spent dozens of hours on the plan. If you’re looking for a rubber stamp signoff, the team will be able to tell and your attempt will likely blow up in your face.

Remember: you’re asking individual contributors for feedback because they have a different perspective than you do. They will see things you can’t see, so take their opinion seriously.

These tactics can help you avoid “ivory tower syndrome” and gather your team’s valuable insights. Doing so will make the decision process take a bit longer, but it’ll save you hours of frustration and alignment during the execution phase.