Are you compelling employees to leave their brains at the door?

It’s astounding how many smart, well-educated, well-paid people are underutilized by their employers. The most costly line in any corporate budget is human capital, and yet many companies don’t get maximum return on that investment.

There are a variety of reasons why companies underutilize their people, but the most pervasive is that senior leaders, whether intentionally or not, send the message to employees that their input is not valued. If people receive that message enough times, they shut down completely, and the company squanders their brainpower.

When senior executives’ behavior includes habitually rejecting suggestions for doing things differently, cutting people off before they can explain their rationale for a particular idea or approach, blaming others when something goes wrong, or making most important decisions with only a few key people, the implicit message is “turn your brain off because others are doing the thinking for you.”

Even if an executive tries to soften the blow – the effect is the same as if he had said, “I’m not interested in hearing what you have to say.”

If your senior team appears to make all the decisions without the benefit of others’ ideas, it’s not surprising that innovation and growth suffer. When people’s brains shut down their emotions kick in. They either do exactly what they are told even if they don’t believe it will achieve the desired result, or they deliberately sabotage the project. Either outcome can result in lost revenue, re-dos and unrealized returns.

On the other hand, if you create an environment in which people can do their best thinking, your company has a much better chance of making decisions that will get it through tough times and allow it to thrive in good times.

A top executive at Best Buy made the point well in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “Look at why big companies die,” said Shari Ballard, Best Buy’s executive vice president of retail. “They implode on themselves. They create all these systems and processes — and then end up with a very small percentage of people who are supposed to solve complex problems, while the other 98 percent of people just execute. You can’t come up with enough good ideas that way to keep growing.”

Jack Welsh, former CEO of General Electric, once told the story of a plant where the day shift had much better production than the night shift. Nothing that executives tried solved the problem. One night Welsh visited the plant. He wrote a number in red on a blank wall, and then walked away. When crewmembers learned that the number was the units the day shift produced, they beat the number. Left to their own devices they solved the problem that baffled the leaders.

Welsh’s story is a clear reminder that when you treat smart people like they are smart and don’t do their thinking for them, the results can be amazing. To realize return on your biggest investment — your people — you have to invite their brainpower in the door.