Your Boss Isn't Ignoring You. They're Just Not Hearing You.

Why does my boss ignore my ideas? Usually he isn't ignoring them, he just never heard them the way you meant them. In one workplace study, 81% of leaders said their people have an easy way to give feedback, while only 44% of employees said they actually have a voice. Your boss almost certainly thinks his door is open. 

And you're on your fourth attempt to get somebody to care about a staffing problem. That gap isn't about caring. It's about transmission, and it belongs to you.

 In this episode, Colby Morris shares the reporting process he pitched four times and got nowhere with, the forty seconds that finally fixed it, and the Reframe Before the Ask: four moves that get you heard by a boss who is busy, distracted, and convinced he's already listening.

"You've been walking into that office thinking one thing is getting judged in there. Your idea. Two things are getting judged. Your idea, and you." Colby Morris, The Things Leaders Do

More on Getting Your Boss to Listen

What is the Reframe Before the Ask?

The Reframe Before the Ask is a framework from Colby Morris for getting heard by a boss who isn't listening. The idea is that most of us spend our energy sharpening the argument, when the thing that decides the outcome is how the idea arrives before you ever make the ask. It comes down to four moves. Colby walks through all four in the episode.

Why does my boss ignore my ideas?

Usually because of what you handed him, not because he doesn't care. There's a difference between bringing your boss a problem and bringing him something he can actually say yes to, and most of us have never noticed which one we're doing. Colby tells the story of getting this wrong for eight months straight.

Does speaking up at work hurt your career?

Research by Ethan Burris at the University of Texas found something uncomfortable. When employees challenged how things were being done, their managers didn't just back the idea less. They also rated those employees as worse at their jobs. Two things drove it, and neither one was the quality of the idea. Colby breaks down what those two things were, and why they're actually good news.

How do I get my boss to take my concerns seriously?

Say it in his language instead of yours. "My team is burned out" is true, and it lands as a feelings report. The same truth, translated into what your boss is measured on, becomes something he can carry into his own leadership meeting. The episode covers how to find your boss's scoreboard, including a four-minute exercise you can run this week.

What is powerless communication?

Powerless communication is Adam Grant's term, from his book Give and Take, for the finding that people who ask questions, admit what they don't know, and speak tentatively are often the most persuasive people in the room. When people think you're trying to talk them into something, they put their guard up. Grant is also clear that this only works under one condition, and the episode covers that condition along with the way this move gets misused.

What if my boss still won't listen?

Run it more than once. One good conversation doesn't undo two years of a pattern. But after three real attempts, silence is an answer, and the question changes from how do I get through to him into something else entirely. Colby covers what to do with that answer, including the version where the problem really is your boss.

Research and Sources

• Ethan Burris, University of Texas at Austin, "The Risks and Rewards of Speaking Up," Academy of Management Journal. Managers rated employees who spoke up in challenging ways as lower performers and backed their ideas less, driven by perceived threat and perceived loyalty.
• Adam Grant, Give and Take, on powerless communication and advice seeking as a form of influence.
• Workplace communication research on the leader and employee perception gap: 81% of leaders say employees have an easy way to give feedback, while 44% of employees say they have a voice.

Related Episodes

• How to Disagree With Your Boss (Without Getting Fired)
• Stop Going to Your Boss About Your Coworker
• Lead with Clarity: 3 Steps to Better Team Communication
• Effective Communication for Leaders

About Colby Morris

Colby Morris is the Founder of NXT Step Advisors, where he helps leaders and organizations build cultures that put people first through keynote speaking, executive coaching, and leadership training.

Connect

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/colbymorris
Web: NXTStepAdvisors.com

• Colby's LinkedIn Profile
• NXTStepAdvisors.com

Transcript

When Nothing Changes After Feedback

SPEAKER_00 0:00

People first leadership. Actionable strategies, real results. This is Things Leaders Do with Colby Morris.

SPEAKER_01 0:11

You've brought it up three times now. You know, the staffing thing, the process thing, what whatever your thing is. You brought it up in your 101 back in March. And you brought it up again in May, and then two weeks ago, you brought it up in a way you thought was pretty hard to miss. And your boss nodded. He said something like, Yeah, that's a good point. Let me think about that. And then nothing happened. Nothing changed, and now you're sitting there doing the math on whether it's worth bringing up a fourth time, or whether you just accept that this is the job now. So really you land where everybody lands. My boss doesn't listen. Okay, here's a number that should mess with that just a little. Somebody ran a study where they asked both sides the same question. They asked the leaders, can your people give you feedback easily? 81% said yes, absolutely. Then they asked the employees, do you actually have a voice around here? Only forty-four percent said yes. 81 and 44? That's a gap. Your boss almost certainly thinks he's listening. I mean, he would say it out loud in a leadership meeting with a completely straight face. My door's always open. My team tells me everything. Meanwhile, you're on what attempt number four to get somebody to care about a staffing problem? Man, you're you're both in the same room and having two totally different experiences. And here's the part that stings. If your boss really believes his doors open, then whatever's going wrong isn't between his ears. It's happening somewhere between your mouth and his ears. And that's bad news because that space belongs to you. Now, I do want to be careful here because there are genuinely bad bosses out there. Some of you work for somebody who is checked out, or maybe they're even threatened by you, or just not very good at this. And honestly, there's there's no real framework on earth that fixes that. And I'll deal with that person before we're done, but that's not most of you. Most of you work for somebody who's busy and distracted and probably drowning. He thinks he's listening, and he has never once actually heard what you were saying. So today I've got four moves for you. I call it the reframe before the ask. And there's a study in the middle of this episode that explains why your good ideas keep dying. It's not the reason you think it is.

Why Speaking Up Can Backfire

SPEAKER_01 3:06

All right, before we get to the moves, you need to know what's happening under the hood because there's a study here that changed how I think about this. And I'll be honest with you, it is not comfortable. There's a professor at the University of Texas named Ethan Burris. He wanted to know what actually happens when an employee speaks up to their boss. So, like a good professor would, he studied it. He watched it happen in a real company, and then he ran two experiments on top of that. And he wrote it up in a journal called the Academy of Management Journal. So this isn't like some random hot take. This is a real thing. Here's what he found. Some employees spoke up in a way that challenged how things were being done. Basically, you know, this isn't working. We should change it. And their bosses didn't get behind those ideas. Okay, fine. You probably could have guessed that part. But here's the one that got me. Those same bosses also rated those same employees as worse at their jobs. Worse at their jobs. Not just, I don't like your idea, but I don't I don't like your idea. And now I don't think you're very good, and certainly not as good as I thought you were. And it gets more interesting than that because Burris found out that was actually driving it. And it came down to two questions running in the back of the boss's head. Question one, does this feel like an attack on me? And question two, is this person on my team or not? That's it. That's what decided it. Not how good your idea was, not how strong your evidence was, just do I feel threatened and are you loyal? So think about what that means for your staffing problem. You walked in there with a real issue. You had good reasons, right? And somewhere in the middle of it, your boss's brain quietly stuck a label on you. This person's got a problem with how I run things. And listen, he didn't decide that. Nobody sits in a chair thinking, I shall now perceive a threat. It just happens under the hood in about half a second. Now, let me be real clear about what the study says and what it doesn't say, because I don't want anybody walking out of here with the wrong lesson. It does not say don't challenge a boss. It does not say go be a yes man. Honestly, Bursa's own work, it points the other directions, right? Companies stuffed full of yes people make worse decisions every time. What it says is this challenge your boss, it will cost you something. And most of us never knew we were paying it. You've been walking into that office thinking one thing is getting judged in there, your idea. Nope. Two things are getting judged, your idea and you. If the whole thing runs on threat and loyalty, then you can actually do something about that. You can't make your boss less busy. You can't make him smarter, unfortunately, but you can absolutely change whether your idea walks in the door sounding like an attack. And that's what these four moves do.

Move One Bring A Decision

SPEAKER_01 6:44

All right. First move. Stop bringing your boss problems and bring him decisions. Here's what most of us do. And man, I did this for years. You walk in and you describe the problem thoroughly, and you give him the context and the history and all the nuance because you want him to really understand it. And then you finish and you sit back and you wait for him to what? Go do something with it. You know what you just did? You handed your boss homework. Think about his day for a second. He's had problems handed him from six directions before lunch. His boss had problems for him, finance has a problem, somebody quit, and now here comes you with your problem number seven. Beautifully explained. And it needs him to go think about it, make up his mind, and come back to you. So he says the thing. Let me think about that. And he means it. He actually does. And then problem number eight walks through the door, and yours slides to the bottom of the pile. And that right there, that's your March conversation. Dead in the water. So here's the move. Walk in with the decision already made up. Not the problem. Two options, which one you'd pick and what you need from him. It sounds like this. Hey, boss, the onboarding backlog is costing us about two weeks on every new hire. I see two ways we can go. We can farm it out for the next quarter that runs about eight grand. Or we pull Denise off the reporting project for six weeks and she owns it. I'd go with Denise because she'll build something that lasts past the quarter. I just need you to okay pausing the reporting project. See that? What was that? 20 seconds? And look what you did to his job. You didn't ask him to solve anything. You asked him to approve something. That's a totally different thing in his head, right? And it's something he can do while he's walking to another meeting. Here's the sneaky part. You just made yourself sound like an owner instead of a reporter. And remember what Burris found? Threat and loyalty? A guy walking in with solutions doesn't feel like a threat. He feels like somebody sitting on your side of the table. Look, I learned this one the slow, slow way. Years back, I had a reporting process that was eating about, I don't know, 10 hours a week across my team. And I brought it to my boss maybe four separate times. And every single time I explained it beautifully, I had examples. I had the whole history of how it got broken. I'm pretty sure I had a chart one time too, because I was going through a phase. And every time he said some version of, yeah, we should fix that, we never fixed it. I spent about, I don't know, eight months telling myself he didn't care about my team. Then one day I got frustrated enough that I walked in and I said, I want to kill the Thursday report. Nobody's opened it in five weeks. I checked. If you want the data, I'll put it in the Monday deck instead. I just, I need you to tell the regional team it's going away. And he said, sure, do it. Seriously. Like 15 seconds. Eight months of me thinking I was being ignored, and he was never ignoring me. He just never had anything he could say yes to. Now, one warning, because I don't want you getting weird about this. Sometimes you really don't have a recommendation. Sometimes something's broken and you have no idea what to do about it. And that's fine, that happens. Just say that out loud. I don't have an answer on this one. I need to think through it with you. And that's honest. Okay? And it's still not the same as dumping a problem on his desk and waiting. All right, the second move.

Move Two Translate Into Boss Metrics

SPEAKER_01 10:56

And this is where most good ideas quietly go to die. You're talking in your language. Your boss is listening in hers. And neither one of you has any idea there's a translation happening and it's going badly. Here's you. My team is stretched really thin, people working late, morale's dropping, and I'm worried about burnout. Every word of that's true, right? And it's real. And I want to be clear, I care about it. That's most of what this show is about. But watch what happens to that sentence on the other side of the desk. Your boss hears feelings. Not because she's heartless, but because nothing in that sentence connects to anything she's getting measured on this quarter. So she nods. I mean, she feels bad, and then she walks into her own leadership meeting where someone asked her about overtime spend and turnover risk and whether the Q4 project is about to slip. Those are her words. That's her scoreboard. And you had exactly what she needed for that meeting. You just handed it to her in a form that she couldn't carry into that room. So translate it. Same truth, her currency. Hey boss, my team's running about 15 hours of overtime a week. That's roughly nine grand a quarter we didn't plan for. And two of my best people have started taking calls from recruiters. If I lose either one, Q4 slips six weeks minimum. Huh. Same problem. Same people you care about, but now it's got a dollar sign, a risk, and a date. And your boss can pick that up and walk into her meeting with it. So how do you learn her language? You already have everything you need. You've just never treated it like information. Okay? Listen to what your boss complains about. Listen to what he gets grilled on. Watch which slide in the monthly reviews makes him sit up straight and start talking faster. That's his scoreboard. Everybody's got one. And most of us have never once bothered to look at our bosses. Here's something you can do this week. Takes about four minutes. Think about the last leadership meeting your boss walked out of in a bad mood. What was that about? Hmm? Not what he said it was about, but what was really driving it? Was it a number? A deadline? A person? Some promise somebody made to a customer? Whatever that was, that's what your boss is hauling around all day long. And if you can connect your thing to his thing, honestly, not as a stretch, then you stop being one more item on his list. You become help with the thing that's already keeping him up at night. And some of you just realized you have no idea what your boss is even measured on. That's not a character fall. Most people just don't. But it's worth 15 minutes of just asking him. Hey, what's leadership actually grading you on this quarter? That's a completely normal question. And almost nobody asks it. Now, some of you are kind of bristling at this whole move. Feels like you're, you know, turning your people into numbers. I get it. I do. But you're not changing what you care about there. You're changing the wrapper so the thing you care about actually gets fixed. The overtime number is just, you know, the truck. Your people are still the cargo. All right, third move.

Move Three Ask For Advice

SPEAKER_01 14:57

And this one feels backwards until you try it. When your idea gets ignored, what do you want to do? Come back harder, right? More evidence, tighter argument. You build the case like you're headed to trial. And then you walk in and you deliver it and you watch the shields go up in real time. Yeah. Adam Grant wrote about this in his book, Give and Take. He calls it powerless communication. And what he found is it's kind of wild. The people who ask questions instead of giving answers, the ones who admit what they don't know, the ones who talk a little too tentatively, those are often the most persuasive people in the room. And his explanation is the part that really matters here. When when people think you're trying to talk them into something, they put their guard up. Which lines up perfectly with what Burris found. It's a threat. Your airtight argument is a threat because what it really says is one of us is right and it isn't you. Grant's move, it's it's more about asking for advice. Here's how he puts it advice seeking is an incredibly powerful way of actually influencing others, besides despite the fact that it's you know admitting that you don't have all the answers. Think about what asking for advice does. You just handed the other guy the expert chair. There's nothing for him to defend against. Nobody's competing. So instead of the fourth version of your argument, you go with something like this. Hey, I've been coming at this staffing thing from one angle and I think I might be stuck. What am I missing? Now, two warnings because this move gets abused. First one comes from Grant himself. This only works if your boss already knows you're good. Okay. If he's not sure about you, showing up tentative doesn't sound humble. It sounds more confused. Okay. This works when your credibility is solid and you're choosing to turn the temperature down, but it backfires when you're using it to hide. The second warning matters more to me. Don't how do I say this? Don't do this as a trick. Okay. If you ask, what am I missing while you're thinking nothing, I'm right. I'm just running the play on you. People smell that instantly. And now you've spent trust that you can't get by. This only works if you're actually willing to hear the answer, which means walking in there genuinely open to the idea that you might be missing something. And sometimes you are. I have been more than once. And the times I asked that question, honestly, are the times I found out why the thing I wanted was never going to work anyway. That's not a it's not a persuasion tactic. That's just being curious. It happens to work because it's real. All right, here

Move Four Choose Better Timing

SPEAKER_01 18:11

we go. Fourth move. And it's it's the dumbest, simplest one on the list, which is exactly why everybody skips it. Timing. You can run the first three moves perfectly and still lose. Because you walked in at 4 50 on a Friday, or the morning after a bad board meeting, or during audit week. The idea was good. The guy was empty. I've watched people bring genuinely great thinking to a boss who was in the middle of a crisis and then walk away deciding their boss didn't value them. No, your boss had 11% battery and you needed 40. So pay attention to the rhythms. Every company has them. There's a week in the month where your boss is buried, and a week where she's got some room. And there's a time of day when she's sharp, and time of day when she's just surviving. Some people are useless before 10 o'clock. Some people are done by three. This is not complicated information, and almost nobody tracks it. And then ask for the time instead of ambushing her. Hey, I want 15 minutes on the staffing issue, and I need you to, you know, actually think about it. When it'd be a good time. Okay. That question does something sneaky and great. It tells her this matters and then hands her control of the win, which drops the threat. Okay, here's the

What Silence Really Tells You

SPEAKER_01 19:54

thing. Half of you have been waiting since what? Part one? What if you run all four moves clean more than once and nothing changes? First, run it more than once. I mean that. A good conversation doesn't undo you know two years of a pattern. And if you've been the problem dumper, you know, for a while, your first solution shape pitch might not even register as different yet. Give it three real tries over a couple months. But if you've honestly done that, then at some point you had to accept the answer you're getting. Because silence, well, that that is an answer. A boss who's heard a clean, well-timed, well-translated proposal three times and done nothing has told you something true. Maybe about his priorities, maybe about how little room he actually has, or worst case, about how much he values you. And then it turns into a different question. It stops being, how do I get through to him? And it becomes, what do I do with what I know now? Sometimes that means going wider. You build support with your peers so the idea shows up from three directions instead of one. Sometimes it means letting it go and putting your energy somewhere to actually moves something. And sometimes, honestly, it means you just learned something about whether this is the right place for you. That's not failure. Okay. That's information. And it took you three conversations to get it instead of three years. Now, I told you at the top that there are genuinely bad bosses. There are. Yeah, some of you are working for one right now. And if you've done all this work and you're still yelling into the void, then the problem might really be him. Just make sure you did the work first, okay? Because most of us jumped straight to that conclusion. And that's the one conclusion that actually needs the most proof. All right, let's bring this home.

Key Takeaways And Next Steps

SPEAKER_01 22:10

Here's what I want you walking out with. That gap between 81% and 44%, that's not a gap in caring. That's a gap in in transmission. Your boss thinks the door is wide open, and you're standing at that door yelling in a language nobody in that room speaks. And I know that doesn't feel fair. Okay. You shouldn't have to wrap up a legitimate concern four different ways just to get somebody to take it seriously. In a well-run world, you'd say the true thing, and the true thing would land. Yeah, that's not the world. In this one, the person who gets heard isn't the one who's most right. It's the one who made it easiest to say yes to. So this week, take that thing you've brought up three times and bring it a fourth, but bring a decision, not a problem. Say it in his currency, not yours. Ask what you're missing and mean it. And walk in when he's actually got something left in the tank. You've been telling yourself that he doesn't listen. Okay, try the other possibility that he never heard you. And then go make yourself impossible to miss. All right. Before we wrap up, if you've got a leadership team where good information isn't making up the ladder, where people have, you know, just quit bringing things forward because nothing ever happens when they do, that's fixable. And it's a lot of what I do. And you can connect with me at Next StepAdvisors or on my website. And both those links are in the show notes. And hey, if this one hit today, please do me a favor. Would you subscribe wherever you're listening? And the big one, please, please leave a review. Okay, that's how we get the word out about this show and how we help more leaders get better faster. And send this episode to someone who's about to give up on getting through to their boss. They need it, like today, not Sunday, today. All right. Keep bringing decisions instead of problems. Keep learning the language of the room you're trying to reach and keep speaking up even when it takes four tries. And you know why? Because those are the things that leaders do.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

Thank you for listening to Things Leaders Do. If you're looking for more tips on how to be a better leader, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and listen to next week's episode. Until next time, keep working on being a better leader by doing the things that leaders do.