Why does your boss ignore you, and your ideas?

Just to get “the big idea” out up front here, there are typically two reasons a boss ignores an idea →

1. They have a very set way of doing things and your idea does not fit into that.
2. They have no organizational authority to do anything about the idea, hence they ignore it rather than trying to help you get it up the chain and have two people (you and them) feel shitty about lack of impact in the business.

Of those two, we tend to discuss №1 about 90 percent of the time, often in the vein of “Managers are so clueless! They don’t even know how great my idea is!”

It’s a much more nuanced problem than that.

Some research on this

From here:

We found that managers face two distinct hurdles: They are not empowered to act on input from below, and they feel compelled to adopt a short-term outlook to work.

Harvard Business Review

Yep.

The “7–10 guys” problem

In most organizations, there are maybe 7–10 guys — still mostly men, sadly — who can do anything in terms of true decision-making. Some other people might run silos or own P&L, but by and large these 7–10 people drive everything going on…