Why Open Door Leadership Keeps People Out

Perry Maddox examines a common trap with open leadership and open door approaches that leads to the opposite outcome of pushing people away.

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“My door is open to anyone,” open leaders love to say. 

What’s not to love?

Your office door is always open, so anyone can walk in. Maybe there’s no door at all because you sit with your team.  Perhaps it’s more of a philosophy than a spatial thing. As an open leader, you’re always open for your teams. You encourage them to reach out to you directly rather than going through the hierarchy.

Either way, the intention is good.  

Make yourself more accessible as a leader.  Welcome people to approach you with ideas, questions or just to say hi.  Break down those barriers and build trust.  Increase transparency. Level the playing field.  Shift the power.

There’s just one problem.

Not So Open After All.

It hit me like a ton of bricks.

I was working as a Country Director in Uganda, leading a team of fifty staff and hundreds of volunteers moving through our office in the beautiful town of Jinja, situated at the source of the Nile.  

The team was young and dynamic, but it had been through some tough times when I came into role.  When I arrived, all managers sat in one room with the director while everyone else had desks somewhere else.  To shake up our culture and to break down pointless division, I shifted most managers to sit throughout the building and announced an open door policy for the room where I sat.  When I wasn’t in a confidential or sensitive conversation, I made clear that the door was open to all.  No big man with a private office.  Anyone could come in. 

So it went for a few months before a colleague visited.  We were sitting in my office talking about our work culture, which was feeling great again.  

Then he said it.  

“Ever notice who walks through your door?”

It hit me before he finished the sentence.  I was excluding people with my open door.

The Problem with an Open Door.

Open leadership approaches come in many shapes: open doors, open hours, open plan offices, you name it. Despite their democratic intent, these approaches share one problem.

People have to walk through an open door.  Up to your desk.  Into your open hours.  Most open approaches require people to come to you. 

And guess what?

Not everyone is comfortable walking through an open door.  

In my case, ex-pat staff in the office were much more comfortable walking up to my desk.  While only three or four of my team were foreigners, they accounted for the majority of visits into my office.  

That’s a big problem.  

For building connection and trust, for fostering diversity and equality, for creating an inclusive culture.  

If only some of our team are comfortable walking through an open door, we risk losing the ideas, insight and inspiration from those who aren’t.  We risk leaving people out.  We risk reinforcing power imbalances. After all, it tends to be the more senior staff, the extroverts, the majority groups, the men, and the people most like you who are most comfortable walking up to your desk. 

We risk doing harm to our people. We risk hurting the quality of our work by excluding all the talent in our teams.

One Easy Step to Fix the Open Leadership Problem.

Here’s the cool thing about an open door.  

It works both ways.

There’s no need to close your open leadership style just because of this problem.  Not at all.  Instead, just make a point to walk through that door yourself on occasion.  Rather than waiting for people to come to you, step through the threshold and reach out to those who might not be confident approaching you.  

Take a couple weeks to watch who approaches you.  Look for patterns. I bet the people who walk in are more senior and more extroverted. I bet they’re more like you in gender, in race, in everything. Don’t take my word for it though.  Every team is different. Observe who comes in to see you, observe who doesn’t.  

Then find a way to reach out to the people who you are missing.  

There’s nothing wrong with being an open leader.  That’s what Just Open Leaders is all about.  The trick to doing it well is to be open actively.  Don’t sit passively waiting for people to come to you.  

Get out there. Walk the floor, work the room, eat lunch with your people, invite folks for a coffee to connect, whatever.  Reach out, connect and build relationships with people who might be excluded by your open approach.

After a little bit, I bet you’ll find a whole lot more people are excited to walk through that open door of yours.