Boardrooms, be it physical or virtual, can be intimidating places. They’re often where the most important business decisions are made and plans are nutted out by CEOs, other executive directors and non-executive directors.

There is an argument, however, that in their traditional format they can stifle innovation, career growth, transparency and wider critical thinking within an organization.

Boardrooms aren’t a new phenomenon. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the earliest known use of the noun ‘boardroom’ dates back to the early 1700s and its definition is almost as archaic, cited in the Cambridge Dictionary as ‘a room where the people who control a company or organization meet’.

Control is the operative word there. While hierarchy, seniority and leadership are needed within an organization, particularly with regard to accountability, the control around how big decisions are made and shared within an organization should be open to a much wider cohort.

Flattening the corporate structure

This may be reflected most pertinently by the younger workforce, who traditionally won’t even see a boardroom until much later in their careers, but who are some of society’s most critical thinkers.

According to McKinsey & Company, the average CEO is around 54 years of age, but younger staff have a burning desire to be leaders. The study reveals that Gen Z is more than twice as likely to want to be CEO compared with Gen X (38 percent versus 18 percent, respectively).

Interestingly, 31 percent of Millennials, another younger age group, also said they’d want to be CEOs. As such, we need to give the younger workforce a leg up and introduce them to these environments early.

Gen Zs are also some of the world’s most critical and conscious thinkers. According to Deloitte, 86 percent of Gen Zs say having a sense of purpose is ‘very’ or ’somewhat’ important to their overall job satisfaction and wellbeing; 50 percent have rejected an assignment or project based on their personal beliefs; and 44 percent have turned down an employer based on their personal ethics or beliefs.

If businesses are to make sound decisions, they need to have seats in the boardroom for society’s most critical thinkers – and this means opening the floor to them on a more regular basis.

Shaking up the boardroom and showing the wider workforce their value in the decision-making process is a good example of intellectual humility in leadership.

Intellectual humility, a metacognitive process characterized by recognizing the limits of one’s knowledge and acknowledging one’s fallibility, is a key component to leadership and one that recognizes that the highest-paid person’s opinion isn’t always right.

Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s most successful business minds, is a champion and key advocate of this. He built Amazon into the success it is today through a test-and-learn approach among his workforce, constantly hypothesizing over key decisions and putting the customer at the heart of everything it did.

Flipping the boardroom on its head

At VistaPrint Australia, we are trying to reshape the role of the boardroom within our organization. For example, we choose to invite all employees to listen in on executive planning meetings to create transparency, flatten the structure and open the door for any employee – at any level – to approach the leadership team with new ideas and opinions.

We are also highly collaborative, sharing and testing processes together and choosing what sticks as a unit.

For example, entrepreneurialism, flexibility and creativity are traits that many of our workforce value, so through popular demand, formal activity stops before lunchtime on a Friday and employees are encouraged to do micro-learning sessions on activities like DJing, ethical hacking or learning the art of negotiation.

We even have an informal session in the morning where the team may take a short course from a mental health provider or get a rundown of another staff member’s side hustle hobby.

Hierarchical structures, where decisions are only made by the most senior people, stifles innovation and the ability to be nimble – and more CEOs should bring down the walls of their boardrooms for this reason.

By adopting intellectual humility and valuing the wider workforce in the decisions your business makes, the boardroom won’t only be more productive, but the decisions made within it will also be sounder and based on collective thought and humility rather than the highest-paid stakeholders’ ideas.