The idea guy is a diminisher
Liz Wiseman's research found the most damaging bosses aren't tyrants — they're the ones everyone likes.
Wiseman spent years interviewing executives for her book Multipliers expecting to find that bad bosses drain teams through obvious bullying. Instead she kept running into a subtler pattern: managers who were kind, competent, and beloved, who were nonetheless quietly halving what their teams could produce.
She calls one type the Idea Guy — the leader who walks into every meeting bursting with suggestions, certain that a fountain of ideas will spark everyone else's thinking. What actually happens, in her data, is that people stop generating their own ideas and start waiting for the fountain, then chasing whatever came out of it. Across her sample of roughly 150 leaders, teams under this kind of well-meaning "diminisher" contributed less than half their real capability. Teams under leaders who instead asked questions and built on others' thinking gave nearly double.
None of these bosses think of themselves as the problem, because intention and impact aren't the same measurement.
The question worth sitting with isn't whether you diminish anyone on purpose. It's whether your best intentions are the ones doing the diminishing.