Does Your Team Take and Enjoy Its Own Medicine?
In the best organizations, it is expected that every team member partakes in the enterprise’s products, services, or advice.
When team members are personally engaged with what the enterprise offers, sells, or promotes to others, pride swells, commitment hardens, and innovation soars. Good leaders encourage this connection and promote the idea that experiencing what the team offers others creates powerful learning for everyone.
Testing new products and services with the inside team will reveal cracks, ideas, and insights that could easily be missed. Once launched and established, asking team members to experience directly the fruits of their labor shows them the value of what they do and exposes them to ideas for how to make things better.
It’s simply amazing how many organizations don’t encourage or promote their own team to use their own products and services. Those enterprises miss out on the important feedback team members would offer and the improvements that would subsequently occur.
Most of all, they miss the opportunity to create a personal pride of ownership that connects team members to their work and to the organization.
In popular culture, this idea is often called dogfooding, historically referring to a dog food executive who ate the brand’s canned dog food at shareholder meetings. Dogfooding is just an inventive name that makes a simple point vividly. Having team members use the organization’s products or services galvanizes commitment and turbocharges ideation.
When what the enterprise offers is expensive or costly, the best organizations offer steep discounts or free samplings that allow everyone to take part. For those organizations in the business of offering advice, creating the opportunity for team members to receive the same or similar advice from their colleagues in a structured way gets the same job done.
The best leaders and organizations insist on taking their own medicine. Inside the enterprise, ingesting what the organization produces exposes flaws, elevates pride, and binds team members and end-users together. That’s a pill worth swallowing.
“Dogfooding”
That’s a new term on me. Love it!
Not sure how consuming THAT particular product in front of the board creates personal pride of ownership. But you point is well taken.
Good morning,
Some solid points.
Two points:
-Many men and women are looking for a place that pays them enough to pursue their own life. On the front lines one may or may not purchase their company's products. I find this particularly common with lower level workers. I believe there is nothing wrong with that. If they work hard and do good work, whose business is it where they invest their funds?
-For PR purposes; one higher up the ladder is going to likely shop at their company or use the products, promotions, and/or services their organization provides.
Ultimately, I have found people get to caught up with image, rather than actual work done. Additionally, most of us don't want to engage with our company after we're off the clock. Why on earth would we shop there then?
Personally, I have found boundaries to be imperative for formulating a strategy.
We already give companies our lives. Don't give them our money too...
Thank you for your time.