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.
