Innovating With a Shark Tank Day
Welcome to the #culturedrop. Every Tuesday, Galen Emanuele emails tools to advance leadership skills, team culture, and personal growth. No spam, just great content. Sign up now to get it in your inbox.
This week's #CultureDrop was inspired by hearing of companies doing similar things to this, but I don't think I’ve heard it done quite to this scale: Have a Shark Tank Day.
Shark Tank Day is exactly what it sounds like: a day for your team to pitch innovations and ideas they have, à la Shark Tank style, to leadership.
Why Shark Tank Day?
Two birds, one stone:
1) Facilitate a fun, opportunity for employees to share creative, innovative ideas, challenge the status quo, or propose changes.
2) Gain valuable insight from employees and show that you value people's unique perspectives, input, and creativity.
The purpose of a Shark Tank style event is to set aside and facilitate a specific, intentional opportunity where any employee can pitch an idea about anything they want without limits — if there’s some new technology or product or policy folks want to adopt, they can throw their innovative ideas into the hat. Or if someone just doesn’t like the way something is done, they can make a pitch on why and how it should be changed.
Make it fun (and real).
Make Shark Tank Day fun (and real) by making sure employees know that the limits for their pitches are endless and that you value their ideas. Or if they’re not endless then provide some guidelines and ground rules for them.
This style of idea brainstorming is not only potentially extremely fun, but it’s exciting to see what people come to the table with. It’s a fantastic way to innovate processes, or make adjustments and changes in ways the leadership team may have never considered.
Give guidance and set people up for success.
Pitching ideas to leadership teams may be WAY out of some folks’ comfort zones, so help by creating structure and guidelines beforehand.
Establish the ground rules for the event so people know what to expect. Encourage people to get into it and be creative, Set some structure and a time limit for pitch ideas, Giving employees some guidance on how to make a successful pitch, give them a template for a slide deck or give them a formula like: the topic, what’s challenging about it, what’s their proposed solution, how that will make things better and benefit the company and/or employees).
Make sure you also set realistic expectations. Obviously not all ideas are feasible or will be able to be put to use for a variety of reasons. But earnestly look for ones that can and be willing to try some new things or embrace some changes.
Another way to celebrate people’s idea’s and their participation is to create awards for a variety of different categories. Most creative pitch, most realistic, best idea, “the Scrooge award” for the idea that would save the most money, and fun things like that. Don’t make it stuffy, have some fun with it.
Different perspectives are powerful tools for innovation.
Perhaps the best reason to hold a Shark Tank Day at your organization is that it allows you to use new perspectives to innovate within the company. Employees that are on the ground gain a vast amount of insight into what processes are/are not working while doing their job — their voices are extremely important to listen to.
Employees of every type have potentially lots of different perspectives to offer on how to make the workplace a more efficient, more fun, more innovative, more profitable, etc. But without specifically asking for their input, and creating an event or environment for it, these ideas often never get shared or come to fruition.
I think people inside organizations have a lot of brilliant ideas, but often there is no opportunity or invite to bring them up.
Shark Tank Day is a great way to facilitate an environment where employees feel safe sharing their ideas. In doing this, you’re going to empower people’s voices and potentially get a ton of really creative business development ideas.
To recap,
Employees on the ground hold important insights into how procedures and policies at their organization could change to improve or enhance their experience. Holding a Shark Tank day and allowing staff to pitch their ideas is a fun way to get different perspectives on how the organization can improve while letting team members know that you value their input.
Let us know if you hold one of these and how it goes!
Related #CultureDrop Articles:
Want more?
This article was created by Galen Emanuele for the #culturedrop. Free leadership and team culture content in less than 5 minutes a week. Check out the rest of this month's content and subscribe to the Culture Drop at https://bit.ly/culturedrop