This year’s grand prize went to Chef Richard Hawthorne from Grotto Las Vegas, for his “Updated Tiramisu.” Congratulations, Chef Richard!

In my professional life, age has crept up on me.

Early in my career, I kept my head down and my mouth shut.  I watched and learned.  I unjammed the copy machine and befriended the guys in the mail room.  Above all, I made sure there was always a cover sheet on my TPS report.

Then – suddenly, it seemed — people started asking for my expertise.

Wait.  I have expertise?  It occurred to me that I’ve been working for fifteen years.  It occurred to me that that’s a long time; maybe I do know a thing or two about a thing or two.

Huh.

Something really interesting happens on the way up the corporate ladder.  You start taking on projects and making decisions, which usually involves working with a few young guns, and it’s difficult to remember that you’re not one of them anymore.  You think back to the managers you worked with back in the day – they were smart, they were put together, they were… old.  You do some mental math, and it strikes you that they must have been in their mid-thirties at the time.  You gasp as realize that you are in your mid-thirties. You’re “that guy” – that old manager.  See how it creeps up?

Okay, fine.  You’re old and you have more responsibility.  That leads to another realization – you suddenly know full well those young’uns are criticizing you at the water cooler.  You see the way they look at you; those pre-pubescent punks think your job is easy.  They think they have all the answers.

Hey!, you want to shout in their direction as you sprint by the water cooler, late for a meeting, this isn’t as easy as it looks! There are budget constraints and politics and too many board members and not enough minions…

You can’t say that, of course.  Didn’t I mention that there aren’t enough minions?

The thing is, they’re probably right, at least on some level.  They likely have some really good ideas – fresh takes on old problems, insights on new ones. Heck, they probably even know what cloud computing is. If you’re smart, you’ll tap into those ideas, sift through them, and put the good ones to work.

But how?  The smart kids – the ones with the first-class ideas – know that their safest course of action is to keep quiet.  Speaking up is risky.

In fact, soliciting ideas within your organization is such a prevalent management issue that The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece about it.  The article, written by Rachel Emma Silverman, discusses methods ranging from the wearisome suggestion box to online idea-submission systems to dedicated ATM-like kiosks situated in high-traffic employee areas.

Those are all well and good, but the best example I’ve seen of a company tapping into the potential of its employees is at Landry’s, Inc.

For those who may not be familiar, the Landry’s empire, headquartered in Houston, is one of the largest in the country.  They operate 35 different concepts, which include over 300 restaurants and entertainment properties, and employ approximately 350 chefs.  They have operations in 31 states.

How do you even begin to manage all that?  How can you possibly keep the ideas fresh?  How do you inspire that many chefs to push the envelope, to keep innovating, to figure out what works best?  More importantly, how do you encourage the best ones to share what they know?

Well, if you’re Landry’s, you appeal to their egos and conduct an invitation-only smackdown.

For seven years, Landry’s has invited its top culinary professionals from across the country to compete head to head in a two-day cooking competition. This year, 36 chefs presented 78 dishes over a two day time period, battling for honors in four categories: appetizer, salad, entrée, and dessert.

The stakes?  Bragging rights, of course, along with the potential for their dish to be featured on menu of a Landry’s restaurant.  And for the first time, this year’s winner for Best Overall Dish won a trip to the annual Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado.

That’ll get the ideas brewing.

Here’s how it works: Invitations are extended to the company’s top chefs, which require the chefs to register their entries three weeks ahead of the competition.  On a first come, first served basis, the chefs sign up for the category in which they want to compete.

The management team creates a schedule dictating the exact time that each dish must be completed, at which time it is served to a panel of Landry’s executives for judging.  Each entry is scored on a numerical scale for creativity, presentation, and flavor.

The genius of the whole setup is this: the judging is blind.  The executives have no idea who submitted which dish.  In addition to fairness and objectivity, this levels the playing field.  The young guns have an unbiased shot at making a name for themselves.  The reputations of the old dogs and the current darlings bear no weight.  They have every incentive to swing for the fence.

In other words, go big or go home.

Landry’s invited me to observe this year’s competition behind the scenes, which was quite an adventure for this humble home cook. I hadn’t been in a commercial kitchen since my waitressing days, and even back then, I never witnessed anything close to this magnitude.  I had the opportunity to get to know the chefs, learn about what inspires them, why they do what they do, how they developed their technique.  I loved all the trash talk; I loved how much they wanted to win.

It was inspiring.  It made me want to cook.  It made me want to bring my best, in the kitchen and in life, too.

But perhaps most importantly, it made me want to motivate and inspire those young guns back at the office to go big or go home.

 

[Note: A slightly modified version of this post was first published as Motivate Your Employees to Go Big or Go Home on Technorati, which is pretty cool.]