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What if individuals and teams were empowered to bring an entrepreneurial spirit to the work they do for you? Imagine a culture that supported new ideas, creative ways of thinking, taking a product or service from good to great! What could this mean for the big picture and employee engagement?
This concept isn’t anything new, Gifford Pinchot III, coined the term intrapreneur in 1978 and defined it as "dreamers who do."
"Intrapreneurs are employees who do for corporate innovation what
an entrepreneur does for his or her start-up."
Early on the term intrapreneur referred to employees who were given liberties (i.e. budget and freedom from established corporate policies and processes) to innovate and build prototypes they wouldn’t have had the ability to develop otherwise. To me, this sounds like certain individuals were given license to create, design and think outside of the proverbial box. Their job was to be internal entrepreneurs!
Today, intrapreneurship is still about freedom to innovate but it is also the ability to bring forward ideas and for all employees to be responsible for driving the business forward by how they approach work and what they do.
In order to drive a culture of intrapreneurship in your organization, what would you need to do to create the environment where this could flourish?
A few things come to my mind.
Create an environment of psychological safety where employees are supported to take risks without the fear of reprimand for failure (fail forward if you will).
Build your organization on the foundation of trust where employees know they are safe and valued.
Make space for it. What barriers (policies, processes, culture norms) do you need to shift to make it possible?
Embed the necessary behaviours in your competency framework. Determine and define the competencies necessary for intrapreneurship and add them to your core competencies.
Grow and hone the necessary skills through training and development programs accessible to employees at all levels in your organization.
Hire for it. Add the competency to your hiring process so you can recruit the right talent.
What comes to mind for you? I’d love to hear how you build a culture of intrapreneurship in your organization.