Intrapreneurship creates the opportunity for a win-win for both the employer and the employee. It starts with what entrepreneurship is all about: pursuing opportunity in the midst of uncertainty.
All organizations, from the smallest to the largest, have new projects or initiatives that emerge that are riddled with uncertainty. This creates an opportunity for someone with an entrepreneurial mindset to showcase their skills and efforts.
How Does Intrapreneurship Drive Success?
Intrapreneurship benefits the organization by mobilizing employee talent to support the company’s mission. Still, fostering intrapreneurship can require a culture shift. Allowing an intrapreneurial employee to flourish requires an environment that empowers employees and is open to taking calculated risks to advance the organization’s mission and values.
An organization would be wise to invest in intrapreneurs who hold historical company knowledge and understand the nuances of the organizational culture. Allowing them to stretch beyond their current roles, perhaps with some additional training, can save time and money that would be lost by hiring and training a new employee.
For enterprising employees, intrapreneurship allows them to exercise their capability and test and develop new skills. To take advantage of this, the individual needs to be prepared to recognize when opportunities arise and, when they do, be ready to communicate what they want to do and ask for the order.
Building Relationships
Intrapreneurship also fosters connections across different parts of your organization. As the organization tries to break new ground, enter new territory, or offer new services, the networks associated with that organization will begin to expand, and intrapreneurial employees will create, develop, and cultivate those new networks and relationships.
You don’t have to leave your current position in order to take confidence-building risks. In fact, intrapreneurship can be a great first step to racking up the small wins that will help you develop the confidence to pursue larger opportunities within the organization and, perhaps one day, beyond it.
Intrapreneurship can be a training ground for a future entrepreneurial endeavor or a key component of your journey from the cubicle to the corner office. Check out my interview on Being an Intrapreneur with Lynn Martin, the President of the New York Stock Exchange, about her own intrapreneurial journey to leadership and success within the NYSE.
Intrapreneurship and the Five Cs of Leadership Capital
The 5 Cs of the leadership capital framework explored in The Treasure You Seek–capability, culture, communication, connection, and confidence–speak to the journey of the intrapreneur as much as the entrepreneur.
Even if leaving your current position is undesirable or too much of a risk for you right now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t progress in developing your unique superpower and moving toward whatever treasure you seek.
Take advantage of the opportunities you see in your current organization to test, develop, and cultivate your entrepreneurial mindset and intrapreneurial skills.