How To Be An Intrapreneur
In my previous post “Reinventing the ‘Intrapreneur’ for the 21st Century” I provided my definition of the Intrapreneur and outlined the role’s new relevance for today’s organisation. But what does it take to be an Intrapreneur? Below are my Top 10 behaviours and principles which I believe will enable the individual to maximise their personal resources, exposure and value to the business for the advancement of their career and the achievement of both their personal and the company’s goals.
1. Be Self Aware
Know, understand and learn to leverage your strengths and weaknesses. Focus on your achievements and consider what factors drove you to success in those cases; how can these same practices be applied to your current role and situation to achieve success? Admit your previous mistakes, but understand how you can profit from them – what could you have done differently to bring about a positive outcome? Only by knowing where you are, can you create a path to where you need to be.
To maximise your potential as an Intrapreneur you must know your passions, what do you love doing? How can you marry these to the achievement of your personal goals and to the goals of the organisation?
By having awareness of your own skills, competencies and expertise you can then surround yourself with people who provide complimentary abilities to maximum your own effectiveness. A big misnomer of the Intrapreneur is that they act alone. In reality, an Intrapreneur cannot be successful without mobilising others around them. To achieve this you must understand how you fit into the team equation, where you can most bring value, and where your talents will best shine through.
2. Have a Success Focus
An Intrapreneur is un-waving in their drive for success. The path to achievement is never straight. There will be hurdles, knock-backs and rejections which must be overcome if the Intrapreneur is to attain their personal and the company’s ambitions. Intrapreneurs have the confidence in their abilities and what they’re doing to be able to see the job through.
If you don’t have confidence in yourself, how do you expect others to have confidence in you?
But the Intrapreneur doesn’t rest on their laurels. To achieve your potential you must commit to constant improvement. Develop a need for learning and up-skilling to provide you with the knowledge and tools to grow your capabilities and remit.
3. Define Your Own Role
One of the defining characteristics of the Intrapreneur is that they don’t confine themselves to the parameters of their prescribed role. The art of the Intrapreneur is to create an expanded job that leverages their strengths, whilst adding greater value to the organisation overall. Only by moving beyond their remit can they accomplish their elevated goals, build their personal brand, and innovate in product and project delivery.
4. Become A Resource Squirrel
Extending beyond their role necessitates Intrapreneurs to acquire and leverage additional resources from inside and outside of their organisation. To support and fuel a project or innovation requires human, financial and material resources which for the Intrapreneur aren’t readily available. One of the benefits of operating as an Intrapreneur is that you do so within an existing business which provides the environment for you to innovate. That’s not to say that this organisation is either set-up to facilitate your intrapreneurialism, or has the resources readily available to support it. It is up to you to identify, hunt, secure and activate those resources for the advancement of your endeavour. Doing so requires you to understand your company, its systems and its politics, to be able to develop the relationships and endorsements required to gain buy-in for your project, and to have the negotiation skills to acquire the necessary backing.
5. Hack The System
Our everyday business lives are filled with incumbent systems, procedures and tools that simply don’t work. They’re constraining, inefficient and block the development of new, better ways-of-working. The Intrapreneur is a hacker at heart. They find the loops in the system; the paths to get around the blocks.
This isn’t hacking in the disruptive sense but the creative. It’s about the development of new and better processes and methods that lead to increased efficiency, new thinking and ideas, and ultimately new products and ways of doing business.
6. Be Prepared to Take Risks
By not taking risks you accept the status quo. You can’t invent and intraprenate by doing what’s always been done. To move outside the box, to innovate and come up with new approaches requires taking risks. Risk taking isn’t recklessness; it should be measured, considered and, where possible, planned.
Successful risk taking entails having a clear understanding of the environment and pertaining conditions, conducting a thorough assessment of the possible outcomes given all scenarios, consideration of the implications for both success and failure, and a knowledge of the most likely outcomes born of experience, training and learning. In this respect, risk taking isn’t a ‘leap of faith’, but gut instinct ultimately plays a part in the decision making process; the Intrapreneur learns to feel and trust their gut – more often than not it will be correct.
7. Create Your Personal Brand
An Intrapreneur is an expert in self promotion. That’s not to say you should take every opportunity to “big yourself up”; personal branding requires subtlety. Look for opportunities to gain positive exposure for your work and initiatives, without being self congratulatory. Understand the vehicles of internal communication within your business, both formal and informal, and identify for ways to inject your message. Are there internal blogs that you can contribute to? Can you provide updates on your projects through newsletters or in team meetings? Be creative if you want to gain real standout.
It’s important to develop your personal brand from within. Be clear on the message that you’re looking to portray. What impression do you want to leave on others? Being an Intrapreneur doesn’t equate to being a mercenary – remember, an Intrapreneur can’t achieve success alone, they must work with and mobilise others to achieve their goals.
8. Network
Be politically savvy to create strategic alliances beyond your specific job function. Know how your company operates and who the key players are. Networking for the Intrapreneur has 3 key objectives: 1) to facilitate the securing of incremental resources, 2) to gain exposure for your personal brand, and 3) to communicate the benefits and successes of your project, thus securing buy-in and endorsement to make the path to success smoother.
An Intrepreneur must be prepared to work collaboratively outside their boundaries, readily building cross-functional relationships. An Intrapreneur is a leader; to achieve success they must mobilise those around them towards their personal and ultimately mutual goals.
9. Be Heard
In order to be successful, you must be seen to be successful…seen, and heard. To be an Intrapreneur you must have ideas and opinions; but to make these a reality they need to be communicated. This means participating during meetings – be vocal – share. Don’t be a “black box”. Again, this is part of personal branding; brands exist through every touch point with their audience. There’s no down time when building your personal Intrapreneur brand.
10. Make Time to Think and Plan
Understand what’s working and what’s not, consider how you can take your contribution to the next level. Build dedicated time into your schedule to take a step back, assess and plan. An Intrapreneur constantly moves forward, but without setting a direction, forward may not be an advancement.
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[...] aren’t financial benefits to being an intrapreneur. As I outlined in my previous post ‘How To Be An Intrapreneur‘, creating a personal brand is a key component to operating effectively in this role; when [...]
great post mr w!