By all accounts, low engagement levels and
employee turnover rates plague organizations of all sizes and shapes. In fact,
recent data from Gallup put employee engagement rates worldwide at about 15
percent and estimate that 51 percent of
employees are looking to leave their current jobs. These statistics have
significant economic consequences, as unengaged employees tend to be less
productive, and organizations are forced to expend significant resources on
recruitment and training to replace employees who leave.
Even the most high-performing organizations
struggle with the ability to retain and engage high-quality
employees. Nevertheless, despite incredible odds, we can also see some “bright
spots” – organizations that have higher engagement rates and below-average
turnover. Their secret sauce? These organizations promote “intrapreneurship” by
encouraging employees to learn and apply entrepreneurial knowledge, skills
and mindsets within their current organization. When done well, this
approach increases employee engagement and retention by giving creative and
growth-seeking employees opportunities to develop new products, services and
business ventures – all without having to look elsewhere for these
opportunities.
What’s
more, there are three basic “leadership actions” taken by leaders who
successfully advocate this approach in their organizations: they provide the
right types of leadership development opportunities and employee engagement
training program, they provide the necessary resources and they enable a
culture of innovation. Let’s look at each of these leadership actions in more
depth.
Provide the Right Types of
Employee Leadership Development Opportunities
Not all leadership development is created
equal, and as Deborah Rowland, change management researcher and
author, notes, the most effective leadership development is experiential,
influences participants’ intrapersonal emotional intelligence along
with their external actions, is linked to participants’ specific contexts, and
enrolls facilitators who act as guides rather than subject matter experts.
Not
all leadership development is created equal. The most empowering
intrapreneurship-focused leadership development experiences also specifically
target the following proficiencies:
- Being proactive and taking initiative
- Embracing design thinking (solution-focused
and oriented toward a desired future)
- Enhancing emotional intelligence, especially
coalition-building skills
- Implementing project management
- Taking risks and learning from failure
In
other words, while general leadership development, when done well, adds value
for all participants, leaders and managers who want to cultivate intrapreneurs
in their organization also need to ensure that they are providing training that
addresses these specific competencies.
Provide the Necessary
Resources for Self-identified, Employee-Driven Projects
More
than talking a good game about innovation and creativity, leaders and
managers who inspire an intrapreneurial mindset put their money where their
mouth is by providing the time, space and financial resources necessary to
support employee-driven initiatives.
For
example, at Centiva Software Solutions, a Utah-based technical services
organization, developers are given two days per month to work on a project of
their choice. After learning about the problems faced by a local homeless
shelter, developer Blake Kohler and his team were inspired to create a software
solution that helped the shelter prioritize beds for clients. After developing
and presenting an initial mockup to senior management, their team was given
three months to further develop the product – the offshoot of which was a new
product for the organization’s commercial line.
Similarly,
with Kickbox, an innovation process designed by Adobe, employees or teams with
an idea are given $1,000 and instructions and tools to measure progress, along
with a Starbucks gift card and candy bar (purportedly to provide the necessary
caffeine and sugar boost that innovators need). To date, Adobe has distributed
more than 1,000 Kickboxes to employees around the world and made the program
instructions available to others under a creative commons, share-alike,
attribution license.
Design, Build and Encourage
a Culture of Innovation
According
to Clinton Longenecker, director of the Center for Leadership and
Organizational Excellence at the University of Toledo, and Dale Eesley,
director of the Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Franchising at the
University of Nebraska, Omaha, organizational culture is the “key gateway” to
intrapreneurship within a company.
In
our experience, there are four defining features of this type of culture:
1. Employees are given a high degree of
freedom and flexibility, which promotes autonomy and, thus, motivation.
Suzanne
Smith, social entrepreneur and blogger, recalls how she started her career
as a social intrapreneur within the American Heart Association: “The
leadership, including now-CEO Nancy Brown, let me invent, lead teams, and grow
in multiple roles within the organization.” Smith believes that by following
the same methodology, other organizations can better tap into their existing
talent pool and especially the Millennial base (those people born between
1981-1996).
2. Employees are encouraged
to test out the competition and compare their company’s product or service to
products and services from a different industry.
Justin
Reilly, head of customer experience innovation at Verizon Fios, describes how
he made the case for improving the company’s MyFios app: “On my phone, the Uber
app is right beside the MyFios app. If I open Uber and hail a ride in two or
three intuitive clicks, and then open the MyFios app and the experience isn’t
as easy or fast, I’m going to judge Verizon Fios service on that experience.
That means we’re competing against every customer’s last best experience. So
that’s what we use as our guidepost to innovation and improvement.”
3. Employees are encouraged to ask questions
and challenge processes.
Tim
Houlne, a Fortune 500 intrapreneur-turned-startup entrepreneur, recalls that he
received a lot of pushback for asking questions early in his career. Now, as
CEO of Humach, an organization that provides customer contact solutions, he
aims to create an culture where employees are encouraged to poke holes and
rethink solutions: “As a tech startup, we must constantly look for better,
cheaper and faster ways to operate; we have a culture where everyone feels
comfortable presenting their ideas and innovative solutions are recognized.” So
create an culture where employees are encouraged to poke holes and rethink
solutions.
4. Employees have permission to fail (or
understand which types of failures are acceptable and unacceptable).
Most
researchers agree that risk-taking is a defining feature of
entrepreneurs (cf, Antoncic 2003); however, one of the defining features of
intrapreneurs is that they are actually more risk-averse than their
entrepreneur peers. With this in mind, organizations that want to enable and
empower intrapreneurs should regularly communicate that failure is a natural
part of the innovation process and even celebrate failures. In situations where
failure is not an option, leaders and managers need to make that clear.
At
the end of the day, there are many factors that drive high levels of employee
disengagement and turnover. As leaders and managers, we often assume that these
factors are entirely outside of our control, which is a mistake. Promoting and
enabling intrapreneurship is one strategy that can benefit both employees and
organizations. While successfully implementing all three leadership actions is
a significant undertaking, it’s also one that organizations would do well to
consider, especially if they are struggling to engage and retain high
performers.
