“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” —Phil Jackson
We love the idea of the “intrapreneur.” Empowering your employees to step up and lead—imagine how powerful that could be! The truth is that, many employees have amazing ideas—ideas about how to streamline operations, ideas about how to smooth out riffles in your corporate culture, ideas about new products or services, ideas about how to step up your marketing game…
…and you want to keep those ideas in house. Trust us, you do.
Think about some of the companies that employ intrapreneurship initiatives and what has been born of them. Google allows engineers to spend 20% of their time working on personal projects that interest them. Now we have Gmail, Google News and Google AdSense. W.L. Gore—who you may know as the creators of Gore-Tex fabric—gives employees “dabble time,” which yielded what is now the #1 selling acoustic guitar string. Facebook Hackathons have become a much talked-about tradition where engineers stay up all night to create a working product or prototype from scratch. Because of the Hackathon, Facebook now transmits digital data over a single wavelength using the Voyager Transponder—which, to us, means faster video and image upload speeds.
The problem is that, when you work in human resources, the minutia of your day-to-day job can get in the way of employing these big-picture employee engagement initiatives. Retirement plans, annual reviews, PTO logs, etc. etc. But engaging and empowering your employees to become intrapreneurs is hugely important to a company’s success. Check out this Forbes article, ’50+ Employee Engagement Ideas from Forbes Human Resources Council.”
Hiring & Empowering Solutions believes strongly in the idea of the intrapreneur—so much so that we’ve written a book about it! You can get a free digital copy of “Intrapreneurs in an Entrepreneur’s World” when you sign-up for our email list.
Your team is only as strong as its weakest link. Learn how to strengthen and reinforce your team through engagement, empowerment and intrapreneurship. It’ll pay off in the long run, we promise!
