Foster the right entrepreneurship!

A clear message came though the various meetings from the newly appointed  CEO along his Road-show:  “We are all entrepreneurs!”. And reactions were always similar. First silent, then a comforting soft murmuring. People seemed to agree.

It was certainly a motivating and challenging statement, and some months down the road something seemed to have changed. Employees understood the message as the need to become more proactive and like entrepreneurs they started embracing true ownership for their projects: Business Executives pushed for new cross-functional projects, Sales Managers started to look for additional “close the gap” activities, and marketing people looked at various synergy possibilities with other brands.  In a way the message acted like a boost on morale or a call to action to further drive the business.

But good things do not last long. One day the word “overload”, a nice euphemism, started to resonate within the organization. The “morale bubble” was starting to burst…  Whether capacity issues, lack of potential, prioritization of resources or budget cuts, it all seemed to lead to the same end, people wanted to get back to “business as usual” and stop or put on hold any additional initiatives.

What had happened? Why did that “morale boost” have just a temporary effect?

The call for entrepreneurship had been an hexogen stimuli. People naturally adapted to it but as time passed, they literally ran out of “fuel”. In a way it was an imposed stimuli, rather than a stimuli coming from the employee itself. It urged employees to react but the organization itself didn’t have the means to sustain it long term. Therefore, hexogen entrepreneurship has rather a limited impact, lots of new projects started but very few actions were taken.

I guess you see already where I want to get: is there such a thing like endogen entrepreneurship? Wouldn’t the potential benefits of “employee driven entrepreneurship”, offset those of “top-down entrepreneurship”?

I belief endogen entrepreneurship per-se can help foster newer ventures out of the traditional scope of work from employees, where risks are certainly higher but so are rewards. It is like an R&D investment, a learning platform focused on long term potential rather than short term rewards. Most notably, endogen entrepreneurship is far more engaging and employees can take real ownership and are more motivated to drive the projects to an end.

Yet, how can companies transform hexogen entrepreneurship into endogen entrepreneurship?

The first step is for companies to accept failure. In order to achieve that, companies can for instance do internal PR campaigns.

Secondly, a reward system will have to be put in place. A good idea is to organize entrepreneurship contests and make the candidates and ideas public. Also entrepreneurship will need to be tackled as part of the employees yearly objectives, as in most companies entrepreneurship is simply not a natural domain where employees should invest their efforts.

Thirdly, managers need to put resources available for entrepreneurs to develop their projects, in terms of time, money, capacity, processes, decision taking, know-how, etc.

And last, managers need to follow-up. Entrepreneurships at the end of the day is about innovation, and therefore it needs to be taken as well as an strategic priority.

To sum it all up: the entrepreneurship spark can be hexogen, but for the fire to burn it needs to feed from the employees own motivation.