For centuries established corporations have had intrapreneurs; executives who lead new revenue streams in separate entities into being. This post draws on John Gale’s experience and three articles to express the characteristics of a good intrapreneur.
Characteristics of a good intrapreneur
- Personal skills
- A visionary
- Skilled politician
- Perseverance
- Can deal with uncertainty
- Creativity and ability to think “outside the box”
- Dynamic thought
- External (to the organization) skills
- Understanding of external environments
- Interpersonal skills and experience
- Understanding of intra-company environments fraught with political peril. This includes understanding of various corporate cultures, management structures, and various types of employee behaviours
- Ready and capable to challenge the internal and external status quo
- Experience at managing cross-functional groups
- Ability to create and maintain a cross-department support network
- Ability to build a professional-support network and draw on it
- Must be able to inspire employees to take political risks
- Must be able to navigate complex internal policies and approval processes
- Ability to successfully lead multi-department teams paperwork and approvals
- Willingness to include all involved as heros
- Willingness to share credit
- Ability to build a cross-department team of advisers
- Persuasion skills to accomplish the above – This includes the ability to persuade many in a large organization that a new and strange concept will benefit all involved
- Ability to keep innovative progress flowing as the intrapreneurial group grows in size and is staffed with those with employee mentalities
- Ability to balance multiple, divergent skill sets and responsibilities
- Listening to multiple simultaneous and likely divergent messages
- Ability to accept course corrections from those without intrapreneurial skills
- Knowing how to fail within the corporation is key to success. In addition they recover quickly from failure
- Internal (to the organization) skills
- Ability to translate new ideas into new businesses
- Ability to impress ‘C-level’ executives
- Matrix management experience and skills
- Management of stakeholder relations – This includes both maintaining support and protection from internal policies
- Expert at internal corporate networking
- Typically intrapreneurs are involved in multiple internal activities. It becomes difficult to free up their time so that they can focus on only one project
- Intrapreneurs prefer to create long-term benefits for their corporation
- Intrapreneurs obtain permission to act outside normal policies
- Intrapreneurs prefer to request forgiveness rather than request permission
- Intrapreneurs are usually only the project leaders
- Intrapreneurs prefer to be autonomous and to have significant responsibility
Conclusion
One article confuses intrapreneurial and entrepreneurial skills even though they seem quite different. The non-salary risks seem higher than for entrepreneurs. The salary and personal asset risks are much lower. The rewards for intrapreneurs max out at lower levels than for entrepreneurs.
References
- Forbes The Skills Necessary To Be A Successful ‘Intrapreneur’ (Corporate Entrepreneur)
- Entrepreneur 5 Must-Have Skills of Intrapreneurs Inside Their Grown-Up Startups
- The perfect intrapreneur: a skillset
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