Five Ways To Foster Entrepreneurship In Your Growing Business by Andrew Lau
Here are five ideas that can lay the groundwork for long-term impact while simultaneously boosting collaboration and creativity in the short-term.
1. Start with great people.
Every company is defined by its people, and a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship is impossible to achieve without a team of intelligent, hard-working, curious people. If you’re surrounded by other people who work hard and are always brainstorming creative solutions to problems, not only will that atmosphere inspire and rub off on you, but it can provide you with a future network of partners, advisers and even investors in future endeavors. A team of passionate, committed people will push each other to tackle big problems—the type of experiences that can inform decades of future legacy.
2. Explain the “whys.”
The decisions we make as business leaders are informed by our history and experiences, and we can’t expect our younger team members to understand the context behind each strategy. I make a point of always trying to explain the “why” behind every decision: Why are we prioritizing this product development or customer segment? Why are we making these adjustments to teams? When you take the time to connect the dots for people, you widen their aperture as they look at their industry and the market as a whole. Knowing the why allows employees to understand the challenges and improve performance in the present while simultaneously helping them learn for the future.
3. Encourage risks.
A startup isn’t the kind of environment where you can play it safe—we’re in the business of making bets. You’ll never be able to know for sure whether the chance you’re taking is going to work out or not, so you have to be willing to take risks. We always encourage our team members to avoid analysis paralysis and try new things. If it doesn’t work, fine—cut your losses and move on to the next experiment. But if it does work, be willing to double down. These moments of risk, success or failure are what give folks the war stories and lessons that help them do it better next time and teach them that risk—even in failure—leads to insight.
4. Don’t penalize failure.
Building off the previous point, the more an organization is willing to take big bets, the more likely they are to hit on the next big thing. With that in mind, it’s really important that leaders don’t establish a culture of penalties when one of their risks doesn’t pan out. Leaders should have their finger on the pulse of the company and be ready to redirect resources when an idea isn’t working, but team members should always be invited to bring new ideas forward. It’s an impossibly rare company that succeeds in selling the first iteration of its first product—expect it to be the same with your team.
5. Build networks for the future.
Above all, a culture of entrepreneurship is one in which people respect and inspire each other. Great people make us all better. Encourage your teams to help each other, and recruit the type of people who would go out of their way to see others succeed. This is where your team will build their future networks—in the trenches, through both success and failure. We see this today with Endeca alumni. That network is an incredible resource as we work together to share ideas, try each other’s products, pass along great referrals to each other and even share furniture from one startup to another. An alumni network is something that takes years to build, but you can lay the groundwork by establishing a culture of hard work and respect.
A culture of entrepreneurship isn’t about creating new companies. The traits that make a good startup founder—vision, creativity and collaboration, shaped by experience—also make for a transformative team member, the type of teammate and leader that executives would be thrilled to have at their company. A culture of entrepreneurship is a culture of innovation, teamwork and drive. Who wouldn’t want that?
Source: Forbes.com
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