How Intrapreneurship Could Save Your Company

Here at Justin Cobb Leadership Academy, we’re all about inspiring entrepreneurs to take their businesses to the next level. We know the power of entrepreneurship, and you do too if you are running your own company or creating your own business. Yet oftentimes we end up with a bit of a contradiction in our beliefs. We want to support and develop our employees to be their best. We also believe that being an entrepreneur is the best way for a person to develop themselves and their business. So how can we help our employees to be their best without losing them? Enter the concept of intrapreneurship.

Intrapreneurship is the term that describes when we apply the principles of entrepreneurship within the framework of a company. We create intrapreneurs when we allow our people to innovate new ideas, products, and processes while working for our company. When we encourage our employees to act like entrepreneurs in their roles at our company, we show them that we value them as people. We show them that we consider them an important part of the company.

The benefit for an intrapreneur is that they get to learn some of the core concepts and ideas of being successful in business, without the attached risks. It’s beneficial to consider whether your employees could run your company if you weren’t there. If not, then why not? What do you lose by teaching them every skill you have? Sure, perhaps they’ll leave and start their own company, but on the way up they’ll add so much value to your company that it will be worth your time.

This way of working has created great benefits for some of the biggest corporations on the planet. For example, Gmail and AdSense were both projects created by intrapreneurs at Google. Google encourages employees to spend 20% of their time working on projects that interest them. This allows employees to innovate and come up with new ideas. Of course, not all of them are useful, but enough are that it’s worth the time.

At Justin Leadership Academy we believe in taking the time to nurture employees to be their best. If you put your best into your people, you’ll see the best from them.

Photo by Clayton Cardinalli on Unsplash