Why intrapreneurship matters to HR

An entrepreneurial spirit is critical to starting a business.

But an intrapreneurial spirit is critical to growing a business. People leaders stand to play an important role in cultivating intrapreneurship within their organizations, according to Justin Pennington, a global transformation executive and author of The Intrapreneur Leader: A Playbook for Next-Generation Human Leadership.

“When we think about entrepreneurs, we think of a certain type of individual, but intrapreneurship really is a capability,” Pennington told HR Brew. “That’s an important distinction for people to understand in HR because, as a capability, it provides opportunity for learned experiences for employees.”

Pennington shared more about his book, and how HR can encourage intrapreneurship, with HR Brew.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will HR pros learn from your book?

For HR, there’s a focus here on adoption, driving adoption of ideas as opposed to just encouraging managers to listen to general ideas…Middle managers are really the enabling layer in an organization, and they have the power to create the right conditions for intrapreneurship to flourish.

When we think about Gen Z and late millennials now coming into the workplace…being the first generation born into technology. Intrapreneurship, as a capability, is going to be very important for retaining younger talent coming through because it…plays very much to some of the ideals and ambitions that that demographic has.

What is an intrapreneur?

An entrepreneur builds capability from outside an organization, and they control the resources and the decisions, because typically they are business owners…The intrapreneur adopts a very similar set of characteristics, but they obviously operate from within an organization.

They have to influence without having authority or ownership, but still displaying some of the characteristics of an entrepreneur…Who can become an intrapreneur? There’s a little bit of a mindset shift needed, because when we think about entrepreneurs, you tend to think that that’s a certain type of person, and therefore you can apply that same logic to an intrapreneur. It’s a personality trait. It’s a certain type of individual, but intrapreneurship is a capability that can be learned.

Not everyone wants to lead a major innovation initiative, but almost everyone can develop intrapreneurial capabilities and behaviors like curiosity, taking initiative, observing end users and understanding patterns of behavior in the workplace, constructive challenge, collaboration, and follow through. These are types of activities. These can all be learned.

Thinking about the intrapreneur as a capability that HR can cultivate through their middle management gives a much wider access to a lot of talent in the organization, as opposed to just thinking that we need to recruit a certain type of person.

Are top performers among those most likely to be intrapreneurs?

If you are training for a race and you’re an athlete, you are training yourself on various aspects of the race…You’re focused very much on the process because the process delivers the outcome, ultimately. In training, you don’t measure how many times, “Did I come first?” and it’s a very similar mindset here…The very essence of, for instance, creativity is about generating many ideas. Generating 10 ideas to get to the one idea that will actually have some mileage, and all successful inventions in history have been based on this idea.

Really [encourage] middle managers to start thinking about, “How can I measure that innovation pipeline?” So, it can be things like how many ideas have been generated? How many decisions have been made in that process? How many ideas have been adopted? How many learnings have been produced? So, you’re helping people grow that capability, and then over time, like any muscle you are training, your conversion rate from ideas to adoption is going to increase.