Recruit and Retain Intrapreneurs
Tomorrow’s workforce faces a world in which existing preconceptions do not apply.1 With Industry 5.0, we are moving toward an era in which artificial intelligence, robotics, and the IoT will automate analytics, learning, and decision making. Given the changing dynamic of the relationship between people and work, leaders will have to rethink who they want to hire and how they retain the best talent.
Recruit Intrapreneurs
Know What Intrapreneurs Look Like
To recruit intrapreneurs, you first need to understand how to recognize them. In Chapter 3, we have discussed the traits of potential intrapreneurs. These traits will help you gain insights into a person’s character and whether they have the right mindset. To embed this in your recruitment tools, use the questionnaire “The intrapreneur in you” in Chapter 2 to evaluate candidates. The questions are designed to assess the person’s intrapreneurship traits and skills and the results will help you decide whether or not one particular candidate is more intrapreneurial than the others.
Identify Intrapreneurs During Interviews
To spot intrapreneurs, you should ask questions that reveal their intrapreneurial character and experience.
Problem Solving and Idea Implementation
• Can you share an example of a time you came up with, and implemented, a new idea for your company?
1. How did you approach the problem?
2. How did you come up with the idea?
3. Who did you liaise or collaborate with?
4. Can you share the process?
5. Who were the stakeholders and how did you manage them?
6. What was the result?
7. What were the learnings?
This set of questions helps you observe how the candidate approaches problem solving. Note the examples that the candidate discusses—ideas for new products, solutions, processes, and businesses are all relevant. Note how innovative the ideas are. How the candidate describes the process can give you insights into their mentality, for example, are they willing to try new ideas or do they stick with traditional ways of solving a problem? You should also find out about their innovation skills, including how familiar they are with innovation methodology, and their leadership skills for dealing with stakeholders.
Customer Obsession
• Can you tell us about a situation in which you had to deal with a difficult customer?
1. What was the situation?
2. What was the customer upset about?
3. What was the challenge?
4. How did you approach it? What actions were taken?
5. What was the result?
This set of questions will tell you how the candidate values customer relationships. Look for signs of empathy toward the customer. Can the candidate fully understand what the customer needs? Did the candidate go the extra mile to offer help? From the results, seek to look beyond the customer service aspect of the event. Look at the change the candidate brought to the organization based on this interaction with a customer. It is not just about calming an angry customer, but also about understanding what the candidate did to identify their unmet needs, and, based on this discovery, the action they took to change the product or service.
Handling Failure
• Can you share an experience of a failure you had at work?
1. What was the scenario?
2. What went wrong?
3. Who were the stakeholders involved?
4. What was the result?
5. How did you feel about the failure?
6. If you were to repeat the process, what would you change?
This set of questions tells you how the candidate handles failure. Some candidates are caught off guard facing this question as failure is not something that is commonly discussed. Some that I have interviewed told me they could not recall a failure, which is ridiculous and obviously nonsense. Observe how open and honest the candidate is when discussing the event. Can the person objectively identify the cause of failure? Did the person not own the failure and try to blame other team members? Or were they embarrassed to talk about it? The major objective of the question is to see how comfortable the candidate is at dealing with failure and whether they can analyze it postevent and see an opportunity to learn.
Constantly Learning
• Can you share an experience in which you had to learn a new skill at work within a short space of time?
1. What was the situation?
2. What was the skill required?
3. Why was the skill required?
4. How did you approach learning the skill?
5. How long did you take to learn it?
6. How did you apply the new skill?
7. What was the result?
This set of questions tests whether the candidate is willing to pick up new skills. Notice in their tone whether or not they are excited about the unknown. Was the candidate self-motivated or forced to learn? You can also get a better understanding of how resourceful they are. Did the person read a book, do research, reach out to experts, or talk to people inside or outside the company? How eager was the candidate to learn? How fast did they learn and apply their new knowledge? Was the candidate delighted to mention their new skill?
What Would Attract Potential Intrapreneurs?
You know that you want to hire intrapreneurs. But how do you make your company a compelling place to work for intrapreneurial talents? Here are the expectations intrapreneurs have with regard to organizations and teams.
Organization Level
• A strong and innovative brand. Branding says many things about a corporation. To attract intrapreneurs to join yours, your brand needs to portray a strong, innovative image so that candidates feel that you have a strong sense of mission such as bringing change or creating something new. People should feel proud to be recruited and, by joining, believe they are setting on a journey to bring a positive impact to the world.
• A culture that promotes innovation. The culture of the corporation should encourage people to innovate. Indeed, innovation should be in the DNA of the corporation and its employees. Refer to Chapter 5 for information on building a culture that nurtures intrapreneurship.
• Publicly unknown innovation capabilities. Talented people are looking for signs that you’ve developed your innovation capabilities over the years and will continue doing so into the future. Do you publicly market your innovation capabilities? Do you have innovation teams? Do you have a corporate venture arm? What new products have you launched recently? Have you filed any patents or developed unique technology in-house? These are all signs—things that potential recruits will look for to assess whether or not you walk the talk. Refer to Chapter 6 for more on the infrastructure required for cultivating intrapreneurship.
Team Level
Intrapreneurial talents look for factors that affect their daily work life, such as working style and interaction with colleagues. They want something very different from conventional work based on job security, a reliable path to promotion, and a defined scope of work. Intrapreneurial talents focus more on autonomy, flexibility, and growth opportunity.
• Autonomy. Intrapreneurs need room to exercise their creative muscles. Giving them autonomy empowers them to shape their working environment so that they can perform at their best. Working autonomously does not mean working in a silo or without guidance. It means that you put the employees in charge. It makes them feel valued and trusted. Autonomy usually comes from a direct manager who has a big influence on the work style of the team. As a leader, you should encourage people managers to build trust with their teams, delegate, and not micro-manage.
• Flexibility. There is an increasing demand for flexibility at work. More people now work across time zones, collaborating with people in different geographies. Telling an employee in Asia who needs late-night calls with a U.S. team to stick to nine o’clock to six o’clock office hours is unreasonable. During the pandemic, many people were required to work from home or a hybrid of office and home. The freedom to choose when and where to work has grown into a priority for employees, balancing their roles at work with other aspects of life. Yet many corporations struggle to provide flexible working arrangements. Even though some have developed firmwide schemes, most employees are not aware of them or are reluctant to request flexible working. Having said that, the pandemic has definitely shaken conventional assumptions of people having to work from specific locations at particular times. A people-first approach should be taken when it comes to giving intrapreneurs the flexibility to approach how they want to get the job done.
• Growth opportunity. Intrapreneurs are eager to learn and advance. They also get bored with the status quo. The idea of having the opportunity to grow excites them. Growth does not necessarily mean promotion. It can include learning new skills, expanding their network, leading new projects, and making lateral moves. During the hiring process, leaders not only have to assess a candidate against the skills required for the role but also look at whether the role brings growth opportunities for the individual.
Intrapreneurship in Action: DBS Hack2Hire2
Some candidates are smart. They learn about the interview patterns of a company. During the one-hour conversation, the candidates can give you the model answers you want. Yet, when they get onboard, their actual performance might not live up to the expectation. Some companies realized that interviews only might not be the best hiring tool.
DBS, one of the largest banks in Southeast Asia, has determined to reimagine banking and the way it hires. To achieve that, it targets to hire the best technology talents who have a strong passion for new technologies and innovative individuals who want to drive major transformation. To ensure that the technology candidates it hires are as intrapreneurial and agile as they claim, DBS decided that the candidates should prove their capabilities via more hands-on tasks. Instead of interviews, DBS puts them through hackathons. During the hackathons, candidates are given specific problems or opportunities. They are paired with other candidates to explore and develop solutions. Through the hackathon, DBS would assess both the candidates’ technical and problem-solving skills. Compared to interviews, a hackathon is more expensive as a hiring tool. However, the investment is worth spending as it ensures that the hired candidates can fulfill the expectation of the corporate.
Retain Intrapreneurs
Assuming you have hired the right intrapreneurial candidates, how do you keep them engaged and satisfied so that they contribute meaningfully to the corporation? Managing employee retention is difficult and managing intrapreneur retention is even harder. When intrapreneurial talents cannot find satisfaction in the workplace, other than joining another company, they might opt to become entrepreneurs themselves. That opens up many more options for intrapreneurs and makes it harder to retain them. Some intrapreneurs who are passionate about solving a problem become so attached to it that they would solve it outside (on their own or with another corporation) if they cannot innovate inside.
Feed Them Challenges
Intrapreneurs are motivated by challenges. They see challenges as opportunities to learn and have an impact. On the other hand, they are bored with routine. If the tasks they are assigned aren’t challenging, they will quickly feel disengaged. So keep the intrapreneurs busy by giving them challenging tasks and problems to solve. They tend to move on to another challenge once one has been solved. Depending on the project duration, their mission needs to be refreshed from time to time. A new problem is a reset for them and keeps them motivated. It’s good practice to open up your organization’s book of problems for intrapreneurs to explore. In Chapter 6, I discussed the use of idea management as a repository of ideas. Similarly, you can also craft a list of problem statements you want to innovate for and make it openly available to employees. Intrapreneurs can seek their next potential project to work on from the pool. The platform should enable intrapreneurs to access background material and reach out to the teams who are working on the problem.
Support the Growth of Intrapreneurs
Intrapreneurial talents need to learn about innovation methodology, project management, leadership, communications, and other skills to help them navigate a large organization. You should support them along their career journey. Corporate leaders and HR can partner to support the growth of intrapreneurs by:
• Tailoring a personalized development plan. Understand what skills the intrapreneurial talent does or doesn’t have today, the skills they want to acquire, and how they can achieve their goals. Help them to identify suitable courses and materials and sponsor the training.
• Providing mentorship. Who in your organization today are seasoned intrapreneurs? Line them up to mentor potential intrapreneurs as role models. It is valuable for potential intrapreneurs to see and talk to someone who has been there and done it. The mentor should be able to share a large amount of organizational knowledge and best practice.
• Creating an intrapreneurial career path. Many people are afraid of building a career that’s focused on problem solving. It would mean seeking solutions to various problems, potentially moving between different functions or fields regularly. However, intrapreneurs are excited by this. They are not afraid to venture outside of their comfort zone or original domain of expertise. However, this is a double-edged sword. The desire to explore the unknown causes them to move on from a particular domain in a relatively short time. It could be a couple of years or it could be a few months. This makes it challenging for them to establish a solid career path. A conventional corporation usually requires people to progress within a vertical after achieving some level of seniority. Corporate leaders and HR need to understand that there is a new way of managing a career path. In fact, intrapreneurship by itself is a possible new career path. To help intrapreneurs advance their careers, organizations should support internal mobility, not just for lateral moves but also for promotions that aren’t purely dictated by the amount of time spent in a particular department.
Reward Intrapreneurship
In Chapter 5, we have discussed how leaders can encourage intrapreneurship by offering rewards. In this section, we will focus more on corporate-level rewards that are not gestures or perks. They are policy-driven rewards built into the corporation’s remuneration system. Some require big and bold decisions to be made. Depending on the corporate culture and its unique innovation ecosystem, corporate leaders and HR should consider carefully when to put these practices into place.
Reward With New Roles
If the idea involves building a new business, you should consider naming the intrapreneur team the C-suites of the new business when it is launched. Give the team the option to own and run the new business as entrepreneurs do. The new business is still under the umbrella of the corporation. The team members can become chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief technology officer, chief operating officer, chief design officer, and so forth on the management team of the new business. The compensation should also match the new position to reflect what they are worth leading the new business.
Sometimes, not everyone on the intrapreneur team wants to take up a management position in a new business. It’s normal for some to want to move on to other intrapreneurship projects. As a leader, what you can do is provide options and let the intrapreneur choose for themselves.
Intrapreneurship in Action: Citi D10XSM Program—Reward With New Roles3
Citi Ventures fostered intrapreneurship using an internal accelerator to support the creation, development, and launch of new concepts by employees. The program is designed to partner closely with core businesses to discover strategic growth areas to “propel Citi into the future.” Over the years, it has inspired numerous intrapreneurs and launched many innovations, including Proxymity.
Dean Little and Jonathan Smalley worked at Citi in London and had over 30 years of combined experience in custody and asset-servicing product development. They identified a problem with the shareholding voting process of institutional clients.
Institutional clients owned shareholdings of hundreds or even thousands of other companies around the world. The clients couldn’t attend all of those companies’ shareholder meetings but they were required to vote during the meetings. Conventionally, agents and intermediaries collected voting agendas from the companies and notified all the investors. The investors then had to cast their votes and send them back to the agents and intermediaries. Depending on the complexity, there could be up to seven intermediaries involved. Unsurprisingly, misinterpretation and mistakes occurred. With so much time lost on simply communicating information, the time available for investor decision making was squeezed. The process was also very costly, with billions of dollars spent on it every year.
To solve the problem, Dean and Jonathan came up with an idea called Proxymity. It’s an online platform that connects companies more directly with shareholders, removing most of the steps in between and the potential for errors. Meeting agendas and voting intentions are shared digitally. Proxymity helps companies to manage the process in real time, with less risk and more transparency.
During the discovery process, the team has felt that for Proxymity to have the largest possible impact, it should be backed by the industry as a whole. To support this vision, some of the world’s largest financial institutions joined together to invest in the platform and establish Proxymity as an independent business. As well as Citi, Proxymity is now backed by financial institutions including BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, and State Street.4
Dean and Jonathan have also crafted new careers. Dean became the CEO and Jonathan the COO of Proxymity. They are still partners and have been leading a team to further develop Proxymity as a new business.
Reward With Shareholdings
To motivate intrapreneurs to innovate for the company, they should be rewarded in a meaningful way. Granting employees a minority shareholding in the new business they build is one of the most powerful ways to motivate them to make the business successful. A good example of this is Henry Chesbrough, who in 1984 was an employee of Quantum Corporation, a hard drive manufacturer.5 He was working in a team of four people that started Plus, a new business within Quantum. All of them were given shares in Plus, with Quantum taking 80 percent of the shareholding in return for funding the team. Each of them ended up earning quite a lot when Quantum bought back the remaining 20 percent of the stock in 1988, at a valuation of roughly $100 million.
Using shareholding as a reward provides the intrapreneur with a strong vested interest in the project they are building. They develop and operate the project as if it is their own business. In Henry’s case, he chose to sell his shares back to Quantum. Employees might instead opt to keep their minority shareholding and right to dividends.
When you reward employees with shares, consider building in a vesting period to encourage long-term behavior. Awarding shares at an early stage, in only one allocation, might promote excessive risk-taking. A shareholding vesting mechanism could vest a portion of shares over several years or vest them based on performance.
Some corporations already have a corporate shareholding plan for employees. Based on employee performance, they are granted a small number of shares in the corporation (not the new business). Those incentives work quite well for senior management and, in general, all employees as they benefit from the overall growth of the company. However, motivating intrapreneurs using corporate shares might not work effectively as the linkage is weak. At an early stage, the revenue or cost-saving contribution of the innovation the intrapreneur is working on is too insignificant to influence the stock price of the corporate shares.