‘Hintrapreneurs’ should be seeking support not permission

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Organisations, and specifically HR, need to ensure that they are always encouraging everybody to make the best possible contribution – but how can this be achieved? It can be difficult to know where to start sometimes. I’d recommend the very first steps – recognising when employees are showing the signs of innovation, or ‘intrapreneurship’. But how can HR practitioners encourage it, capitalise on it and even adopt it themselves? Where we find intrapreneurs we find innovation, engagement, high performance and most interestingly of all the catalyst is choice. It’s the choice to be engaged, to perform well and use discretionary effort and the choice to be brave, different and to stand out.

There are also two key things that need highlighting about this ‘intrapreneurial zone’. Your ambassadors are those really engaged, switched on and happening people. Your mavericks are still switched on and make things happen but maybe more for personal gain and satisfaction than true corporate and organisational spirit. There is more risk with mavericks, yet with the right leadership and culture, they can become ambassadors with the opportunity to enhance their positives and risk-manage any toxicity. To push organisations forward there needs to be real focus on those intrapreneurs, what HR can do with/for them and what HR can do to be intrapreneurs themselves. Overall though, it’s the concept of ‘choice’ we’re interested in to understand more about these internal, innovative, ingenious people. Where there’s choice, there’s a route to engagement, which leads to more intrapreneurial potential. Capitalising on that potential means letting the intrapreneur make more and bigger choices, increasing their engagement further and creating a cycle of energy, curiosity and innovation.

Building that environment requires an emotional element to an organisation’s culture - the ‘Three Emotions of Business’. The choices made around high performance, engagement and trust are at play and more valuable where people LOVE what they do. DESIRE is then created in customers and partners and competitors who cannot figure out how you do what you do so will ultimately display ENVY!

My perspective is that intrapreneurs are vital in creating a fantastic place to work and a progressive organisation. They embody engagement, innovation and deliver an amazing customer experience that makes an organisation thrive and grow. I believe the future role of HR is to create an environment that promotes people to ‘choose’ to be intrapreneurial and step up to the challenges faced by their colleagues and the wider organisation.

So, this is the HR call to action - increase the font size of other business disciplines and areas whilst retaining the professional focus on your core HR practices. HR practitioners need to know more about the business - because the business won’t naturally let you know. My first recommendation is ‘go and find the experts and ask them about their part of the business’. Increase your understanding and create a stronger alliance with those in specialties like legal, marketing or finance. This is the additional insight HR practitioners need in order to grow their awareness of business issues and better serve them as experts on people-related issues. This is time spent strategically and, if tactically planned, doesn’t need to get in the way of the HR ‘day job’.

Alternative suggestions are to join business-related projects, form tactical groups around business and people issues and use media such as Twitter to keep abreast of your own company’s social media presence plus the external, expert thinking which you could bring to the table. I call it ‘filtwering’ - using Twitter as a filter for a mass of external data to help you hone in on the really good stuff you need to know.

Another perspective is to consider ‘If I ran my own business what would I know?’ Your language is a critical factor in being warmly received by your business colleagues so consider how you might use business language more effectively to achieve your desired outcomes. Less an HR business case, more a business impact case. Also, challenge your own language to be not just HR practitioners but more a ‘Business Practitioner Specialising in People’. If you position yourself differently, you’ll be seen differently.

My suggestion for the future is to use the term ‘HintRapreneur’ to merge the HR and intrapreneur handles.

So here’s the blueprint, or Haynes Manual that I call ‘The Strategy for Becoming Strategic’ – what I think HR needs to know, do and feel for future success. The blueprint is a simple one and it all starts with choice. Your choice to be a really exceptional professional, never satisfied with knowing just enough. HR practitioners need to draw a line in the sand. Whatever’s gone before, forget it and focus on the future. Choose from this point on to be a different kind of practitioner, a business-focused practitioner. This would become a virtuous circle where the choice of action could become bigger and more impactful, with engagement increasing as the feel of individual influence on organisational success is enhanced, which in turn sustains the intrapreneurial way of working.

Innovation in this sense helps push the business forward. Your desire to show how the specialties you have for people and organisational development has a direct link to sustainability of the organisation’s growth, market share, profitability, etc. - the ‘hard’ measures that CEOs and boards want and need to know. Starting with this point in mind and then working backwards to the specialist people interventions you are aiming to introduce will ensure you receive support and buy-in to your proposals.

The other, softer measures we know and love like absenteeism, staff turnover, mobility, etc. also need to feature, but HR practitioners already know these areas so can easily amalgamate the two measures for maximum impact and chances of success. This demonstration of effect on the business and not just the people proves your strategic importance and your journey to becoming a Business Practitioner with a specialism in People will be complete.

I would urge HR practitioners, budding ‘Hintrapreneurs’ to not seek permission to create this ‘movement’, more seek support by getting your business connections to run with your ideas and prove the concept before going ‘over ground’. So overall, if you have the LOVE of what you do, the DESIRE to do it with more business edge then you will be the ENVY of the professional world.