How to Identify Intrapreneurial Talent Within Your Organisation?

With constant change looming over senior managers, employees with entrepreneurial attitude are increasingly important for organisations. These intrapreneurs operate with the same talents as entrepreneurs, but from within established organisations.

Ten innate psychological characteristics of both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs able to deliver economic energy and impact:

• Confidence
• Delegation
• Determination
• Disruption
• Independence
• Knowledge
• Profitability
• Relationship
• Risk
• Selling

By looking for individuals who exhibit these ten characteristics, organisations can identify which individuals should step out of their current operational role and help build the future.

So, what does this combination of talents actually look like in practice?

There are five top skills that characterize intrapreneurial talent:

Endorsements

Paying attention to peer recommendations is useful in two ways. While it’s important to note who is praised, it’s equally significant to note those with intrapreneurial leadership qualities who regularly promote the gifts of others.

These individuals are also likely to demonstrate competence when speaking about their personal contributions. Simply put, talent sees talent.

‘Plusses’

Intrapreneurs are likely to build on the contributions of others by regularly ‘plussing’ ideas.

The best intrapreneurial leaders may well be visionary, but they won’t exclusively focus on their own ideas. When coaching innovation teams, the more promotable individuals share a genuine curiosity to explore off-centre ideas and find ways to turn them into viable realities.

Intentional Practice

This skill is noticeable in structures where managing incremental innovations is someone’s day job and transformational innovation happens in another department. Intrapreneurs will often explore leads to secure new experiences and develop adjacent intrapreneurial skills. These individuals will intentionally go above and beyond the call of duty to deliver the best possible results.

Co-Creation

Good line managers know how to leverage the strengths of their team. However, siloed projects are no longer useful as those with refined intrapreneurial skills invite and mobilise team members that fall outside of their strict remit. As they look to identify blindspots and make progress, these stand-out individuals make collaboration feel like equal co-creation.

Conversation Starters

Some of the most inspired individuals aren’t afraid to test long-held assumptions. Those with distinct entrepreneurial talent generally accept principles into a conversation, seek evidence to validate old schools of thought, or introduce new data-backed propositions. Resistance to such revisions was often more of an indication of the management’s lack of readiness to accept change — further motivating them to collect the facts.

You can review a collection of successful intrapreneurship examples that we collected over the years here.

Originally published on StudioZao.com by Teresa Kotlicka, People and Culture Development Specialist.

If you are interested into Intrapreneurship, why not checking out our online Intrapreneurship course?