Want to Drive Employee Engagement and Innovation? Try Intrapreneurship

The latest research on employee engagement drives the point that most people approach their work on one of three levels. The 3 levels are:

Level 1. As a job, which equates more or less to purely working for the money...it pays the bills...it allows them to live the lifestyle they have chosen.

Level 2. As a career and the desire to progress along a chosen career path and be promoted as they gain more experience and expertize.

Level 3. As a calling with meaning and to see their work as contributing to something greater or seeing a direct link between what they do and how it benefits the greater purpose and cause of the enterprise they work in.

The more Level-3 employees you have, the higher the level of engagement...and higher engagement results in more employees dedicating their disposable time to their work and still feeling good about it.

Intrapreneurs work at level 3. Those individuals in your organization that seek to bring innovations to market and create successful new businesses or lines of business are driven by something more than a career. They certainly put in way too much time, effort, energy, and dedicate way too much mind-share to simply be driven by money or to view their efforts as a well-calculated career move. Intrapreneurs want to contribute to something bigger and are usually driven by your customers’ repeated pleas for a better solution to their problems.

Your challenge as a business or department leader is to remove all the corporate roadblocks that stifle corporate entrepreneurship (intrapreneurship) and therefore limit employee engagement. These roadblocks cover an array of issues including corporate culture, corporate governance, misalignment amongst P&Ls, resistance to change, operational practices, metrics and KPIs, and many more. Launching an innovation initiative without proactively identifying and removing the corporate roadblocks that lay ahead is a very high risk proposition that will lead to failure. You can read more about this and find solutions proven in the real world in my new book, Winning at Intrapreneurship: 12 Labors to Overcome Corporate Culture and Achieve Startup Success.