Key Takeaways

• Intrapreneurship is not a personality trait but a human capacity that leaders can enable or suppress through organizational design.
• Weak alignment between work, workplace, and workers produces fragility, while intentional alignment creates the conditions for adaptability and value creation.
• Small, repeatable leadership practices compound over time into cultures where people feel safe to think, experiment, and contribute beyond their roles.
• What leaders notice, name, and reward becomes cultural currency and signals whether initiative and curiosity are truly valued.
• Intrapreneurial cultures emerge when learning, trust, and shared purpose are designed into everyday work rather than treated as add-ons.

This article builds on my earlier post, “What Kind of Organization Are You Designing for the Disruptions Ahead?” In that post, I argued that nonprofit and educational leaders are always designing an interaction among work, workplace, and workers—either intentionally or by default. I believe that this design challenge is especially consequential today as leaders come to expect better results from people adopting rapidly evolving technologies such as A.I. and robotics in the workplace. I suggested that:

When the alignment efforts between work, workers, and workplace is weak or unintentional, organizations struggle to adapt to changing conditions. When realignment is strong and intentional, conditions for intrapreneurialism emerges.

So lets begin with a common conception of intraprenuerialism. Irena Yashin-Shaw defines intrapreneurialism as the enfranchisement and empowerment of people—liberating them to engage their enterprising talent in service of creating value for the organization. This framing is important because it reminds us that intrapreneurship is not a personality trait. It is a capacity that can be influenced by conditions leaders’ design.

In numerous public and private responses to my earlier post, one concern about intrapreneurialism in the workplace was mentioned repeatedly:

Even when leaders create supportive conditions, not everyone is willing or able to engage in intrapreneurial behavior.

Far too many people have learned—often over years—that effort often does not lead to impact, that taking risk can create negative consequences, or that what they are expected to do is often restricted to the narrow confines of their job description. So over time, the “good workers” protect themselves by staying quiet, sticking to what is expected, or waiting for direction. These responses are understandable and reinforced by the system they are in. Consequently, for leaders working to redesign a more intrapreneurial culture, in addition to redesigning work and workplaces, they may need to help team members transition from habits that once helped them succeed in the past to new habits that support intrapreneurialism.

I found a useful reminder in Lawrence and Nohria’s work on human motivation. Organizational systems often activate defensive behaviors when people feel pressure to protect status or avoid loss. In contrast, intrapreneurialism flourishes in organizational settings when people feel safe to learn and connected to other people through a shared purpose. Leaders have the potential to shift that balance.

What follows are seven practical and accessible suggestions for leaders to begin the journey of redesigning work, workplace, and workers in a way that enable people to utilize a broader range of their talents in service to adding value to their organizations.

Seven Practical Ways to Start Building an Intrapreneurial Culture

1. Learn about Intrapreneurship

Before asking people to act as intrapreneurs, I find it helpful to promote a shared understanding of the skills involved—such as opportunity recognition, experimentation, collaboration, and adaptive problem-solving. Learning about competency frameworks such as the one presented by Yashin-Shaw and Morrison-Beedy, can help to clarify and communicate these skills to others, and the value of liberating these skills, in a way that encourages intentional skill recognition and development.

2. Solicit Project Ideas

Recognizing that not everyone will be ready to step beyond their assigned roles, begin by soliciting project ideas and plans. Prioritize low-cost, low-risk improvement effort. Vet the submitted project ideas for their likelihood of success within a short time frame and potential impact—such as improving a work process, enhancing how clients are supported, or how you might appeal to a new customer segment.

3. Give People Time to Make Things Better

Often the best work improvement ideas come from those closest to work. However, those highly invested in doing the work often need time and support to work on how to change the way work is done. Set aside and announce that a portion of work time is dedicated for staff to explore improvements, test ideas, or adjust how work gets done. Making your commitment to staff using their time to make improvements visible signals that improving work is part of the job. Publicly acknowledge the people involved, the lessons gained, and the progress made as a way to celebrate intrapreneurs and to reinforce the idea that initiative and improvement are valued.

4. Enable Learning

There are lots of ways to build learning into the workplace. For example, one might encourage the sharing of articles on related subjects or encourage team members to attend a free webinar. Perhaps the lowest cost way to enable learning is to design learning opportunities into regular meetings. For example, I enjoy facilitating “possibility discussions.” As a meeting facilitator you might ask broad learning and improvement questions such as: “What are we noticing, or what might we do, that may matter later?” This type of question, embedded in regular meeting time, can build collective sensemaking while inviting people to contribute insights. Track and record insights and acknowledge contributors.

5. Bring People Together Across Boundaries

The Center for Creative Leadership has published papers on boundary spanning in action, acknowledging that there are no shortage of boundaries that divide us and challenge how we live and work. These boundaries include but are not limited to borders, barriers, roles, status, limits, obstacles, and constraints. And yet, in organizations boundaries can reveal new frontiers for solving pressing problems, driving innovation, and leading breakthrough change.

I have found that successful organizational changes often require attention across boundaries. Neglecting boundary effects, a proposed change in one part of the organization may have significant negative ripple effects in other parts of the organization. To avoid optimizing one part of the organization at the expense of other parts, leaders can put problems and possibility discussions in front of short-term, cross-functional teams.

I find that boundary spanning collaboration expands perspective, strengthens relationships, and helps people to responsibly see the organization as a connected system.

6. Notice and Name Intrapreneurial Behavior

People watch what leaders notice. They also seek feedback in what their leaders say and don’t say. What you as a leader notice and name becomes cultural currency to team members—and signals what is truly valued by you and the organization. Publicly recognizing when people question assumptions, suggest improvements, respond creatively to challenges, or take initiative is one of the highest leverage and lowest cost leadership actions you can take as a leader. My hypothesis is that clarifying desired skills and is more likely to contribute to a workplace environment where people feel safe in contributing outside of their role, and reinforces the value of people taking initiative around shared purpose. I’d love to do this research!

7. Help Team Members Ask Intrapreneurial Questions

There are micro-behaviors, including the questions we ask, that can either unlock or shut down intrapreneurial energy. Questions sometimes disguised as seeking information or testing understanding, can signal power, intent, or premeditated judgment. Alternatively, intrapreneurial questions are constructed and asked as a way to signal curiosity and not judgment, invite shared sensemaking, expand possibilities under consideration, and foster collective ownership.  Asking the right questions is an executive skill.

Why I believe These Practices Work

It should be noted that I stuck to ideas that I believe do not require new departments, large budgets, or complex organizational redesigns. They are all practices I’ve applied over the years or observed others apply with some success. Each are small acts, repeatable, and sustainable—and I believe they work because they realign work, workplace, and workers around learning, trust, and shared responsibility.

Peter Drucker once famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Culture cannot be created overnight. It must be tended over time, with each design choice, and properly reinforced and incentivized. A leader’s small design choices compound into a culture where people feel free to think, contribute, and adapt—exactly the conditions intrapreneurs need to thrive.

As you approach the new year, consider this question:

Which of these practices would make the biggest difference in how my team members show up—and what might it look like to try one or more of these practices?

In a restless workplace where technological advancements are occurring at a more rapid pace and featured more prominently in the realignment of work, workers, and workplace, mission-driven organizations deserve human systems designed not just for stability, but for learning, adaptation, and growth. As a leader you can redesign a workplace where people are trusted to think, empowered to act, and supported to strengthen the mission from within.

*This article originally appeared in LinkedIn