From Employee to Intrapreneur

Being an intrapreneur starts with beginning to take control of your experience being an employee, whatever your position may be. You must think of yourself as a “resource” not as an “employee”.

Allthough nothing changes from the outside, your view on the world will start to change. You will ask yourself a view important questions, like:

• Do I have this job because my employer wants to, or because of my skills?

• Are there other people that do the same as I do? How do they do this, and why do they do this better or worse then me?

• How can I become the best at what I do for my employer? (Today?, Tomorrow?, Next Year?)

• Do I have fun at what I’m doing, or is it just for the cash?

Intrapreneurs ask themselves such questions, they change their perceptions, and take control of their experience being an employee. But of course Intrapreneurs will not only ask questions, they will search for answers too. And even more important, they react on the answers found.

So how do you do this? For example:

• Read books, journals and blogs on what you do, and the business field you are in. Often intrapreneurs are authors of magazine articles, blogs, white papers and books (for writing tips, see Capture. Deliver. Excel.). Becoming an expert is easy, staying an expert is a never-ending process!

• Join associations of people who do what you do. This gives you direct access to peers in your business field, to learn from them, as well as a platform to potentially show them your best practices.

• Share information. Information is one of the most important things in nowadays business. Collect it, filter it, and share the important. Your colleagues, your peers, and your management, they all will be grateful.

• Be constant looking, reading and exploring the processes around you. In the worst case you will learn to understand them, in the best case you have good ideas to improve them (and then you have to take the next step: Pitching your Idea).

• Deliver what you promise. In other words, getting things done! Be reliable for your colleauges and your management. You don’t have to say yes to everything, but when you say it: Do it!

• Expand your horizons. Picture yourself and your career in the future. Ask yourself where you want to be in five years, believe it, and start working today on your skills and knowledge to reach these goals.

Intrapreneurs, in almost all cases, have a vision or plan for themselves. While no plan is perfect it does have a goal to be reached. And when the environment (or the plan) changes, they will have the guts and the will to make it work.

All of today's intrapreneurs are employees that decided they were going to grow and evolve. First to the best at what they do, then the best on their team, then best in their company and then evolve to being recognized among their peers in the business field they work in (at least that is the plan :-)).

When you have read this, and recognize yourself as an intrapreneur, then have a look at The Art of Intrapreneurship.