Being an intrapreneur takes more than a good idea
Natalia Christenson, Marketing Strategy, IBM Watson
As the ranks of millennials in the workforce grows, so will the influence they wield on a company’s culture. But their impact transcends their need for feedback, preference for teamwork, or expectations for career advancement.
Many millennials don’t like to be stuck in organizational status quo. They want to help shape their company by contributing unorthodox ideas that shake up expectations and make a difference.
Despite conventional wisdom, it’s not always harder to spearhead disruption or rally skunkworks initiatives within a big company. Both large and small companies can present opportunities for intrapreneurs to shake things up.
However, no matter where you work, it’s a long and winding road between a good idea and successful execution. Let’s say you want introduce a new marketing approach that breaks into an area — like sports, food or fashion — that resonates with millennials in ways your company hasn’t really tried. Or your marketing team hasn’t fully committed to trying new channels, like Snapchat or Reddit, that are a beeline to reaching millennials. You know your idea will raise eyebrows, or worse, but you know it’s the right way to go.
Where do you begin? how do you build support? and how do you get your voice and idea heard?
1. Be the mini-CEO of your idea. That means doing your research, being strategic, gathering evidence, and laying out a clear, actionable proposal with milestones and a timeline. Share your plan with stakeholders and people who can help you. Build consensus with peers and senior executives whose support and approval you’ll need along the way.
2. Think like a quarterback. Take full responsibility for achieving your milestones and be accountable for delivering what you promise. And don’t wait for someone to tell you what to do: anticipate a few steps ahead so you don’t lurch from deadline to deadline. At every juncture, imagine you are presenting to your boss — what would you be asked to do next?
3. Build your base. Learn from experts around you and make sure they feel vested in your goal. The probability of success is greater when you rally support and get valuable contributions from others. Let your results speak for themselves and find meaning and fulfillment in your progress, and don’t be preoccupied with who gets credit.
I was part of a small team that worked to create the cognitive dress. We saw the entire project through, from its inception to the red carpet. I worked alongside a band of dedicated business and technical experts to gain consensus, learn, and quickly move the project along. With no coding experience or prior knowledge of how to design a “digital experience,” I managed to identify peers who could help me figure out what needed to be done.
Not every skunkworks project will be as glamorous as the dress. Sometimes incremental changes in a program make a big difference. Earlier this year my company launched a new performance management system that uses continuous feedback. Regular feedback can be easier said than done — it can be time consuming, uncomfortable, even painful. A group of millennials decided to create a mobile app so managers and their teams could provide informal feedback on the go. It was a small project but it made a massive corporate program more relatable to digital natives.
So don’t sit on your hands if you have a good idea — figure out how to make it work. But remember that a good idea doesn’t reach the finish line all by itself!
