Most leaders want more creativity, innovation and change from their people. They want the owner mentality to be a guiding force behind daily decisions and actions. They need individuals to become internal entrepreneurs, or Intrapreneurs. However, transforming an existing employee into an intrapreneur, while an admirable goal, is much easier said than done.  From my experience in helping thousands of employees make this journey, here are the common barriers that, left unattended, will stop the transformation to intrapreneur in its tracks.

• When asked to contribute more value and become intrapreneurial, most people will think (but not say), “I wasn’t hired to do that. My job description says nothing about that. I hate it when they ask me to do that!”

• Existing workers have already been affected (infected?) by the non-intrapreneur culture. It is therefore easier to maintain the status quo. In most cultures, it normally takes only weeks to calcify new hires. Think of how entrenched your more seasoned personnel are when it comes to a lack of creativity, innovation and change, and how quickly newbies learn from tenured coworkers the mantra, “this is how we’ve always done it.” Inertia is a difficult force to overcome.

• Even if your existing personnel should suddenly want to step up and become more valuable to the bottom line, they probably don’t know how to do it. Intrapreneurial skills, knowledge and abilities are often missing, even in the most willing of workers and the most conducive of cultures. In the absence of these seemingly necessary factors, the fear of failure will overcome any desire to try.

A Different Approach

Instead of trying to transform existing employees into intrapreneurs, perhaps you should concentrate your future recruiting efforts on finding intrapreneurs that can transform (infect!) your existing workforce.  This infectious intrapreneurship from new entrants must be carefully orchestrated, however, or the collective will absorb them, and resistance on their part may indeed be futile. Consider the following six steps (job seekers and career upgraders, take note of how you can position yourselves as intrapreneurs by understanding and taking advantage of these leverage points):

1. Screen and Recruit Them Differently. In order to find intrapreneurs who will infuse their soon-to-be peers with a heightened ambition for business value creation, it is absolutely critical to filter for the right capabilities during the recruitment stage. Chris Kelly, CEO Survata, has been separating strong candidates from the weak with the simple question, “Do you want to start your own business someday?” According to Kelly, “Anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur at some point in the future will be more likely to exhibit the intrapreneurial tendencies of business value creation, reasonable risk-taking, problem-solving, and outside-the-box thinking while working for me in the near term. If they turn out to be indispensable to my company, I’ll find ways to keep them for as long as possible.” For related reading on this topic, see a previous article: Want To Be An Entrepreneur?

Job seekers, how can you show a greater propensity toward intrapreneurship during the application and interview process? Hint: Do you have a history of reducing costs or increasing revenues? If so, bring the details to your first meetings with prospective employers. They will be duly impressed with any sign that you can think and act like an owner while working for someone else.

2. Hire Them With a Different Understanding. When hiring an intrapreneur it is necessary to set certain expectations. For example, they need a different job description than a “normal” hire. This job description (regardless of position) should include duties like “will take on and solve major problems, will improve the customer experience wherever possible, will propose new product/service ideas based on customer feedback, will find ways to reduce expenses and streamline processes.” An intrapreneur must never have a reason to think, “They didn’t hire me to do these things.” They must also know that there will be adequate recognition, reward and career path opportunities if they succeed. These incentives should of course be extended to all existing employees, but they are especially important when hiring an intrapreneur. It’s all about bringing on the best candidates, and then bringing out their best once they’re on board. Jim Mulato, President Astronics Test Systems (ATS) in Irvine, California, cites the need to, “Hire people who will connect the dots and see beyond their personal duties.” Mulato continues, “Then we can help them apply their capabilities to problems average employees would never tackle.”

Intrapreneurs, to increase your chances of being hired into that dream job at a great company, are you prepared to show problem-solving prowess above and beyond a normal, narrow job description?

3. Insulate Them From the Existing Culture. “The challenge that I lose sleep over is when you introduce an intrapreneur into a group of people who are not used to thinking and acting that way,” laments Lisa George, VP Global Talent Management at Cardinal Health. “Their ideas may get rejected. Intrapreneurs are innovators, so if those around them don’t validate their ideas, they can often feel lonely; like they don’t fit. Intrapreneurs are more future-oriented and aspirational, so leaders need to protect them for a period of time to allow them to be a positive disruptor, and those new behaviors/ideas to take root.” If leaders don’t heed this counsel, the felt need for intrapreneurs to conform to surrounding attitudes will drive them deeper into the existing culture, rather than enable them to help pull the culture in a more beneficial direction.

Recruits, do you have personal stories of when you went against the prevailing wisdom of the group, and by so doing, produced a huge win for a past employer? You can’t rely solely on management to help you do this in the future—you must show a history of immunity to peer influences that are detrimental to business outcomes.

4. Support Them Through Their Failures. Despite their best efforts, there will be times when your intrapreneurs just won’t have the right skills, knowledge, abilities or tools to make the contributions you hired them to make. This means they will make mistakes and they need to know you have their backs. “We have found that we need to empower and give ownership to intrapreneurs, and that includes permission to mess up,” reflects Wain Kellum, President Vonage Business Solutions. “When they make mistakes, we want them to let us know their thought process, and learn how to do better in the future. Often times mistakes are not intentional and can be used as teachable moments not only for one employee, but also possibly for the company as a whole. We don’t want fear of failure to hold people back.”

Job seekers, do you want to be the strongest candidate for your next position? Tell of a time when you made a huge blunder, and how you recovered from it by learning, applying new thinking, and eventually producing a better-than-expected outcome as a result. Everyone makes mistakes. Intrapreneurs make the most of them.

5. Recognize and Reward Them Visibly.  To keep intrapreneurship alive you will need to feed it. Highlighting every instance of it via formal and informal recognition and rewards is how you feed it well. Who gets bonuses, pay raises, promotions, or even a lunch with the CEO in your organization? If it’s not your intrapreneurs, then you are not fostering that behavior as much as you could be. Steve Lee, Lumisource CEO, has found great success in attracting intrapreneurs at the intern level every year. “These young people bring some of the freshest thinking in our industry, and we are thrilled to recognize and reward them for new product and design innovation. We would not be where we are without them.” Lee starts each intern out at a certain pay level, which increases as they add value. Ultimately, the high performers are brought on full-time, directly out of college. Intrapreneurship has its privileges.

Intrapreneurs, aside from producing noteworthy acts of innovation yourself, a good way to show your worth to a company is to recognize others’ efforts in this arena. Talk about your favorite innovation that came from a colleague, how you were able to help implement it, how you built upon it and made it even more useful, and how much you enjoyed seeing someone else get deserved credit for a job well done.

6. Replicate Them From Within (infect your existing workforce). With a strong (albeit small) team of well-vetted, on-boarded, protected, supported and recognized intrapreneurs in place, you are ready to move to the infectious phase of your strategy. Success on the part of a small group within your company can overcome cultural inertia, mitigate fear of failure, and allow non-intrapreneurs to mimic skills and behaviors that will raise the bar on everyone’s performance. When more seasoned employees see that the fruits of success (bonuses, newsletter mentions, promotions, peer approval, etc.) are more readily accessed through intrapreneurship, they will be more inclined to participate.

To the upwardly mobile: Do you have a track record of infecting others with your passion and powers of persuasion? Make the case that you will not only be an intrapreneur, but will also convert others to this way of life, and you’re in—you’ve got the job.

Maybe every organization’s next hire should be an intrapreneur, no matter the position. Don’t hire just a secretary, machinist, engineer, salesperson, manager or executive. Make sure you also get intrapreneurs in the bargain and grow this valuable competitive advantage from within.

If you know of organizations that have mastered the art of attracting intrapreneurs, let me know. I’d like to write about them.