Five Ways to Harness the Entrepreneurial Spirit at Your Company

When someone says they’re a founder of a startup, everyone knows that person is an entrepreneur, but that’s not the only way to practice entrepreneurship. Those working at larger, established companies who want to be the most agile and successful have to learn how to harness and deploy their entrepreneurial spirit. Their companies may feel less ripe for entrepreneurial ideas but still need startup features like creative people and teams, disruptive ideas and nimbleness in order to remain competitive.

In my experience founding multiple successful companies and sticking with startups while they grew, I learned that there are five key ways to harness the entrepreneurial spirit in any company. These ways include hiring creative types, ensuring teams are diverse, fostering collaboration in new ways, protecting time for creative thought and rewarding agility and change making.

Hire The Right People -- Without Bias

You’ll note that most of this list has to do with people and how they work together versus a focus on customers or on any specific product-market concept. That’s because attracting and hiring smart, creative people into your company is the single biggest way I've found to be an entrepreneur in your own company. On its face, the definition doesn’t seem to fit; after all, being “entrepreneurial” basically means taking some financial risk to achieve high multiples in return, right? I argue that the word means far more than that. It means taking risks -- beyond just financial ones -- to build a sustainable venture. People can be a company’s biggest assets and its biggest risks. I’ve written elsewhere about how to combat unconscious bias in hiring, a key component of securing good people with whom to work, and that’s a very important part of the hiring process: making sure that it’s fair. Among the ways to avoid such biases are by tackling them head-on, teaching those involved in the hiring process about what bias is and how to avoid it in hiring and in general, and implementing rubrics for hiring and other tools that will help you to focus on specific qualifications rather than on specific people.

Another important component of hiring is making sure to protect space for creative types as your company grows. Not everyone who submits a resume is going to check every box of your requirements. Read between the lines to find people who are smart, flexible and agile. That kind of energy and creativity is what you need to harness in order to gain the benefit of fresh ideas.

Create Diverse Teams

Speaking of fresh ideas, I don't know of a better way to get them than to make sure work teams are diverse, and I’m not just talking about gender or ethnicity. The death knell of some companies can be found in their silos. A room full of engineers sitting around talking about products all day won’t usually make a product as fast or as well as a rounded product team composed of those engineers alongside product managers, customer service representatives, marketers and others with valuable input. When a startup is small, in all likelihood, everyone is involved in many aspects of the business. Somewhere along the way, many companies lose that level of connectedness and shared knowledge. Being an entrepreneur in your company means recognizing that input from top to bottom and across departments in your organization is critical.

Foster Collaboration

One way to share fresh ideas from diverse teams is by fostering a culture of collaboration. To help connect threads of a common purpose across your organization, consider implementing collaboration software. (My company offers some, but there are many options available.) Gone are the days of wondering “who else knows this?” when you're reading an email. Collaborating mindfully using those tools takes a lot of guesswork and time-consuming tasks like responding to emails out of the picture. This is one way in which you can integrate diverse teams by bringing them together in a virtual space. Collaboration software isn't the only way to collaborate mindfully. Open seating arrangements are another thing to consider. Not everyone is a fan of such spaces, but working without walls literally removes barriers to collaboration. It’s important to note that fostering collaboration may involve shifting to a culture that’s supportive of it. A culture change from one where employees work in silos to one where they work in shared ways is a big shift, but it’s very worthwhile.

Protect Time For Creativity

Especially in fast-paced, high-tech companies, time is a commodity that is nearly priceless. I continue to marvel at how much of it is wasted, especially in meetings. Disrupting the meeting model is entrepreneurial at its core: Time is money, and no one wants to waste money. That said, time is well spent on creative thought, and sometimes that needs to happen via group brainstorming sessions or even just via protecting time alone to think. I prize my Fridays and try to schedule as little as possible on those days, as that’s my best creative space. Carving out time to be creative isn’t a luxury; it’s essential for both personal growth and for the growth of business ideas.

Reward New Ideas

Ideas that have real legs can come from that creative space, from collaborating well, and from diverse teams. Great new ideas can push companies in the best of new directions. These turns in the road should be welcomed, embraced, and rewarded. A company can stay entrepreneurial even post-IPO, when the staff is in the hundreds or even thousands, if creativity and change making are rewarded.

There are many ways to be an entrepreneur in your own company. Hiring smart, creative people, compiling diverse teams, fostering collaboration, protecting creative space and rewarding changemaking are five of the ones I value most -- in addition to remaining relentlessly focused on measurable results and well-defined objectives and adjusting to market forces as you go. It’s exciting to think of the ability to remain in a startup mentality while being part of a large company, isn’t it? What might you add to my list?

Originally published on Forbes