The American Dream is a wonderful thing – it has liberated hundreds of thousands from the 9 – 5, and also shown that entrepreneurship isn’t just a way of life, but a successful mantra by which to live. Now, with the internet, it has gotten even easier to grow a business from something small into a huge colossus that you can truly be proud of.
The entrepreneurial spirit is a special one that doesn’t want to be tied down behind a desk, following orders: it’s a creative, free spirit that wants the liberty to pursue new ideas and create something that’s unique.
However, let’s say your vision has grown to the point where you’re now running a company, or at least managing employees remotely across the world. This is a whole new board game, and it is worth remembering that even though these guys are being paid to work for you, they’re not necessarily going to have a hugely entrepreneurial spirit themselves – after all, we all need a job.
If you want to boost your company’s entrepreneurial spirit and reap the rewards that it brings, then you will also need to foster that culture within it. In other words, if you want employees that share your drive, enthusiasm, vision, and ability to solve tricky problems on the spot, then you need to encourage it.
The first and most important thing to teach your workforce, then, is that the entrepreneurial spirit isn’t just another position at Acme Co., it’s a mindset. Rather than associating the word entrepreneur with someone who simply starts up a company, the definition is fast moving towards something closer to “opportunity taker”.
That’s to say, the mindset is always focused on the opportunity and what it could represent, rather than simply building a business. Encouraging your workforce to adopt this way of thinking – to always be on the lookout for something that could massively improve the business and grow it, is vital to developing this spirit.
In addition to this, encouraging innovation along with this is a great way to foster that creativity that we all have inside us. We all know intuitively that working at a large business – particularly a traditional one – can squash any independent thought and innovation. But working in a dynamic environment that celebrates it can lead a company to new and exciting places that few other businesses have been before.
How can you foster this? One of the easiest ways is actually simply to tell employees that they should spend a fixed amount of time on independent ideas – ideas that don’t necessarily need a green stamp from you to pass.
While this lack of control can seem scary to some business owners, consider it another way: you’re letting other people be creative problem solvers, and every business has an issue. If there’s an issue, everyone has ideas on how to fix it – and one of those ideas might just be the next great idea.
Take Post-It notes, for example: these useful pads to jot notes down are just about everywhere these days – but they were actually a radical innovation from 3M back in the 1970s when they allowed employees to come up with these kinds of ideas. As it turns out, this was a hit, and they’re now a global phenomenon. Not bad for a bit of paper with some glue on the back, right?
In addition to encouraging innovation and the mindset of entrepreneurialism, you’ll also want to inject a healthy dose of competition into the team. Not too much: it’s not war you need, but that little zest of competition to grow incentive and push innovation to “beat” the other guys.
In turn, productivity skyrockets along with the results of that competition. It can be as simple as telling your workforce that whoever has the most innovative and creative ideas that boosts the most sales get something, or it can be linked to other rewards.
In time, you may find that encouraging competition naturally instils that desire to always grow and outdo previous work, demonstrating that your company is on the cutting edge, willing to try new things to and push forward to create something that’s bigger, bolder, and better than what anyone else has on the marketplace.
If all else fails, you can also hire someone who is filled with the spirit of entrepreneurialism. Not everyone has this spirit, and some people simply will resist all efforts you make to introduce it. That’s not to say you should fire them: they may be excellent workers who simply don’t share the vision of entrepreneurs, nor want to pretend to.
If that’s the case, you should consider going the straight route and making hires of people who already have this spirit. Though it can be hard to spot at first, you just need to listen to them when they describe their goals: a pen-pusher has very different ideas to someone who wants to change the world for example.
Ideally, you want an office that’s packed with people ready to learn, willing to experiment and apply those results, share their brilliant ideas and partner up with others to create something that’s special: a place where the experience of creating a new idea is more than the end result.
If you can get that, then you truly have a company that you can be proud of – one that’s moving towards a bright future.