How to Encourage Entrepreneurial Thinking on Your Team

While there’s no magic bullet that will make an organization more innovative overnight, there are some things managers can be doing to encourage entrepreneurial thinking on their teams. First, get comfortable with failure. Whether someone is proposing a small improvement or a major industry-defining technical pivot, employees should have the expectation that their performance will be measured by their level of ingenuity and initiative, and not by their ability to play it safe. Individuals need to have a sense of ownership in order to allow themselves to try things that haven’t been tried before, and to let their inspirations morph into practical solutions. To help achieve this, new initiatives should be allowed to run independently from the usual way of doing business because they may require a new set of processes to be successful. Encourage team members to get outside perspectives that have nothing to do with their work, which can help teams generate new ideas in ways that could not possibly be predicted. Put full confidence in your team to try new things, and then promptly get out of their way.