Turbulent and changing economic situations can give you both challenges and opportunities. If you are switched on and prepared to stand back from your day-to-day operational needs (not easy to do in a changing environment) you might be able to see some great opportunities in offering an entrepreneurial route to your employees
One such great opportunities lies in liberating your employees to run their own business. I don’t mean let them go off and start their own enterprise (that could be a solution – more on this later), but I do mean to adopt an entrepreneurial approach to their role as part of your firm.
Having an open discussion and supporting and encouraging your team to adopt this outlook can help both your firm and your employees grow and develop. This needs to be closely aligned with your appetite for risk as a firm. If you are facing challenges and your appetite to risk in a volatile world is changing, exploring an entrepreneurial approach can offer you new and creative ways of working. Here are the major benefits we see when professional service firms take up this approach.
Employees feeling empowered and heard. Think about what running your own enterprise means. You get to steer the ship, you get to set the direction and take more control of day to day operations. This ties in very closely with purpose part of Dan Pinks work around motivation – see his book “Drive” to understand a little more about motivation and his three sided approach of “autonomy, mastery and purpose”. Giving more control can help you harness peoples innate ability and experience to help grow your firm right at the front line.
Creating new ideas and improved ways of working. You might find that the team around you has some great ideas on services that can be improved or developed to really help engage more of your clients. Too often these ideas go unspoken. This can be because the culture and environment of some firms is based around doing what we have always done, or simply looking for incremental improvements in your current work rather than the step change that comes with exponential mindset. This is the mindset that challenges and says “there must be a better way to do this…”
Agility and speed of solutions can come quicker. By giving more authority to deal with challenges, issues or complaints and empowering people to take ownership to resolve client issues at the front line can overcome the over complex and slow systems that may have grown in more stable times. That speed advantage that smaller firms can have can be overcome in the largest organisation by refocusing on the client and empowering the team.
Connecting up the dots around income and expenditure. It’s far too easy for employees to lose the link between income and expenditure.
Just the other day I overheard two employees of a well know professional services firm say “Oh, I don’t get paid to do that, so I am not worried about it”. Everything that happens in your own enterprise is critical for you. As a business owner you wouldn’t walk past something that wasn’t working (this is what the two people I overheard were doing). If it was your business, you would either tackle it directly to resolve it, or you would pull together the right people in the firm to fix it. Thinking more commercially can help each employee make the most out of every internal and external stakeholder relationship.
Maximising client profitability. One key skill entrepreneurial staff develop is that of understanding how working with the right clients and doing the right things for them gets both you and your clients the right outcome. Entrepreneurial staff ask more searching questions of clients, they understand more of their clients world so they can help and serve them, and also to fully understand their clients perspective and world.
This deeper client knowledge can be applied in each subsequent client interaction to inform, educate and improve each transaction.
Breaking down silos and department-based working. Taking an entrepreneurial approach to your role means breaking down internal barriers, maximising the resources a firm can offer and working for the whole firm and not just your department or team. Encouraging your staff to look at the whole client experience and needs can help retail a client for more work over a longer period. Great entrepreneurs look for long term client value, not just this current piece of work in front of them.
Now you might be thinking this all sounds fantastic (and it generally is), and there are some barriers and areas to consider when starting on thispath.
Not every employee will get this and will need help and support to step away from the “employee” mindset to adopt these new approaches more readily. They might need training, mentoring, or coaching to help them build their confidence and competence when it comes to taking this step.
You need to overcommunicate! Be clear on exactly what you are asking your team to do, check in regularly to both celebrate successes and to identify and support when challenges arise.
Set clear guidelines and boundaries. If you are a legal firm, you don’t want people setting up their own in house bakery! All their entrepreneurial activities need to be based around your mission and vision as a firm.
As a final though you may have some employees in your firm that have this drive, desire and entrepreneurial passion burning within them. You need to decide as a firm, do you want to fan these flames and help them harness this energy in your firm, or do you want to help them on their way to set up their own firm. Sometimes this is the right approach for you and for them. Make sure you understand where your key players are and how much of this entrepreneurial spirit you want them to apply to their own role. It’s those with the entrepreneurial approach that can really help you and your firm survive and thrive in challenging times.