Why Networking Is One Of The Most Overlooked Intrapreneurship Skills

When it comes to defining employees’ entrepreneurial mindset and tools, or intrapreneurship skills, within large, established organisations, two crucial elements very often overlooked are networking and stakeholder management. 

Intrapreneurs are often defined as creative problem solvers, able to manage risk and navigate ambiguity, equipped with a resilient growth mindset and, finally, resourceful individuals able to move at a fast pace.

However, some crucial intrapreneurship skills are very often overlooked: the ability to network and manage stakeholders.

Intrapreneurs do not work alone

Intrapreneurs are part of a larger organisation. Throughout our activity at Studio Zao, we have never ever seen an intrapreneur succeeding alone.

They may be often right and have a great vision for the future of their company, but getting along well with the rest of the team, being able to create a strong network and break silos to collaborate effectively is often more important. 

One of the advantages of being an intrapreneur is that they have the opportunity to leverage the vast amount of resources and insights available within the organisation they work for.

This puts them in an incredibly advantageous position compared to an entrepreneur wanting to launch exactly the same business idea. However, it’s a crucial success factor for intrapreneurs to be able to navigate internal politics and generate support and momentum across stakeholders to ensure their innovation initiative will be eventually deployed. 

Intrapreneurs get their strength from the rest of the organisation. At one simple condition though: they need to be able to bring the organisation with them, and manage their stakeholders with excellent emotional intelligence and awareness of the c

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Intrapreneurs are great at networking

When we were working for large organisations ourselves, we were regulars at water coolers, corporate canteens and coffee bars, and got the best deals with colleagues and senior stakeholders done over an informal coffee or a lunch rather than an official meeting. In unofficial settings, people tend to open up more freely, and do not feel like they have to play certain roles as it often happens during regular meetings.

Sometimes we would prepare the field for a key meeting where we were hoping to secure approval for an innovation project by having lunches and coffees with all the participants in advance so that we could preempt any critical point or observation, and crucially take action before the actual big day. 

“We would discuss the idea with all the stakeholders and decision-makers in advance, framing the opportunity in their best interest, looking for objections and preparing to address them, and looking for support.”

We would then use these insights to iterate our idea, following up with our colleagues to ensure they understood that their observations were being taken into consideration. Then we would finally have the large official meeting with senior executives to get final approval, knowing that everyone at the table was on the same page.

This kind of exercise, strictly done on a one-to-one basis, has been critical to our success as intrapreneurs, as we would find much fewer surprises and curveballs being thrown at us while pitching to senior leaders. A much more comfortable situation as opposed to going blind into a key presentation. Eventually, we realised that the more we would do this preparation work, the more our likelihood to succeed would increase.

Being able to manage stakeholders and nurture a great network is the paramount capability of a great intrapreneur, and it’s probably the biggest failing point for aspiring intrapreneurs.