Robert J. Oravitz, MBA

You’re sitting at your desk after the Monday morning team huddle. Everyone left the meeting with the usual boost in confidence and a bounce in their step toward creativity. But what about you? Why no bounce? As a veteran of the productivity and creativity wars, you’ve been here before. Good ideas, the right people around you, but only a weak feeling that you’re going in the right direction. It might just be the time for a personality adjustment.

An accepted mentality is that entrepreneurs are people who find business and life success working for themselves in a successful niche start-up or the division of the family business they inherited. If you happen to be neither the captain of a start-up or the heir of a family company, consider adopting an entrepreneur’s attitude right where you are and become and intrapreneur.

What does an intrapreneur look like? Look in the mirror. It’s the new you; with an admiration for creative freedom, and complete confidence in your leadership ignited by a passion for risk taking. An intrapeneur is an entrepreneur on the inside (of the company or organization), the person who brings passion and creativity to the job every day as an executive leader.

An intrapreneur is the Chief Executive, COO, or Executive VP that is a non-majority stock holder and acts like Steve Jobs, Henry Ford or Sam Walton every day they show up at the office or factory. An intrapreneur is the functional or department lead who manages their staff as a coach and role model, and spins off enough excitement for everyone in that department to feed off of.

So with the definition clarified, what are some traits of successful intrapreneurs?

1. They are closet entrepreneurs at heart with a penchant for generating creative ideas, and launching them.
2. Passion for leading a cause and making a cause out of what they lead.
3. The ability to navigate career tracks on the shortest route.
4. An intuition for building the right mission into a strategic plan. This implies the ability to move a strategic plan off of paper and into action.
5. Recognize key internal and external stakeholders for building consensus, and then moving those parties toward short and long-term collaboration.
6. They are culture builders and adapters, recognizing coming change before it impacts their organization.
7. Tie he traits together with effective communication skills.

First step to becoming a successful intrapreneur?  Accept the role, act on it and remember that you are responsible for the bounce you receive as the entrepreneurial leader inside your organization.

The term Entrepreneur evokes images of Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Ray Kroc, Elon Musk, Milton Hershey and others. It implies a never sleeping lifestyle, driven by boundless passion, and the determination to succeed.

Q:             But can the the term stick to leaders in the non-profit sector?

A:             A resounding yes, and it should!

Thumbing through a thesaurus will yield some synonyms that define an entrepreneur including: leader, organizer, backer/supporter, executive, manager, administrator, creator, hero/heroine, opportunist, and even consider intrapreneur.

Each synonym is simultaneously a definer of an organizational leader and manager. The synonym intrapreneur; however, implies someone who creatively works outside of the box while positioned inside the box. This is the sweet spot for a non-profit executive. As an Executive Director, COO or CEO, you probably have a nationally branded system of best practices and organizational structure in place. How you creatively manage within that structure can be the difference between finding competitive advantage, new sources of funding, or meeting the needs of a specific constituent population.

Becoming a Non-profit Entrepreneur / Intrapreneur:

• Accept the mantle of Intrapreneur, and consider that as part of your working title.
• Based on your operational intuition and “active observation”, define what this means for those around you. How will you lead the team within this outside the box mentality?
• Engage your board and trustees. and seek their creative guidance. Also challenge them not to “do what we’ve always done.”
• Model the best behaviors of successful for-profit and non-profit leaders that are considered visionary. Be willing to pivot and adopt new behaviors, new thought processes, and act quickly after reviewing the best options based on resources available and projected.
• Be Thomas Edison working within your cause. If Plan A doesn’t yield the needed result, then act on Plan B. You’ll know when the light is on, as programs function smoothly, cash flow is positive more regularly or non-operating funds flow consistently from new sources.

Most importantly, remember that an entrepreneur is not an executive that functions  only in a for profit environment. They are the executive that manages creatively in any organization and embraces  leading change, outside of the box.

If you are a non-profit executive, you know that the two resources you never seem to have enough of are funding sources and non-operational dollars. Most outside of the non-profit world assume that non-profit status ensures a flush cash position and reserves, and a working cash flow with plenty of room to weather the bad times. That position of understanding is simply not true for most local or small regional non-profits.

So what tact do you take? Does going after operational revenue streams spread your organization too thin? If you build a new robust non-operational funding model, do you spend too much valuable time and energy that could applied elsewhere?

The answer(s) to these three questions are simple and complicated? The tact you take is having a volunteer team and staff in place that can move between servicing operational cash flow development and a vibrant non-operational model. This may make volunteers, board members and staff uncomfortable, but it is necessary. Cash is the life blood of your cause efforts, your mission.

Developing a non-operating funding plan involves a long-view of 3 to 5 years and beyond. Some members of your staff and volunteer team who want the instant gratification of bills being paid may not be able to move to that position. Each of these points lays the foundation for a funding dichotomy, two opposing views. If the organization builds programs to meet current operating needs, and a funding model grounded in quick hit, low goal events for limited perspective projects, you are taking a short-view survival perspective. The existence of your cause cannot have true impact if a short-view is the philosophy and the grounding for mission.

Path to Short and Long Term Funding Co-existing:

• Build board, staff and volunteer teams that can buy into a long view.
• Step outside of the box of what the organization “has always done.”
• Find a Champion for each cause of short-term/operational and long-term sustaining funding.
• Be very specific about what operational and reserve needs are. Set attainable funding goals.
• Choose the most easily implemented and most manageable sustaining funding (long-term) mechanisms.
• Use measurement metrics that everyone can understand. All results should be pegged to an identifiable outcome in the overall cause and mission.
• Hold regular vision meetings that allow everyone to check-in and see where funding programs are in relation to goals set.
• Be willing to change course if the environment you are operating in calls for it.