Entrepreneurial Corporate Culture
In the fierce business environment, the idea of incorporating entrepreneurial corporate culture (ECC) into a team continuously acquires relevance and significance among employers. ECC is regarded as a system of entrenched beliefs, values, mindsets, and attitudes shared by all members of a company, with a particular emphasis on cultivating creativity, innovation, and risk-taking. In ECC, the management allows its employees to conduct voluntary but ethical experiments, offer new ideas, and make mistakes to determine their strengths and weaknesses and help them develop leadership skills and entrepreneurial orientation (Thomke, 2020). Herewith, the concept is based on the that an entrepreneur strives to resolve challenging problems by suggesting feasible solutions built on reliable data, substantial arguments, or logical reasoning (Kennedy, 2019). As a result, a company raises a team consisting of autonomous but accountable and creative entrepreneurs aiming at its productivity and stable progress.
ECC’s components, including encouragement, the environment of empowerment, trust, rewards, and continuous efforts, are tightly interrelated and interdependent. In particular, empowerment is the driving force of the cultivation of entrepreneurial spirit in a team. When employees feel authorized, they learn to think practically, strategically analyze markets and trends, calculate risks, detect opportunities, foresee potential losses, and make relevant decisions. To plant this idea in companies, managers should encourage workers to assume and perceive their responsibilities as day-to-day activities allowing them to grow professionally and personally (Miller, 2016). Herewith, leaders should delegate their duties to only those members who are respectively tuned and willing to take liability and risk; that is, those who are sufficiently mature.
The best way for effective encouragement is constant communication implying close interest in employees, providing feedback, and sharing valuable information and examples of success and failure. Besides, timely rewards are also a necessary form of appreciation for employees for tangible accomplishments and advancing the company’s interests (McCord, 2014). The active demonstration of trust, even despite mistakes and failed ideas, should also be adopted by leaders as a daily practice to keep their employees continuously inspired and enthusiastic. Finally, the nurture of an entrepreneurial culture requires continuous deliberate efforts. ECC should be firmly maintained by the senior management and a frequent central topic in various team discussions, with developing clear positions on particular issues. Overall, each entrepreneur should never forget that the path to innovation and breakthrough lies through trials and errors.
Education Company
In an educational environment, companies have to work and cooperate with numerous customers that have different backgrounds, characteristics, and abilities. Due to this diversity, along with the abundance of other challenges, educators should design programs that meet learners’ needs and preferences and ensure their successful acquisition of delivered material. In this regard, ECC can bring significant benefits to an education company by cultivating the spirit of leadership and independent thinking among its employees. Over time, empowered teachers become more creative in educating students and manage to provide engaging programs that enhance their motivation and curiosity, which ultimately reflect on their performance and outcomes. Furthermore, teachers can expand corporate entrepreneurship over to students by occasionally allowing them to experiment with their lesson learning tasks, homework, and test. Due to such an approach, learners can learn about their disadvantages and identify various obstacles hindering their progress.
Three Necessary Actions
Considering the items discussed above, to cultivate an entrepreneurial culture, I would focus on promoting empowerment, appreciating workers for their results, and investing in their professional development. I consider that involving employees in the decision-making process and giving them challenging tasks should be indispensable elements of strategy targeting long-term and sustainable growth. This tactic helps workers develop valuable skills, reveal significant gaps in their knowledge, and eventually grow into genuine leaders capable of bearing responsibilities and overcoming various hurdles.
The idea of recognition includes actions directed at praising, thanking, and presenting employees with a certificate or other acknowledgments of employee performance and attainments, which are announced at a company meeting or in public. Moreover, appreciation should be compulsory, accompanied by monetary incentives, such as bonuses, rewards, and compensations. The study by Khan et al. (2017) indicates that recognizing employees enhances their motivation and loyalty and attracts novel talents. Finally, investments in training and education help employees to acquire specific leadership skillsets and an in-depth understanding of the company’s goals and values. In this regard, the management should introduce relevant seminars and training courses and provide employees with useful educational sources. Considering the budget issue, it is worth noting that with restricted resources, monetary incentives and training programs could be reduced to reasonable limits or partly canceled until the company begins yielding adequate profit.
Three Barriers
Three potential barriers related to entrepreneurial culture include bureaucracy, employees’ resilience towards changes, and lack of needed resources, both staff, and material. The point is that bureaucracy usually requires subordination to the established order, which can noticeably hinder the flow of ideas between employees. The relationships between workers and the management can be complicated, stiff, and closed in designed boundaries. Employees’ resilience is conditioned by their unwillingness to change the status quo and the risks that will occur during the development of ECC. Any evolution and even minor shift demand times, and this change should first come from leaders. Finally, the limited budget may interrupt efforts in educating workers and providing them with decent salaries, which can affect their motivation.
References
Kennedy, J. (2019). Five tactics for structuring corporate entrepreneurship culture. The Academy for Corporate Entrepreneurship. Web.
Khan, N., Waqas, H., & Muneer, R. (2017). Impact of Rewards (Intrinsic and extrinsic) on employee performance: with special reference to courier companies of city Faisalabad, Pakistan. International Journal of Management Excellence, 8(2), 937-945.
McCord, P. (2014). How Netflix reinvented HR. Harvard Business Review. Web.
Miller, M. (2016). Developing an entrepreneurial culture in your company. Volaris. Web.
Thomke, S. (2020). Building a culture of experimentation. Harvard Business Review. Web.