…… Originally published in The Organization in the Digital Age 2016-2017 ……
Potential Obstacles
- Command-and-control leadership style.
- Hesitation to rethink how people work.
- Fear of losing control by management and central functions.
- Centralized decision-making.
- Excessive fear of taking risks.
Actions That Help Overcome These Obstacles
Building an entrepreneurial work culture starts with enabling people and teams, then expanding to a cross-organizational dimension.
Capabilities: Deployment
- Deploy digital capabilities for people to share information, ideas and know-how directly. For example through blogs, wikis and the capability to comment on other people’s content.
- At the same time, or shortly after, deploy collaborative technologies such as an enterprise social network and the capability to create communities. These should be available across the whole organization.
Practices: Openness
- Establish a policy that communities will be open by default, and closed only if absolutely necessary for security reasons.
- Start and spread working out loud practices, by developing internal examples or bringing in an external consultant to build awareness and share techniques.
Leadership: Autonomy
- Introduce methods that let individuals and teams self-manage their own work. Ensure freedom in a context of accountability.
- Implement distributed decision-making, again in a context of accountability.
Culture: External awareness and interactions
At both the senior manager level and operational level, develop ways to increase awareness and contacts with the external world.
- Depending on the sector of activity, consider working directly with start-ups, invite thought-leaders to challenge management practices, bring in peers in other organizations who can share their challenges, approaches and successes with you.
Photo credit: Russell Collins, www.Beyond.fr.