Intrapreneurship isn’t limited to specific types of people or roles. Intrapreneurs can come from different backgrounds and possess different domain skills. At the same time, intrapreneurship is typically not a solo activity. Along the way, people need to collaborate with, and seek knowledge from, others. To bring a big idea to fruition, you need a core intrapreneur team who can contribute in different areas, complement each other’s skills, and divide and conquer.
As a corporate leader, you should identify which types of intrapreneurs you have and which are missing, and explore how to encourage collaboration among different types of intrapreneurs. Every intrapreneur has unique characteristics, expertise, skills, and experience. In this section, we will discuss avatars that help you define intrapreneurs in terms of their professions and characteristics. Professional avatars relate to an intrapreneur’s educational background, training, and experience. On the other hand, character avatars relate to a person’s personality and mentality.
The avatars described here are not exhaustive and are not intended for putting intrapreneurs in boxes. People can sit anywhere in the spectrum of avatars and can have different permutations of professional and character avatars. The categorization simplifies a host of factors to help you better understand yourself and others. Once you know this, it helps you find the right team, know the strength of team members, and understand how to work better with them.
Professional Avatars
Professional avatars are based on the intrapreneur’s educational background, training, and experience. They reveal what matters to a person, what motivates them, what skills they bring to the team, and the roles they can play. There are five main professional avatars: the Business Venturer, the Academic Pro, the Design Guru, the Tech Hacker, and the Domain Specialist. These are not mutually exclusive avatars and, with appropriate training and experience, a person can possess a combination of different professional avatars.
Business Venturer
Business Venturers are people with strong business acumen. They understand how business works in the corporation: what the target market is, what drives revenue, and how the corporation makes a profit. Their business acumen can come from either education (a business degree or MBA) or experience. They have experience in leading a business within the corporation—a profit center like sales and marketing or a particular department or franchise. They know how to read the financials of a company. They have a strong sense of commercialization and understand how the business model works. They understand how external factors affect the business. They are good at creating the vision and strategy. Their domain expertise leans more toward strategy, product, and organization knowledge. Business Venturers are potential serial intrapreneurs as they constantly form ideas by reading changes in the market and the business. They draw inspiration from competitors, observations of customers, and reading the market.
Academic Pro
Academic Pros are people who have deep domain expertise in the subjects they study. They are expert innovators. They have usually earned PhDs and have done extensive research on the subject matter. A PhD not only masters the field but is also tasked to push the field forward by exploring new findings. Their research might have resulted in discoveries that can be applied to benefit the business. They possess strong problem-solving skills and are keen to apply analytical sense. They approach problems with solid logic and understand how to design experiments. They are aware of the applicable tools and methods of their subject matter. They are not afraid of dealing with complex problems with a high level of ambiguity as they’ve been well trained throughout their research. They understand how to analyze data and know-how to leverage it for decision making. They draw inspiration from their research work and the latest progress in their field.
Design Guru
Design Gurus are people who practice design thinking as a profession. They go by the title of product designer or design thinker. They have been trained in design thinking, user interface or user experience, industrial design, human-centric design, or service design. They are good at conducting field research and drawing insights for the design of people-centered products. They specialize in understanding users by developing personas and designing the customer journey. They create user flows, wireframes, and prototypes to effectively conceptualize and communicate detailed interaction behavior. They draw inspiration from studying users and understanding their pain points.
Tech Hacker
Tech Hackers are people with a technology background. They are usually software developers or engineers. They come from domains like computer science, computer engineering, analytics, data science, and artificial intelligence. They have a deep understanding of the capabilities of technology and are passionate about it. They have a strong experimental mindset and understand technology frameworks like agile. They can prototype a concept via programming within a short turnaround time. They possess a good understanding of databases, application services, technology architecture design, and application life cycle development. They draw inspiration from advancements in technology and the applications they observe or experiment with.
Domain Specialist
Domain Specialists are people who have earned professional licenses or are practitioners in their fields. These are the doctors, nurses, lawyers, physicians, surveyors, accountants, architects, pharmacists, or someone who has spent sufficient time in their industry. They have strong practical knowledge and experience. They have direct access to customers or have dealt with the problem area during their careers. They are close to the problem and therefore have a strong vested interest in solving it. They draw inspiration from their daily work, the problems that they observe during their practice, and their interaction with customers.
What Professional Avatar(s) Do you Need in Your Intrapreneur Team?
The Business Venturer and the Design Guru are common avatars since they provide skills that can be applied across problems and solutions. You should have these two avatars on your team. Next, depending on the problem and the solution you are trying to build, you will need different skills and hence a combination of different professional avatars in your team. For example, if you are working on a problem that involves changing the delivery of medicine in the health care system, you will need a domain specialist in the pharmacy industry to provide insights into the existing system. On the other hand, if you are working on solving a problem that involves a big breakthrough and you require deep knowledge and pioneering discoveries, you might need an Academic Pro. If the solution you are exploring involves software development, you will most likely need a Tech Hacker. Try to strategize the team mix by analyzing the skills you require.
Character Avatars
On top of professions and skills, another factor that affects the team dynamic is the character of people. In his book Surrounded by Idiots, Thomas Erikson, a behavioral expert, introduced his theory of the four types of human behavior.1 He has observed people’s behavior, identifying what motivates different people and understanding how they react.
Using this framework, you can understand how different character types affect the intrapreneur team, their strengths and weaknesses, and how the team can perform better. The four types of human behavior are Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green. Only about 5 percent of people have just one character avatar. You can be a combination of two or even more, and some people have a dominant avatar that can be easily observed.
The Red
The Reds are people who are highly driven, ambitious, and bold. They set high goals and strive to achieve them. They have a firm belief that they can achieve anything if they try hard enough. They enjoy challenges and react positively under pressure. They are competitive. They have a strong bias toward action and, in their mind, thought and action should happen at the same time.
In an intrapreneur team, Reds are good initiators and leaders. They are often good at setting direction and forming strategies. They can lead the team with their vision. They are decisive—not necessarily making the right decisions all the time but they nonetheless make a decision and move on. Having a Red on the team keeps the team focused on progress and builds strong momentum.
In terms of weaknesses, the Reds can be very dominant and therefore the team needs to make sure it balances the voices of different members. Reds can be impatient when progress is slow. Beware of their hot temper, which might put pressure on the team.
The Yellow
The Yellows are highly optimistic. They are very good at coming up with ideas and are not afraid of out-there thoughts. They often think outside the box and inspire the team. The Yellows are good visual thinkers. A Yellow can visualize things in their mind without actually experiencing them. They are cheerful and happy people to work with.
In the intrapreneur team, Yellows are often the ones with lots of ideas. Their contribution during the ideation stage is significant. They are very good storytellers and, in fact, most Yellows are good at selling. They can be the salesperson in the intrapreneur team to help pitch the idea. They are also great at networking as they can build relationships with a diverse group of people. They are natural collaborators.
Yellows might not be good at details and have little idea how to proceed to the next step. They are obsessed with high-level ideas but do not have a strong execution mindset. If you have a Yellow in the team, make sure that they come up with a plan and follow through. Do keep track of their progress from time to time to make sure things are happening.
The Blue
The Blues are extremely detail-minded. They focus largely on tasks and execution. They are perfectionists. They have high standards for their quality of work. They are data and facts oriented and demand high accuracy. The Blues are very organized and they always approach tasks with a plan. They care about order and logic. Spreadsheets and project planners are their favorite tools.
In an intrapreneur team, having a Blue is a valuable asset. The Blue is the one who gets your numbers right and thinks through the execution details, while the others are too excited about the new idea and the possibilities. The Blues are very realistic and practical. They are the ones who bring ideas back to Earth and work on them diligently, step by step. They spend extra hours ensuring that even the slightest details get sorted.
In terms of weaknesses, the Blues are relatively cautious and therefore might not buy into new ideas easily. You would have to present facts to convince them. If they cannot assess the risks of a new idea, they might refrain from starting it. Try to help the Blues get across the starting line by offering facts and analysis. Because the Blues are extremely detail oriented, they might sometimes miss the big picture. Do bring them back and remind them of the high-level objective from time to time. Blues tend to demand all the information before they can make a decision. You need to help Blue team members balance this tendency as it’s impossible to be certain about everything in advance, especially in an innovation project. Blues are also not the loudest on the team but their opinions are usually well thought through. So do make an extra effort to encourage participation and seek input from them.
The Greens are the majority of people in the world. They are the average of all colors. They are the most balanced. They are calm, leisurely, and easygoing. They do their work as they are supposed to. They are good listeners and are very helpful to others. They are also good team players.
Having a Green on the team brings calmness and provides stability to the team when conflicts happen. They are reliable and deliver results according to the plan. They are usually friendly to work with. However, it’s not often that you would have many Greens as intrapreneurs because Green does not like change in general. They do not have strong opinions about things and often do not take sides. Greens are also not too excited about new ideas. They do not see the urgency in most things. Given the characteristics of Green people, they are not the biggest fans of being in a team pushing for something new.
What Character Avatars Do you Need in Your Intrapreneur Team?
When forming your team, you will need to put together people who can help drive the idea forward. A team works best if it has people with all the character avatars so that you have a balanced team. While that might not be possible, you definitely want to have a Red to steer the direction, a Yellow to contribute and sell ideas, and a Blue to look after the plan and the details of execution. A Green might not be readily available since they do not like change. But if they are, they would provide good support for getting the work done. You also need to observe the dynamic between different character avatars for improving the efficiency of the team. In general, Greens work well with most people. Red and Blue usually work well together, with one setting direction and the other looking after tasks. Putting Yellow and Blue together is challenging as one talks at a very high level and the other is extremely detail oriented. If Yellow and Blue in the intrapreneur team work together, keep track of their progress and see if they need help communicating with each other.
Size of Intrapreneur Team: Not the More the Merrier
Every team should be small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas.
—Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
The size of the team matters when you are pushing an innovative idea forward. Of course, the more support you have, the better. But it does not necessarily mean having more core team members. Once the core team grows to a certain size, there is a trade-off between resources and speed. In his research work, Nis Frome surveyed over 300 decision makers to discover their most significant challenges and decision-making strategies.2 One of the areas studied was the team size that contributes to the best outcomes. He found that almost nine in 10 respondents indicated that teams of two to five people made for the best decision-making process.
Innovation work is inherently uncertain and the pace of work is relatively fast. Having a small team allows decisions to be made swiftly and with autonomy. A small and nimble team ensures that people work closely and spontaneously. Since innovation involves ambiguity, having too many people results in too much deliberation, too much consensus, and too little actual progress. Try to limit your team to around five people and be clear about the role and expected contribution of each member. The other people who support the project are the stakeholders, who you keep informed.
When you move an idea forward, it is good practice to seek domain experts’ input. Subject matter experts can help you understand existing ways of doing things, why things are done in such a way, and the current constraints they face. You need to collaborate with people who bring different expertise to the team. However, having too many experts can slow your project down. When the team is composed of a majority of experts, there is a tendency for team members to focus more on what they already know and less on exploring what they don’t. They rely on the knowledge they’ve learned over the years and it takes them extra effort to unlearn it. Experts might, therefore, be limited by constraints known to them. They might be close to the domain knowledge but not necessarily close to the customer.
In her Harvard Business Review article, “Too Many Experts Can Hurt Your Innovation Projects,” Riitta Katila revealed that innovation thrives when expert users make up about 40 percent of an invention team.3 One of the reasons is that expert users have spent lots of time getting comfortable with existing tools and methods and can’t always recognize a potential breakthrough innovation when they see one.
When you form your intrapreneur team, ensure that less than half of the members are experts. This is so that you have enough team members with no prior assumptions who can ask incisive questions. You do need subject matter experts and their input is valuable. But instead of having all of them on the core team, consider keeping some on an expert panel to tap into their knowledge from time to time.
In this chapter, we have introduced the different types of intrapreneurs. There are two ways of categorizing them: professional avatars and character avatars. Professional avatars tell you about the intrapreneur’s training, educational background, and the skills they bring to the team. Character avatars tell you about the intrapreneur’s personality, what motivates them, and how they work best with others.
Now you know how to team up your intrapreneurs to maximize the results of their efforts. But how can you attract intrapreneurial talents in the first place? What are intrapreneurs looking for when they join a corporate or a team? What motivates them to stay engaged and contribute their best to a company? And how can leaders effectively recruit and retain intrapreneurial talents? These are the questions we will focus on in the next chapter.