How Hiring Entrepreneurs Can Help Your Business

Hire an entrepreneur and you’re asking for trouble. There’s a long-standing doctrine that says that entrepreneurs are rebels by nature. They take unnecessary risks, possess limited scopes of knowledge and skills, have tunnel vision, don’t work well with others, resist authority, and can’t integrate into a structured environment.

Welcome to the new workplace. The cultural landscape of business has changed, and these old notions are outdated. Entrepreneurs are now often regarded among the best employees, bringing the kind of creativity, dynamism, and motivation that enables them to seize opportunities and accomplish great things for employers.

They can in fact be an important ingredient to your workforce, igniting excitement and passion in other employees. If entrepreneurs with these attitudes can mesh into your company at all levels and areas, from front-line to managerial and product development to finance, you will see your productivity rise.

Sparking Innovation

Entrepreneurs, people whose success has stemmed from their innovative thinking and resourcefulness, bring extra value to companies in a variety of ways. They come up with new ideas and know how to make them reality. They usually have the ability to learn both organizational and functional skills and are successful precisely because they do not simply follow orders.

Growing a company of entrepreneurial workers, or integrating them into a more traditional setting, means looking forward and embracing the new reality. Employees want more responsibility and want their contributions to be meaningful. They want to be empowered, and they want an interest in the outcome of their work. In short, they want some degree of “ownership” in a company, to feel that their jobs are not cogs in the proverbial wheel but that their jobs are the wheels themselves.

Hiring entrepreneurs acknowledges that you know employees do not thrive as worker bees. Adding a few entrepreneurs in the mix of your regular workforce can spark innovation in others. Your company becomes a place where other employees are inspired to create, improve, and exchange ideas to further the company’s goals. This is the fuel that famously drives the most successful in the tech sectors, companies such as Google, Twitter, and Apple.

Preparing for Change

Of course, you must be ready for change. Don’t engage entrepreneurs unless you are prepared to have some of your values and systems tested. They tend to question assumptions, test company practices, and push limits. A small business that’s set in its ways will have a harder time incorporating these types of employees.

To keep entrepreneurial employees, you must engage them and give them a lot of room to try out ideas and make on-the-spot decisions. For example, an entrepreneurial employee is likely to grow frustrated if he or she is expected to simply replace a previous manager and continue to run things as they have always been run. But give the entrepreneur room to put his or her own imprint on the job, such as overhauling the management of schedules to creating a new system for keeping track of inventory, and the employee will blossom.

Encouraging suggestions for improvements is key. But being open to ideas doesn’t mean adopting every suggestion thrown at you. As with any idea, you have to evaluate it for its merits within your culture. One of the upsides of working with entrepreneurial employees is that “no” doesn’t discourage them because they tend to be founts of ideas and rarely get wedded to a single idea. Decline one suggestion and they’re likely to return with another.

Although entrepreneurial employees tend to bring their creative energy to any job, there are certain positions in which they may not thrive. For instance, a position requiring an employee to follow a specific protocol for legal reasons with little room for invention is not an ideal fit for an entrepreneur. These types of employees should be placed in positions where their creative energies can be tapped and where they have the ability to work independently or have significant impact.

Integrating entrepreneurs into your workforce may cause some initial discomfort for other employees, especially if your company hasn’t embraced the entrepreneurial spirit in the past. Longtime employees may feel intimidated by these new additions and perhaps even fear for their jobs. Explain to them the value this kind of employee brings to the company. And signal to staff that you’re not only interested in garnering ideas from this new “special” employee but from everyone. Encourage all employees to develop ideas to improve aspects of the business. In doing this, you pave the way for a culture shift, using these entrepreneurial employees as a catalyst for change to a more engaged workforce.

Some company leaders, especially supervisors and managers, may be threatened by the entrepreneurial employee, afraid they’ll be outshined. To get buy-in, it’s critical to communicate to them the importance of the entrepreneurial performer to the company. Stress the aspects of this addition that will improve the front-line manager’s own job, areas such as boosted morale, improved retention (because employees tend to like being around high-energy, can-do creative coworkers), achievements, and the creation of new and improved methods for carrying out duties. Explain that when they embrace the new attitudes that entrepreneurs bring in, the managers themselves will be rewarded.

Adding entrepreneurial people to your workforce may initially cause a few growing pains as the company gets used to this level of engagement, but once you do, your outcomes are likely to be transformed with increased morale, higher output, more product and system innovations, better employee retention, and ultimately a stronger bottom line.