Stop Abusing “Entrepreneurship” Tag In Your Hiring Campaign

I think I just have my Aha! moment when I realise I – as an HR practitioner, an Executive have been contradicting myself for putting the requirement in hiring “We expect you to have entrepreneurship mindset” then later question regretfully why some of those Stars leave the company so fast.

To go further, let’s understand what entrepreneurship is by definition. From here, you will stay on the same page with me and know why I reason as below.

By Cambridge dictionary: “skill in starting new businesses, especially when this involves seeing new opportunities“

By businessdictionary: “The capacity and willingness to develop, organise and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit. The most obvious example of entrepreneurship is the starting of new businesses.
In economics, entrepreneurship combined with land, labor, natural resources and capital can produce profit. Entrepreneurial spirit is characterised by innovation and risk-taking, and is an essential part of a nation’s ability to succeed in an ever changing and increasingly competitive global marketplace.

I see that many companies use that word as a trendy keyword but I don’t discuss their choices of words here. From my own observation, that is a blindly wrong requirement for some reasons.

1. If the role doesn’t require that capability, then why you seek for it?

I particularly see this requirement appears mostly on top in plenty of Internship, Entry-level or some purely technical roles (e.g Engineers), which is not relevant.

For the Internship, Entry-level roles, this requirement can be brought to the table as a nice-to-have but then we should stuck it behind and emphasise our top 5 key capabilities that the role requires instead. As a company, each person we bring in must add value to the system to cover the cost we spent. Therefore, the real questions we have to solve with these young mind are:

• What skills, knowledge that they can bring in to help the business to run fundamental tasks?
• How to nurture, maximise those raw and not diverse skills, knowledge?

The spotlight should not on how much risk-taking you are to break the business process, how much confident you are to step up and confront the seniors. Don’t spoil the kids which the feeling they are Harry Porter, just don’t know much of everything then wave the wand and things are great.

For the Engineering roles, I am not biased to say that we should not ask them to have this mindset, however, their roles are distinctly different so we should strongly emphasise their technical knowledge and skills. In their early career, they should focus on how to run things with rules and processes then they are allowed to explore things when they know how things work in certain limits and which limits can be broken.

2. Having too much Entrepreneurial mindset will be toxic

This is the other side of #1, if those roles in #1 should not emphasise Entrepreneurship then which roles? And what if we have too much Entrepreneurship mindset in all levels of the company?

For the first question,I reckon the Managerial and Leadership roles are the ones. These roles, in contrast, ought to have the mindset to break rules, to take risk once they see the opportunities. As they are those who have both the knowledge, experiences and the power to execute the change. Yet, in reality, they are those we hardly find the entrepreneurship since their minds are set with certain ways of doing things, and also, they have experienced the good, the bad, the ugly of the organisational politics.

How’s about we have many many Entrepreneurs? This will bring down the business quickly. Firstly, too many people want to be the leaders, to work on their “own business” then who will contribute to the common goal? Secondly, those can’t find the environment for them to be entrepreneurs will then be demotivated, distracted from their tasks and then they will distract, affect other employees. This will create a chain effect and toxic spreads everywhere.

3. They right word should be “Ownership”

We still can use the keyword “Entrepreneurship” in our requirements as long as we know exactly what roles we need this. (The definition of “Entrepreneurship” is on the top if you forget)

Most of the time, people mis-use the word, instead of using the word “Ownership”, they use “Entrepreneurship”. What company should really look for in ALL employees is the “Ownership”. As Laszlo Bock in Work Rules suggested

“All it takes is a belief that people are fundamentally good—and enough courage to treat your people like owners instead of machines. Machines do their jobs; owners do whatever is needed to make their companies and teams successful. People spend”.

At first glance, this seems similar to entrepreneurship’s nature – do what it takes to achieve the goal. However, from my own experiences, 80-90% of people see entrepreneurship with its fancy, glamorous image and then they fall and fall into their own illusion. That is why I say it is dangerous to use the word Entrepreneurship to replace Ownership.

Also, it is easily to measure Ownership. For example, we can ask an employee how they managed to complete a task in which their capabilities are not enough and they have go an extra mile. They will tell us the situation, the challenge, the action and their achievement. Then we can validate their answers from one of our Managers. For Entrepreneurship, they can tell us a nice idea, a nice business but we have no tool to validate the story.