Your employees, teams, departments, company, vendors and customers are all connected in more ways than most of us realize. Together they make up your interconnected business environment. It can be overwhelming.
What is a corporate entrepreneur to do? Take a deep breath and look at yourself first. Make sure that you have your own system working well. This may appear easy, however, it is the most difficult part of understanding the complex interconnected system that makes up your organization.
Now that you are just a bit more calm, close your eyes and identify how all your successes are tied to others in your business and life. Then do the same things for projects that failed, people that have left, promotions lost, etc. Don’t look for blame, look for how the situation was influenced by the interconnectedness of your organization and how you fit.
Successful corporate entrepreneurs handle business situations by understanding that the we are all part of the whole business environment. What we are going through involves more than just the individual. I know most of you will say, “I already know that,” but how many of you really understand the totality of how complex it is?
First, look at your successes. How did the efficiency of another department help you achieve success? Did the company executives implement a direction that supported your success? You may not like the answer, but if you do this long enough, the answer will come to you…it’s more than likely that it was much more than just your skills that gave you that success.
Over the past 30 years of consulting to corporations and entrepreneurs alike, it has become clear that most corporate entrepreneurs realize that their success is tied directly to the infrastructure and support that the organization provides. Many executives have been recruited away by startups or smaller businesses for big paychecks due to their success. Most find that without the support of the larger organization they can achieve the same success.
Everything is connected, and if you change one thing it will change something else. The secret of corporate entrepreneurship is that you must understand that what you change in your actions will affect others in your organization.
What you are going through has an impact on many other people and businesses. Your situation is not happening in a bubble…we are all interconnected, and the sooner you understand this, the sooner you can transform your situation to be all that you truly want and need it to be.
For more information on the interconnectedness of corporate entrepreneurs, listen to our podcast (or on google podcasts, apple podcasts) on system theory. You can also check out our blog posts on system theory.
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