Yesterday I wrote a post about post about the difference between being entrepreneurial and enterprising1.
After writing it I thought about the team members we’ve hired at The Iron Yard. Some are truly entrepreneurial, but all of them are enterprising and have been described that way to me more than once.
I’ve also heard business owners say that they really desire to hire enterprising employees, or, in their words, “employees with an entrepreneurial spirit.” (Putting the words “employee” and “entrepreneur” in the same sentence can be a bit contradictory, but that’s another post for another day.)
The desire to hire such employees can mean different things and depends on the type of business. Writing the article yesterday got me thinking about what hiring enterprising employees means at The Iron Yard.
The common thread that I’ve seen among our team members is the desire and initiative to make things better. People on our team have a knack for assessing how things are, seeing how the could be, and acting quickly (but smartly) improve the way things work.
This can look like almost anything. Here are a few recent examples from our company:
- From a newly hired Instructor: “Can I tinker with the onboarding process?”
- From a Campus Director: “Can I jump in and help build out this internal tool?”
- From Campus Director: “Can I adjust my budget a bit to try new types of marketing?”
- From an Instructor: “Can I change the order of subjects in the Rails curriculum? I think it will work better for the students.”
Our job as a leadership team is to give our team the freedom to make things better.
1. You can read the full post about entreprenurialsm VS enterprising here.
