One of the key challenges for organisations is not just achieving success but sustaining it into the future.
While delivering excellence in daily operations secures current success, it does not guarantee future growth. Sustainable success requires the ability to seize future opportunities – both internal and external – which demands an entrepreneurial mindset.
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This mindset is often associated with small businesses yet seldom seen in larger organisations. However, it can be developed; I’ve done it.
In the early 2000s UBS, the global bank, didn’t exist. It was created by a series of mergers and acquisitions, combining five organisations into one. Achieving this integration in just over two years was an extraordinary accomplishment. But while business-as-usual operations were delivered to an excellent level, massive market opportunities remained untapped because no organisation was actively pursuing them.
We needed leaders at UBS to develop an entrepreneurial mindset to identify and seize these opportunities. As global head of leadership at the time, it became my responsibility to enable them to do so. Earlier in my career, I had spent four years helping entrepreneurs and small businesses scale by developing their leadership capabilities. Drawing from that experience, I identified the behaviours that successful entrepreneurs exhibited and we used these as a template to cultivate entrepreneurial leadership within UBS.
These included actions such as optimising rather than minimising risk, empowering every employee to act as a proactive brand ambassador, and instilling a shared responsibility for success beyond individual job roles. We dedicated much time to developing these behaviours, and the results began to show. For the first time in a corporate setting, we successfully implemented entrepreneurial leadership.
However, embedding entrepreneurial leadership across the organisation was not without its challenges. While customer-facing managers embraced this mindset, supporting functions lagged behind, creating frustration among frontline leaders.
To address this, we proactively enabled supporting teams in HR, IT, finance and elsewhere to adopt entrepreneurial behaviours. This led to the concept of entrepreneurial HR, positioning HR as the key catalyst for fostering entrepreneurial leadership across the organisation. This shift evolved the role of the HR business partner into that of an ‘HR entrepreneur’.
I have since introduced entrepreneurial leadership to different organisations but always thought a better way to enable this mindset change would be for corporate leaders to interact directly with entrepreneurs.
Four years ago, I was approached by EEX Global in Helsinki, which helps entrepreneurs scale by working with corporate leaders. Unexpectedly, they saw corporate leaders become more entrepreneurial in their thinking during these interactions. They asked me to help develop an approach so that corporate leaders could maximise this benefit.
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The results have been remarkable. More than 300 senior leaders from major organisations such as BASF, Robert Bosch, Deutsche Telekom and ABB have benefited, transforming their leadership styles and delivering measurable business outcomes.
Interestingly, HR professionals who participated in this journey experienced even greater transformative changes in their perspectives than their line colleagues. They gained deeper insights into how HR could drive organisational success and act as a catalyst for entrepreneurial thinking.
Entrepreneurial leadership is growing in impact but could have more if HR was able to lead the development and implementation across organisations.
My vision for 2025 is for more HR leaders to become entrepreneurial leaders, enabling their teams to be change champions and embed entrepreneurial leadership throughout their organisations to deliver sustainable success.
Chris Roebuck is a leadership and employee engagement speaker, and is a member of UCL School of Management's advisory board
