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Balance leadership with entrepreneurial skill

A question that we hear being endlessly debated in start-up circles is — Are entrepreneurs born or made? And what is entrepreneurial leadership and can non-entrepreneurs benefit from these traits and hone their leadership style?

Balance leadership with entrepreneurial skill


Aval Sethi

A question that we hear being endlessly debated in start-up circles is — Are entrepreneurs born or made? And what is entrepreneurial leadership and can non-entrepreneurs benefit from these traits and hone their leadership style?

Entrepreneurship and leadership are sometimes considered synonyms, but these two terms actually have quite different meanings

Entrepreneurship is defined as having a defined set of skills that an entrepreneur possesses and practices when starting his or her enterprise. Leadership, on the other hand, is the process of influencing people and providing an environment for them to achieve their organisational objectives.

Entrepreneurial leadership is, therefore, a complex mix of attitudes, skills, capabilities, styles, traits, motives, and mental mindsets and effectively using the skills associated with successful individual entrepreneurs resting on innovation, risk optimisation, taking advantage of opportunities, and applying those within the environment of a larger organisation.

Any entrepreneurial leader must have the ability to learn fast and within environments of ambiguity and change.

The entrepreneurial leader will work within a formalised organisational structure, but use approaches normally expected of an entrepreneur to identify opportunities. Once an opportunity has been identified, they work towards creating a value proposition, which will enable a rapid testing of their key assumptions.

Leadership has a key role in entrepreneurial behaviour. People, who possess leadership qualities like influencing ability, are found more prone to becoming entrepreneurs and perform entrepreneurial functions more effectively. Some of the leadership competencies that influence entrepreneurial behaviour are an inner drive, integrity, self-confidence, intelligence, knowledge and emotional intelligence.

Some of the leadership traits that you should take time to develop over the course of your career to develop the agility, tenacity, and courage of an entrepreneur in your job are:

Communication

Share successes and failures with your team. Information clearly transmitted gives them context and a sense of belonging to the company. This belonging will develop a sense of ownership.

Delegation

You may find yourself getting increasingly inefficient as you start to handle more responsibilities as your business grows. The key to combating this is the delegation and so hiring the right team who you trust and who believe in and respect your vision is of utmost importance at this stage. Good entrepreneurs or organisation builders are always recruiting — talent, advisors, investors, and customers.

Collaboration

Focus on collaborating both with your internal team and external agencies, build strategic alliances and seek external advice on business strategy from suppliers, customers, and other business sounding-boards. Focus your energies on effectively networking, building strong relationships which might help to discover opportunities, source resources and get that all-important foot-in-the-door with potential customers, clients, and future opportunities.

By imbibing traits of an entrepreneur, you can fast track your growth in the organisation, increasingly; companies are looking forward to these traits in their teams. You can be the first one to benefit from it.

Strategic Vision

Passion and a great business idea aren’t enough to succeed in business. You need to develop a robust strategy for your company. Your plan should include where you want your business to be in five years and how you are going to take it there. The devil lies in the detail; make sure you drill the vision down to actionable and doable steps. A vision that is not actionable is called daydreaming by corporate pundits.

— The writer is Founder & CEO of Protaiga.com, a Procurement Automation platform 

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