Balancing Entrepreneurship – Workshop 5 (All-Star Identification)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Balancing Entrepreneurship is provided by Mr. Meuchel Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
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Learning Provider Profile
Mr. Meuchel is a Certified Learning Provider (CLP) at Appleton Greene and he has experience in management and entrepreneurship specializing in the construction industry. He has achieved a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering with a concentration in Construction Management. He has industry experience within the following sectors: Business Ownership; Design/Build; Construction Management and General Contracting. His experience within the construction industry incorporates all facets of construction including: Design Phase; Bid Phase and Construction Phase. He has had commercial experience within the following countries: United States of America, or more specifically within the following cities: Baltimore MD; Washington DC; Raleigh NC; Jacksonville FL and Atlanta GA. His personal achievements include: established time management processes; published book for entrepreneurs; entrepreneur mastermind program and construction expert witness. His service skills incorporate: time management; process development & testing; marketing & sales; owner & 1 subcontractor relations; estimating & budgeting; planning & scheduling; cost & quality control; inspections & safety; municipal regulations and permitting.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
Similar to the planning phases you have completed already, the final phase in the Process Planning Stage will continue to build on what you have already accomplished thus far in the program. In the last phase you worked closely with your mentor to prioritize your future development, implementation, and testing of processes and systems; specifically focusing on taking your business to the next level while improving on your work-life balance. The objective of the All-Star Identification Phase is to place emphasis on taking calculated actions to better align passion and expertise; in the process, planning the shedding or delegating the activities that are a threat to your healthy work-life balance. Planning this repositioning and leveraging of available resources will be critical to run a process driven business that works around your ideal lifestyle, not the other way around. During this phase you will use newly identified priorities from the previous phase as the framework while you are guided through additional steps to help you begin to identify and plan how best to utilize in-house staff and outsource partners to better leverage your time and resources. This is a precursor for the steps you will take in the future program phases to shed your load and also streamline the creation of tested, repeatable systems and processes. At the conclusion of this phase you will have successfully completed each phase of the Process Planning Stage and be ready to move into the second stage of the program, the Process Development Stage.
Objectives
01. Talent Acquisition: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
02. Big 5: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
04. Managing Teams: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
05. Personality Traits: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
06. Power Motivation: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
07. Goals & Aspirations: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. 1 Month
08. Environmental Factors: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
09. Growth & Success: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
10. Risk Attitudes: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
12. Values & Experience: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
Strategies
01. Talent Acquisition: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
02. Big 5: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
04. Managing Teams: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
05. Personality Traits: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
06. Power Motivation: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
07. Goals & Aspirations: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
08. Environmental Factors: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
09. Growth & Success: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
10. Risk Attitudes: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
12. Values & Experience: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
Tasks
01. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Talent Acquisition.
02. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Big 5.
03. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Entrepreneurs vs Managers.
04. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Managing Teams.
05. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Personality Traits.
06. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Power Motivation.
07. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Goals & Aspirations.
08. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Environmental Factors.
09. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Growth & Success.
10. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Risk Attitudes.
11. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness.
12. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Values & Experience.
Introduction
Entrepreneurial All-Star Personality Traits: A Review of Recent Literature
Entrepreneurial companies and their founders are all the rage these days. New incubators and accelerators are springing up all around the United States, as well as programs to attract inventive talent. Foreign countries are also involved, with countries ranging from China to Chile experimenting with novel approaches to encourage the establishment of new businesses. Of course, the interest with entrepreneurs is not new, and literature dating back to the 18th century investigates what motivates entrepreneurs and if their characteristics influence the success of their businesses. This literature currently covers a wide range of topics and has developed a variety of concepts and methodologies for analyzing entrepreneurial all-star qualities. We collect and integrate the most recent research on the prevalence of various personality types among entrepreneurs and their impact on venture performance in this review.
Many studies look into “entrepreneurial qualities” or “traits that make entrepreneurs successful.” Frank Knight’s book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit was published in 1921, marking a watershed moment in thorough and detailed research on the personalities of entrepreneurs that distinguish them from typical company managers. In the decades afterwards, researchers have continued to look into the precise personality qualities that drive people to become entrepreneurs, as well as the personal motivations and preferences that keep them on track. These studies have frequently focused on high-growth environments or enterprises backed by venture capital (VC), when entrepreneurs face a significant risk of their businesses failing, a tiny chance of exceptionally positive outcomes, and a potentially low average return on their monetary and time inputs. To explain such a goal, standard economic theory must be supplemented, and many scholars have attempted to comprehend the “homo entreprenaurus” (a moniker introduced by Uusitalo, 2001).
However, the term “entrepreneur” is used in academic studies to refer to a wide range of people other than Silicon Valley company founders. The research we include in this review cover a wide range of definitions of entrepreneurship, from “Main Street” small business owners to young college students taking an entrepreneurship class. While all of these groups are linked to entrepreneurial activity, recent research has shown that these subpopulations behave very differently, and that individuals’ typical personality traits will vary greatly depending on the type of entrepreneurial activity they engage in.
Today’s applied researchers have access to data for gauging entrepreneurship that would have been impossible even a decade ago. Most notably, researchers can now analyze entrepreneurial transitions using large-scale administrative datasets based on employer-employee relationships. In the United States, for example, researchers are increasingly using comprehensive panel data on individuals like the Linked Employer-Household Database to model entrepreneurial transitions, whereas cutting-edge work in the 2000s often used firm-level entry rates measured in datasets like the Census of Manufactures or Venture Xpert. Other countries also have frontier administrative datasets that integrate foundational behavior with everything from an individual’s prescription medicine history to their stock assets. Researchers are now creating their own specialized datasets in addition to administrative datasets, such as tracking cohorts from entrepreneurial training programs, accessing gig economy transactions from a leading online platform, crafting from LinkedIn profiles of entrepreneurs receiving venture capital, conducting customized surveys of entrepreneurs in co-working spaces, and much more. Because of the abundance of opportunities, there has been a boom in research that examines career histories and individual-level characteristics that predict entrepreneurial all-stars.
While these cutting-edge datasets allow researchers to raise novel questions, they also present new challenges. When considering individual-level characteristics that favor admission, the question of when and how founder personalities should be regarded arises. Some people are explicitly interested in the phenomenon, for example, studying the risk tolerance of high-growth business founders. Others have a different study question in mind, but they are concerned that personality is a key omitted aspect that distorts empirical results. Others believe that personality is the conduit or mechanism via which some of the events analyzed have short- and long-term impacts. While previous research has looked at how personality factors affect transitions to self-employment, this workshop looks at a considerably broader and more diverse range of topics, from small-scale service firms to high-growth entrepreneurship. As the number of possibilities for modeling individual- and team-level entrepreneurial all-stars grows, it’s becoming increasingly vital to understand the personality traits linked with entrepreneurship and how they affect the research being done.
Gartner (1988) questioned the study of entrepreneur personality qualities in a seminal article three decades ago, proposing instead for a focus on how firms develop. Gartner was critical of the various definitions for entrepreneurship, preferring to focus on one that highlighted the functional creation of new businesses. Gartner also questioned the validity of survey methodology for determining a “ideal” personality for entrepreneurship performance. The specter of this criticism has hung over the literature for a long time, and it’s far from apparent that these new attempts will overcome the obstacles identified by Gartner (1988), as we’ll see throughout this review. However, given the increased acknowledgement of entrepreneur heterogeneity and the availability of powerful new data sources, it may be worthwhile to revisit some of these topics 30 years later. After all, many people are now concentrating on articulating how personality influences the formation of new companies, which addresses at least some of Gartner’s concerns.
This workshop focuses on three main themes: (1) entrepreneur personality qualities and how they compare to other groups; (2) entrepreneur risk attitudes; and (3) the overall goals and aspirations that entrepreneurs bring to their endeavors. These themes span the majority of the major theoretical contributions to the entrepreneurial qualities literature, which are relatively diverse, while also allowing common problems to be identified across seemingly disparate study streams.
How to Identify — and Develop — High-Potential Employees in Your Company
For good reason, companies struggle to find their next-generation leaders. How do you figure out who has — or can acquire — the proper strengths to tackle such difficulties when you don’t know what the future holds? Which high-potentials will provide you the most bang for your buck in terms of development?
In the face of such uncertainty, businesses tend to concentrate on what they do know: they search for employees who have taken on more responsibility in their careers or who have met their performance goals. In other words, people look for prospective leaders based on their past performance. And if you’re filling a well-known position where candidates have had the opportunity to display the requisite abilities and attributes, this strategy can be effective.
However, historical performance does not indicate who is capable of performing new tasks. It also makes it difficult to spot high-potential employees early in their careers. Other, potentially richer sources of talent — people who haven’t had equitable access to mentoring, sponsorship, development, and advancement chances — could be losing out on your leadership pipeline.
To address this issue, a model was created for predicting leadership potential that is based on observable, measurable behaviors rather than achievements. I n-depth studies were conducted of 1,500 people, ranging from entry-level professionals to senior executives, using a database of more than 23,000 candidate assessments for employment in public and private firms. WeResearchers looked at their actions and discovered three psychological characteristics that accurately predict people’s ability to grow and adapt to new roles:
• The Cognitive Quotient (CQ): How well someone use their intelligence.
• Drive quotient (DQ): What inspires them and how they channel their energy
• Emotional Quotient (EQ): How they interact with those around them
While these indicators are based on intelligence, goals, and interpersonal style, they do not provide raw measures of these characteristics, as do personality tests and other instruments. Instead, they document how people apply these skills on the job, and when combined, they provide organizations with a specific, objective means to assess leadership potential, independent of the level of experience of candidates.
Let’s take a look at indicative behaviors in each psychological area — both commonplace and higher-level differentiators that indicate leadership potential in the future.
Cognitive Quotient (CQ)
When examining their leadership bench, many businesses place a premium on intellectual capacity. After all, it’s an useful quality that we can measure using academic transcripts, psychometric tests, and case-based interviews. We frequently presume that people who perform well on these tests are “smart enough” to learn everything they’ll need to achieve in the future.
However, these widely used metrics can be skewed. Candidates who attended prestigious colleges, have previously earned lucrative early-career roles, and know how to jump through the required hoops are preferred. They also prefer book smarts to practical smarts and business intuition.
To assess CQ, look for the more advanced behaviors that characterize persons who apply their brains to solve problems correctly. Do they regularly take a step back from their tasks to consider things from the perspective of their boss (or boss’s boss)? Do they strive to check around corners while deciding which road to take in order to anticipate the unexpected? Do they think about how they can add value to the company while making decisions, no matter how small?
Drive Quotient (DQ)
When we talk about drive, we don’t just mean a will to succeed, a strong work ethic, or perseverance. Although these characteristics are important, they are very widespread among prospective leaders.
The key differential here is how people use their energy – not just to improve their own performance, but also to develop and harness the potential of others (a distinction we see overlooked in many models).
People with a high DQ enjoy pushing themselves out of their comfort zones and taking on new challenges. They’re also tenacious: if they have a setback, they regroup, reinterpret, and try again. Most importantly, they are constantly striving to grow not only as individuals, but also as an organization.
Emotional Quotient (EQ)
Companies recognize the importance of emotional intelligence in their leaders, but in our experience, they prefer to focus on the fundamentals, such as self-awareness, interpersonal skills, and the ability to read a room. These abilities are necessary yet insufficient.
The differentiators we uncovered in our research imply that you look for people who engage for effect — for example, those who are intentional about channelling their insights to influence stakeholders and negotiate outcomes — when looking for people with high EQ. Furthermore, seek for those who can and will convey difficult lessons with courage and sensitivity.
Model Validation
Researchers utilized this model extensively to validate and implement their findings throughout the last five years. The three markers of CQ, DQ, and EQ accurately separated individuals who later made it to the C-suite from those who didn’t two times out of three in a double-blind research looking exclusively at the early stages of leaders’ careers. The algorithm beats traditional success rates for hiring and promotion decisions, which are typically a 50/50 chance.They utilized their methodology to assess the potential of more than 1,800 candidates for key leadership and/or functional jobs in another study done over several years within one business. Following the studies, they discovered that the persons they ranked highly on potential were more than three times more likely to be regarded as top performers by their managers in their first year, and even more likely to be top performers in their second, third, and fourth years. They were also less likely to be terminated involuntarily.
These findings show that what we’re evaluating isn’t just skill development, but a way of thinking and functioning that paves the way for long-term success and progress.
Developing Potential Using the Model
Organizations can incorporate a few essential elements into their personnel procedures to tap leadership potential early – and more successfully.
Begin by training managers on what to look for when hiring and screening early-career employees, performing reviews, managing performance, and choosing candidates for advancement possibilities. Explain that performance alone isn’t a good predictor of future success, and train managers to spot CQ, DQ, and EQ in people who don’t have a track record or come from different backgrounds than past generations of leaders.
As part of their performance management and talent development procedures, companies might create “potential profiles.” Managers can help employees advance in their careers by measuring their CQ, DQ, and EQ abilities and providing coaching on how to improve and enhance them.
We frequently advocate that people attend meetings with top management to observe and obtain a broader perspective on the business in order to develop the strategic muscle associated with CQ. Managers can also offer employees tasks that require them to interact with various parts of the business; via these interactions, employees can learn how to connect dots across units or functions. Encouraging staff to attend industry conferences and events will expose them to topics and questions that are on the minds of executives outside of their own company.
Stretch chances that put people to the test in fresh ways can help to build DQ. Rotate aspiring leaders into various markets or divisions of the company, for example, or give them larger teams to oversee, and observe what they do to get up to speed. Do they wait to be informed the abilities they need to improve, or do they go out of their way to find out what they need to know and how to go about learning it?
Start with company culture to assist high potentials in developing their EQ. Make a list of the “unwritten rules” for interacting with each other. As soon as they’ve mastered those, assign them the responsibility of mapping their stakeholders, and make developing these relationships an explicit development goal. You can also introduce them to tools and frameworks that will help them better understand how they’re wired, what motivates others, and how to communicate with them.
Case Study
Developing a High-Potential Leader: A Case Study
A company was hired by a Fortune 500 organization to assist them in identifying and developing their high-potential talent pool. They spent the majority of ourt heir time working with executives two levels below the C-suite.
Maya* was added to a program from the 3rd level below on the spur of the moment when a space became available. Many of the client’s senior executives were unfamiliar with her, and those who did knew her thought she was “too young,” “too eager to please,” and “lacked gravitas.”
However, they were pleased by how she addressed challenging problems, examining several scenarios rather than settling on a single solution and taking into account the overall industry environment and competitive dynamics during our initial assessment. On CQ, they gave her an excellent rating.
Maya made a name for herself on DQ as well. Her parents were immigrants who worked in low-wage occupations, so she went to a college that didn’t have a prestigious name but offered her the best financial package. She flourished there before joining our client, where she quickly rose through the ranks. What made her stand out, though, was how she sought out possibilities for stretch assignments even in her early responsibilities. She also volunteered for the company’s women’s mentorship initiative and rose to become its leader.
Maya’s weakest aspect was EQ. Her focus on delivering results has the unintended consequence of neglecting to invest time in creating relationships. As a result, she suffered in instances where facts and statistics were insufficient to prove her point and she needed to rely on persuasion to achieve her goals. She also avoided having difficult interactions with coworkers by working around them.
They worked with her to help her be more deliberate in getting to know her stakeholders and managing how she “showed up” with them. They advised her on how to confront difficult challenges full on and held her accountable. They also suggested that she rotate to a task that would put her cross-functional skills to the test.
She advanced two levels in the next 24 months, landing in a high-profile position where she thrives. Her new employer refers to her as a “rock star,” and she has risen to the top of the list for C-suite feeder positions.
Finally, many behaviors may be taught – for example, people can learn how to influence and convince others more effectively. Others, such as thinking more conceptually or strategically, may be more difficult to adapt. When evaluating someone’s ability to succeed in a new leadership job, examine how easily any missing behaviors may be learnt and implemented.
Each of the three skills, CQ, DQ, and EQ, is valuable in its own right. However, when taken together, these indicators can help your company discover and nurture the next-generation leaders it will need to face the unknown challenges ahead. They’ll also enable you to tap into a much wider, deeper, and more varied leadership pool than you previously knew existed.
Executive Summary
Chapter 1: Talent Acquisition
Hiring And Developing Talent Requires A Skills-Based Approach
Upskilling and reskilling have taken on a fresh urgency as the global economy undergoes enormous upheaval. For these transformations to be successful, fundamental shifts in thinking about hiring and staff development are required.
Certain businesses and industries, such as logistics and manufacturing, are unable to hire quickly enough. A feasible solution to an evolving workforce challenge is to shift to a skills-focused approach.
Employers and employees alike are often unaware that the talents they have for one job can simply be transferred to another. Consider the food servers who were laid off as a result of the pandemic. More than 70% of them have the necessary abilities to excel in customer service, which is one of the most in-demand occupations on LinkedIn right now. Instead of seeing those positions go unfilled, we might have witnessed a huge transfer of out-of-work food servers into in-demand occupations if servers and individuals hiring for customer service experts knew they already possessed many of the essential skills.
Employees and new hires can be evaluated based on their skill sets rather than their job experience, which can help level the playing field and help firms recognize the talent they currently have. It also broadens talent pools and, in many cases, improves hiring efficiency.
This is how hiring and development will be done in the future. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses must begin to incorporate learning into their corporate cultures. Organizations that are reluctant to adapt will be left behind, resulting in dissatisfied and unmotivated personnel, as well as a major reduction in overall innovation. Companies can’t afford to be mired in outmoded attitudes at a time when talent is the most valuable commodity in business.
Chapter 2: Big 5
As an All-Star leader, how do you use the Big Five?
According to Simine Vazire, a psychology professor at the University of California at Davis, the evidence-based and scientifically researched Big Five model has been shown to produce largely consistent results that can be used to predict some form of a person’s likely achievement, behaviors, and even dating choices.
According to research from the Academy of Management, Big Five personality traits are linked to job effectiveness. Many professional positions and duties can activate specific traits, and knowing who has the traits that are compatible with the functions and responsibilities of a position allows you to establish a high-performing team.
Individuals in professions that need innovation and creativity (graphic designer, creative director, digital content producer, etc.) may be more open than those who think more conventionally. Allowing these team members’ imaginations and curiosity to flourish can be critical to their job success and engagement. Extroverted employees may favor social group activities such as team happy hours or participation in company-sponsored sports teams when it comes to developing team culture. Someone who is diligent may prefer to create individual and team goals through focused, one-on-one interactions.
If you have a diverse team that spans the Big Five model, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to lead in a one-size-fits-all manner, since you’ll need to pull out each individual’s talents and strike an appropriate balance as a leader. For example, your pleasant team member will nearly always think of the team first, but it’s crucial to make sure that individuals with high forceful, opinionated attributes don’t take advantage of their cooperation and empathy.
As a result, it’s critical for you to understand where your personality qualities lie in the Big Five model as a leader. A team’s performance might be harmed by a mercurial leader with erratic emotions. If you have a high level of openness, be cautious about how you communicate with those who have a higher level of conscientiousness. A more regimented, detail-oriented subordinate may chafe at your chosen creative method and abstract thinking.
Understanding how your team performs on the Big Five model can help you discover and develop potential leaders, assign tasks to team members who are most suited to handle them, and position your team for success by placing individuals in places where they can thrive. As a leader, you’ll want to ensure that you have a fluid, agile management approach that allows you to adapt your style and methods across the Big Five personality types.
Chapter 3: Entrepreneurs vs Managers
Characteristics of a Good Manager
Good managers are enthusiastic about the firm where they work and positively express the corporate culture, or the reason why the organization is different from others, to the employees under them. Managers have the ability to prioritize activities and lead their departments by making difficult decisions. They must, however, be people-oriented, not only focused on completing work, but also on listening to employees’ problems and keeping the company on a positive track. Integrity, honesty, and the willingness to assume responsibility and hold themselves and others accountable for their actions are some character traits that supervisors seek for in a manager.
Successful Entrepreneurial Characteristics
Part of why people become entrepreneurs is because they have a natural aptitude to see issues and come up with solutions. They are extremely determined to see their ideas through to completion and display a high level of self-assurance in their abilities. They are not afraid to take risks, both financial and otherwise, and they are unfazed by failure. Challenges they face are frequently viewed as a learning opportunity, with the potential to lead to even better solutions. As a result, these astute businesspeople are willing to admit when they require additional information and are constantly eager to learn.
Entrepreneurs are also devoted to their businesses and willing to put in long hours. They thrive in networking with other businesspeople and developing sales skills for their firm’s products and services. Finally, if they want to stay financially successful, they must be effective money managers.
Chapter 4: Managing Teams
All Star Games are special event games organized by professional sports leagues. They assemble teams of the finest players from respective leagues to compete in a game, demonstrate their abilities, and sell tickets.
The players are chosen in one way or another (by media votes, player votes, or fan votes), and the game is played. The totality of the collected talent is always mind-blowing. However, the ensuing team performance is occasionally lackluster.
On the surface, it appears that the best player at each position would produce the best overall team result; however, this is not necessarily the case. Of course, talent is important, but it’s not the sole component in a team’s success.
If you’re still reading, you’re probably thinking, “What does this have to do with me?” After all, in the workplace you can’t even pick your entire squad to begin with. The suggestions below will still benefit you, and you’ll be adding people to your team over time.
So, How Do You Go About Putting Together Your All-Star Team? Here Are Six Ideas To Consider
Have duties that are well defined. Ascertain that you are aware of the duties and responsibilities that must be fulfilled (and even the roles you expect you will need in the future). Make sure you and the rest of the team understand them. People are better able to fulfil responsibilities and even learn new ones once they have a thorough understanding of them.
Make sure your talent descriptions are clear. Make a talent list once the roles have been determined. What talents do you require on your team? What skills are required for various roles? Once you and your team have agreed on this, you’ll know what talent you’ll need in the future and which abilities you’ll need to develop and train within your present team.
Look for a cultural match. Some players are more suited to one squad or system than to another. When looking to expand your workforce, keep your company’s culture in mind. Yes, you’ll need talents to fill a position, but you’ll also need someone who can thrive in your environment and work style (and your leadership style too).
Think about intangibles. Engage as many current team members as possible in the process of adding a new team member. Intangibles are just as important as talent and expertise. Inquire about your team’s impressions, and consider their input during the selection process. Remember that the “little things” are rarely small in the end.
Make sure that everyone is on the same page. Ascertain that all team members (new and old) are aware of the team’s and organization’s objectives. People are more equipped to proceed in the right path when they grasp and agree on the goals. It is considerably preferable to have above-average players working together than to have superstars all going their own way.
Keep in mind the connections. Your team members do not need to be best friends, but they must form productive relationships. You have a responsibility as a leader to provide the time, space, and sometimes the expectation that working relationships are important. There is more to a winning team than great relationships, yet positive relationships are likely to lead to increased productivity.
Your all-star squad may not have a superstar at every position, but if it is properly fostered, it can produce all-star results.
Isn’t that, after all, the goal?
Chapter 5: Personality Traits
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them,” wrote William Shakespeare. To put it another way, some people are born with leadership personality qualities, while others must master the talent through practice and time. Being an all-star leader necessitates a set of attributes and skills that may be honed with effort and time.
Being an all-star leader necessitates a set of attributes and skills that may be honed with effort and time.
To encourage others to follow you as a great leader, you must act with confidence and assurance. To achieve your objectives and lead your firm to success, you must take clever actions and come up with novel ideas. You can become n effective leader with years of experience and developed self-awareness.
Personality Qualities Of Leaders Discussed
Leadership is described as the ability to inspire and motivate people to achieve their objectives. While leadership personality attributes do play a part in success in such jobs, any personality type has the potential to be exceptional. Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the psychological attributes required to succeed in a leadership position, some features are frequently connected with powerful leaders.
What Characteristics Characterize An All-Star Leader?
By being there for their team and making an effort to build a healthy work environment, good leaders guide their people and businesses to success. Great leaders drive their companies and people to success by being imaginative, ambitious, and problem-solving. While there are many different leadership styles and skills, there are some characteristics that are critical to being a better leader.
1. Integrity
2. Empathy
3. Emotional stability
4. Transparency
5. Resilience
6. Influence
7. Confidence
8. Persistence
9. Innovation
10. Purpose
Key Takeaways On Leadership And Personality
Although not everyone is born with the capabilities to be an all-star leader, you may take steps to improve your current abilities and learn the skills required to become one. Emotional intelligence, good decision-making and communication skills, self-awareness, and confidence are among the ideal leadership attributes; each plays a critical role in being a successful and powerful leader for your team.
Be aware of the personality traits and essential abilities you already have and which ones you may need to improve further in order to lead your staff and business to success. Self-awareness and a desire to adapt and improve are the first steps toward being a great leader. Understanding your personality strengths, limitations, and leadership style is a wonderful method to ensure that you are providing the most effective leadership in your job.
Chapter 6: Power Motivation
The Power Factor
In all sectors of a single large organization, 50 managers were questioned in both high- and low-morale units. The majority of the managers’ power motivation scores—more than 70%—were found to be greater than the average person’s. This finding reaffirms the importance of power incentive in management. (Keep in mind that “power motivation” does not refer to dictatorial behavior; rather, it refers to a desire to have an impact, to be powerful and influential.) The better managers tended to score even higher in power motivation, as measured by the morale of people who worked under them. But it turns out that the most crucial determinant of excellent morale was not how their need for power compared to their need to achieve, but whether their need for power was greater than their need to be liked. Only 10% of the poorer sales managers had this relationship, while 80% of the better sales managers had. The same could be said for other managers in practically every department of the company.
In the research, product development, and operations divisions, 73 percent of better managers had a larger need for power than a need to be liked, compared to only 22 percent of inferior managers, who tended to be “affiliative managers”—those whose primary motivation is to be liked. Why is this the case?
Sociologists have long argued that in order for a bureaucracy to function well, those in charge must apply laws uniformly: if they create exceptions for individual needs, the entire system will collapse. The manager who has a strong desire to be liked is the one who wants to maintain excellent relations with everyone and, as a result, is the one who is most inclined to make exceptions for special circumstances. If an employee requests time off to care for a sick husband and children, the affiliative boss almost immediately agrees out of compassion for the employee’s predicament. When former President Gerald Ford said in his pardon speech to Richard Nixon that he had “suffered enough,” he was acting like an affiliative manager, empathizing largely with Nixon’s wants and feelings.
Chapter 7: Goals & Aspirations
“No, but I have every intention of becoming one!” most CEOs and managers would say when asked if they are outstanding leaders. It’s not easy to align time, skills, and effort with the goal of improving leadership ability and capacity, but it’s more critical than ever.
According to two shocking surveys, 87 percent of employees are not actively involved in their work, and 20% of those employees diminish the value made by more engaged co-workers.
Furthermore, experts attribute the problem to managers’ time management and leadership effectiveness. Too much time is spent on low-level minutiae, and not enough on high-level leadership activities like articulating goals, creating strategies, coaching, and recognizing outstanding performance.
While most employees are uninterested in reaching the organization’s objectives, a whopping 77 percent believe that receiving more feedback would improve their performance. Regular feedback, in fact, engages 60 times more employees than no input at all. Given the striking contrast between a disengaged, even destructive workforce and a high-performing one, the necessity for leadership is evident.
How can leaders who work long days receive the operational facts and status they need for execution while also increasing their leadership capacity? Goal success necessitates an awareness of where you are now and where you want to go so that resources and efforts are directed toward the desired outcomes.
Facts are often difficult to come by, and they’re collected in mind-numbing meetings, conference calls, emails, and spreadsheets, leaving managers with a stale image that wastes their time. Time is wasted reacting to unexpected when there is no openness. These cycles become routine, detracting from leadership duties such as goal communication, coaching, and acknowledging contributions.
Managers gain efficiencies and boost their leadership potential by establishing a culture and processes of transparency for both goals and present status across the organization. Employees have a better understanding of the mission and how they may contribute to it.
Increase your ability to lead and develop your leadership skills. You’ll need tools to communicate objectives and status more efficiently for greater transparency so you can both participate as a leader and execute on goals. Moving from a reactive, transactional manager to a successful leader who coaches, enables, empowers, and executes necessitates a shift in thinking and habits.
This daily schedule for balancing execution and engagement activities will help you form new habits.
Chapter 8: Environmental Factors
External Influences on All-Star Leadership
Leaders have the ability to influence and guide those who report to them, allowing an organization to achieve its objectives more effectively. External elements such as the organizational environment, demography, staff traits, resources, economic and political considerations, technology, and the organization’s culture influence leadership styles.
1. Organizational Setting
Organizations have their own unique work environment with their own set of values that are a legacy of previous and current leadership. These principles define the company’s attitude toward investors, customers, employees, and the community, and they influence how the company is run. The personality of an organization is defined by its goals, values, and ideals that characterize its products and services.
2. Resources for the Organization
To fulfill their objectives, leaders rely on organizational resources such as employees, technology, finances, and physical resources. How well resources are acquired and used determines managerial success.
3. Employee Positions
When an employee starts working for a company, the tasks and obligations he must fulfill in collaboration with others determine his job. Employees’ levels of maturity in tackling tasks and relationships influence the leadership style required to guide them. Employees have an impact on the company because of their work ethic and personal values. Leaders must recognize and eliminate hazards and bottlenecks in order to assist employees in completing their tasks.
• Employees have varying levels of maturity in approaching tasks and relationships, which impacts the style of leadership needed to guide them when they take on a role in an organization.
• Employees have varying levels of maturity in approaching tasks and relationships, which impacts the style of leadership needed to guide them.
4. Organizational Culture
An organization’s culture is a product of its founders, past and present leaders, history, and crises. Because culture is the consequence of long-held information and formal processes, traditions, conventions, and norms that represent the organization’s self-image and shared expectations, it is difficult to change. Established rites, such as rituals, routines, and a standard method of doing things, have an impact on organizational norms, such as how a worker can maintain good standing and respond appropriately in a variety of situations.
5. Sociological Factors
To design products and services for certain groups, leaders must grasp the demographic make-up and cultures of the organization’s clientele, as well as market trends.
6. Economic And Political Factors
To determine the economic and current political issues that affect the marketplace, leaders must educate themselves on their suppliers, consumers, and competitors. These elements have an impact on how leaders achieve their objectives.
7. Technology
Overnight, technology can drastically alter the business landscape. To assist the organization adapt to technology, leaders must change their management techniques. Leaders benefit from research and development because it allows them to develop new techniques that make operations more efficient.
Chapter 9: Growth & Success
Companies like Microsoft and Starbucks have used the growth mentality to help improve their cultures, so it’s gaining popularity in the corporate world. Accepting that we can constantly improve, learn from our mistakes, and move forward is the growth attitude. You know, the whole “if at first you don’t succeed, pick yourself up and try again” thing. Although it appears to be a basic concept, in the business world, we are only now seeing that having a mindset that focuses on “becoming better” rather than “being good” can be a significant differentiator in a company’s ultimate success. Still, many people don’t understand the value of using a growth mindset, and it’s a quality we don’t see in all leaders.
In business, you may hear the popular refrain that people are either born leaders or not – that our ability to lead is determined by our luck of the draw. Granted, some people are born with the ability to lead, but what about others for whom leadership does not come easily, those who have had to work hard to achieve success? Consider Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos: What these leaders have in common is a never-ending desire to learn from their mistakes, to improve each time, and to never be satisfied with a job well done. This is the development mindset in action, and these are the growth leaders, as I like to call them. A growth leader might be anyone who desires to be a leader. The growth mentality is about guiding the organization through these ups and downs by constantly learning, refocusing, motivating, and enabling it to achieve its objectives.
Chapter 10: Risk Attitudes
Every leader has a distinct vision for their lives. They are willing to navigate treacherous waters in order to achieve their goals.
They understand, however, that the more vision they have, the more focus they will require, the higher the risks they will take, and presumably, the bigger the return.
Taking chances entails venturing beyond your comfort zone.
Furthermore, taking risks is a natural human tendency that plays an important role in the lives of leaders. The leaders’ willingness to take risks may be influenced by their age, generation, and financial situation.
Taking risks is contagious. Your employees will feel more comfortable taking risks and moving outside of their comfort zones if they witness you doing so.
Risk-taking has been treated as a disease for the past few years.Taking chances is prized nowadays since it creates opportunities, even though the outcomes can be bad.
Risk-taking isn’t reckless as long as it’s done with caution.
Why Should A Leader Take Risks?
Some people attempt to avoid taking chances, while others are unafraid to take them.
Leaders, on the other hand, are willing and compelled to take risks.
Longevity, meaningful experiences, greater finances, and a more motivated, loyal, and trustworthy team are all benefits of taking risks as a leader.
People do not take risks because they are afraid. They are usually terrified of failing or succeeding, of being vulnerable, of being incorrect, or of revealing their flaws and limitations.
Chapter 11: Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
How Can You Know Whether You Have Self-Efficacy In Leadership?
Laura Paglis and Stephen Green have done extensive research on leadership self-efficacy. They developed a paradigm that breaks down how to think about leadership self-efficacy in a practical way. The model divides general leadership activities into three categories: providing direction, garnering followers’ commitment, and overcoming obstacles.
Self-Efficacy in Leadership for Setting Directions
A leader’s capacity to recognize and plan for their leadership environment is referred to as direction setting.
How confident you are in your abilities to solve problems or obtain and understand knowledge relating to your field can be used to determine your self-efficacy for establishing goals. Previous successes or failures in making plans and solving problems, as well as your overall opinions about your intelligence, can influence your self-beliefs in this area.
Overcoming Obstacles with Leadership Self-Efficacy
For leaders, overcoming barriers is a never-ending task. Whether it’s conquering personal difficulties such as self-motivation and restrictions, or group-wide challenges. Ability to pivot, serving others, building momentum, overseeing work, and taking action when necessary are all talents associated to overcoming challenges.
Self-control and motivation are also crucial abilities. You probably have strong self-efficacy for overcoming problems if you are a more action-oriented person with self-motivation and adaptability.
What Is The Definition Of Innovative Leadership?
Innovation leadership is a management method that emphasizes the integration of multiple leadership styles in the workplace in order to boost creativity, competency, and collaboration.
This leadership style is used to guide and motivate people to build the abilities necessary to improve the organization’s innovation performance, notably in the creation of viable and strategically aligned ideas that can shape the company’s current and future success.
Chapter 12: Values & Experience
Despite a vast body of evidence demonstrating that experiential-based development can be handled effectively and strategically, the HR community has been resistant to accept the idea that on-the-job experience should be the driving force in growth. Researchers summarizes seven key findings from studies on the impact of experience in leadership development over the last three decades:
1. To the extent that leadership is a skill, it is acquired via experience. Personality and experience both play a role in “leadership role occupation,” according to research conducted on twins at the University of Minnesota. These researchers discovered that while inheritance accounts for 30% of leadership success, the great majority (70%) is attributable to experience.
2. Some developmental events are more significant than others. Successful managers have described comparable events that affected their development in different ways, according to multiple studies. Early work experiences, short-term assignments, significant line assignments, other people (almost always very excellent and very awful bosses or superiors), varied hardships, and random events such as training programs are all examples of these encounters.
3. On-the-job training is effective because of the problems it presents. The characteristics that make an experience challenging—for example, high stakes, complexity, high pressure, novelty, and unexpectedness—are the characteristics that give each event the potential to be a learning experience.
4. People can learn different lessons from different types of situations. It’s tough to say whether or not a person will genuinely learn from the event because it depends on their personality and other characteristics.
5. Workplace encounters and assignments might be more educational. By providing feedback on learning progress and challenges, high-quality learning experiences can be strengthened.
6. Despite the challenges that people confront during their professions, they can gain a lot of the experience they need to succeed. Getting individuals into the experiences they need is a matter of recognizing who needs what experiences, having the experiences available, and being ready to put developmental movements ahead of other priorities, whether the push is a direct boss or an organizational process like succession planning.
7. Learning is a multi-step process that takes time. It can be planned, but a lot of learning happens on the spur of the moment. The author claims that competence models, which are used to describe leadership development methods in most American businesses, may not be the ideal way to lay a foundation for future leaders.
Curriculum
Balancing Entrepreneurship – Workshop 5 – All-Star Identification
- Talent Acquisition
- Big 5
- Entrepreneurs vs Managers
- Managing Teams
- Personality Traits
- Power Motivation
- Goals & Aspirations
- Environmental Factors
- Growth & Success
- Risk Attitudes
- Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
- Values & Experience
Distance Learning
Introduction
Welcome to Appleton Greene and thank you for enrolling on the Balancing Entrepreneurship corporate training program. You will be learning through our unique facilitation via distance-learning method, which will enable you to practically implement everything that you learn academically. The methods and materials used in your program have been designed and developed to ensure that you derive the maximum benefits and enjoyment possible. We hope that you find the program challenging and fun to do. However, if you have never been a distance-learner before, you may be experiencing some trepidation at the task before you. So we will get you started by giving you some basic information and guidance on how you can make the best use of the modules, how you should manage the materials and what you should be doing as you work through them. This guide is designed to point you in the right direction and help you to become an effective distance-learner. Take a few hours or so to study this guide and your guide to tutorial support for students, while making notes, before you start to study in earnest.
Study environment
You will need to locate a quiet and private place to study, preferably a room where you can easily be isolated from external disturbances or distractions. Make sure the room is well-lit and incorporates a relaxed, pleasant feel. If you can spoil yourself within your study environment, you will have much more of a chance to ensure that you are always in the right frame of mind when you do devote time to study. For example, a nice fire, the ability to play soft soothing background music, soft but effective lighting, perhaps a nice view if possible and a good size desk with a comfortable chair. Make sure that your family know when you are studying and understand your study rules. Your study environment is very important. The ideal situation, if at all possible, is to have a separate study, which can be devoted to you. If this is not possible then you will need to pay a lot more attention to developing and managing your study schedule, because it will affect other people as well as yourself. The better your study environment, the more productive you will be.
Study tools & rules
Try and make sure that your study tools are sufficient and in good working order. You will need to have access to a computer, scanner and printer, with access to the internet. You will need a very comfortable chair, which supports your lower back, and you will need a good filing system. It can be very frustrating if you are spending valuable study time trying to fix study tools that are unreliable, or unsuitable for the task. Make sure that your study tools are up to date. You will also need to consider some study rules. Some of these rules will apply to you and will be intended to help you to be more disciplined about when and how you study. This distance-learning guide will help you and after you have read it you can put some thought into what your study rules should be. You will also need to negotiate some study rules for your family, friends or anyone who lives with you. They too will need to be disciplined in order to ensure that they can support you while you study. It is important to ensure that your family and friends are an integral part of your study team. Having their support and encouragement can prove to be a crucial contribution to your successful completion of the program. Involve them in as much as you can.
Successful distance-learning
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes or workshops, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. But unlike traditional internal training courses, it is the student’s responsibility, with a distance-learning program, to ensure that they manage their own study contribution. This requires strong self-discipline and self-motivation skills and there must be a clear will to succeed. Those students who are used to managing themselves, are good at managing others and who enjoy working in isolation, are more likely to be good distance-learners. It is also important to be aware of the main reasons why you are studying and of the main objectives that you are hoping to achieve as a result. You will need to remind yourself of these objectives at times when you need to motivate yourself. Never lose sight of your long-term goals and your short-term objectives. There is nobody available here to pamper you, or to look after you, or to spoon-feed you with information, so you will need to find ways to encourage and appreciate yourself while you are studying. Make sure that you chart your study progress, so that you can be sure of your achievements and re-evaluate your goals and objectives regularly.
Self-assessment
Appleton Greene training programs are in all cases post-graduate programs. Consequently, you should already have obtained a business-related degree and be an experienced learner. You should therefore already be aware of your study strengths and weaknesses. For example, which time of the day are you at your most productive? Are you a lark or an owl? What study methods do you respond to the most? Are you a consistent learner? How do you discipline yourself? How do you ensure that you enjoy yourself while studying? It is important to understand yourself as a learner and so some self-assessment early on will be necessary if you are to apply yourself correctly. Perform a SWOT analysis on yourself as a student. List your internal strengths and weaknesses as a student and your external opportunities and threats. This will help you later on when you are creating a study plan. You can then incorporate features within your study plan that can ensure that you are playing to your strengths, while compensating for your weaknesses. You can also ensure that you make the most of your opportunities, while avoiding the potential threats to your success.
Accepting responsibility as a student
Training programs invariably require a significant investment, both in terms of what they cost and in the time that you need to contribute to study and the responsibility for successful completion of training programs rests entirely with the student. This is never more apparent than when a student is learning via distance-learning. Accepting responsibility as a student is an important step towards ensuring that you can successfully complete your training program. It is easy to instantly blame other people or factors when things go wrong. But the fact of the matter is that if a failure is your failure, then you have the power to do something about it, it is entirely in your own hands. If it is always someone else’s failure, then you are powerless to do anything about it. All students study in entirely different ways, this is because we are all individuals and what is right for one student, is not necessarily right for another. In order to succeed, you will have to accept personal responsibility for finding a way to plan, implement and manage a personal study plan that works for you. If you do not succeed, you only have yourself to blame.
Planning
By far the most critical contribution to stress, is the feeling of not being in control. In the absence of planning we tend to be reactive and can stumble from pillar to post in the hope that things will turn out fine in the end. Invariably they don’t! In order to be in control, we need to have firm ideas about how and when we want to do things. We also need to consider as many possible eventualities as we can, so that we are prepared for them when they happen. Prescriptive Change, is far easier to manage and control, than Emergent Change. The same is true with distance-learning. It is much easier and much more enjoyable, if you feel that you are in control and that things are going to plan. Even when things do go wrong, you are prepared for them and can act accordingly without any unnecessary stress. It is important therefore that you do take time to plan your studies properly.
Management
Once you have developed a clear study plan, it is of equal importance to ensure that you manage the implementation of it. Most of us usually enjoy planning, but it is usually during implementation when things go wrong. Targets are not met and we do not understand why. Sometimes we do not even know if targets are being met. It is not enough for us to conclude that the study plan just failed. If it is failing, you will need to understand what you can do about it. Similarly if your study plan is succeeding, it is still important to understand why, so that you can improve upon your success. You therefore need to have guidelines for self-assessment so that you can be consistent with performance improvement throughout the program. If you manage things correctly, then your performance should constantly improve throughout the program.
Study objectives & tasks
The first place to start is developing your program objectives. These should feature your reasons for undertaking the training program in order of priority. Keep them succinct and to the point in order to avoid confusion. Do not just write the first things that come into your head because they are likely to be too similar to each other. Make a list of possible departmental headings, such as: Customer Service; E-business; Finance; Globalization; Human Resources; Technology; Legal; Management; Marketing and Production. Then brainstorm for ideas by listing as many things that you want to achieve under each heading and later re-arrange these things in order of priority. Finally, select the top item from each department heading and choose these as your program objectives. Try and restrict yourself to five because it will enable you to focus clearly. It is likely that the other things that you listed will be achieved if each of the top objectives are achieved. If this does not prove to be the case, then simply work through the process again.
Study forecast
As a guide, the Appleton Greene Balancing Entrepreneurship corporate training program should take 12-18 months to complete, depending upon your availability and current commitments. The reason why there is such a variance in time estimates is because every student is an individual, with differing productivity levels and different commitments. These differentiations are then exaggerated by the fact that this is a distance-learning program, which incorporates the practical integration of academic theory as an as a part of the training program. Consequently all of the project studies are real, which means that important decisions and compromises need to be made. You will want to get things right and will need to be patient with your expectations in order to ensure that they are. We would always recommend that you are prudent with your own task and time forecasts, but you still need to develop them and have a clear indication of what are realistic expectations in your case. With reference to your time planning: consider the time that you can realistically dedicate towards study with the program every week; calculate how long it should take you to complete the program, using the guidelines featured here; then break the program down into logical modules and allocate a suitable proportion of time to each of them, these will be your milestones; you can create a time plan by using a spreadsheet on your computer, or a personal organizer such as MS Outlook, you could also use a financial forecasting software; break your time forecasts down into manageable chunks of time, the more specific you can be, the more productive and accurate your time management will be; finally, use formulas where possible to do your time calculations for you, because this will help later on when your forecasts need to change in line with actual performance. With reference to your task planning: refer to your list of tasks that need to be undertaken in order to achieve your program objectives; with reference to your time plan, calculate when each task should be implemented; remember that you are not estimating when your objectives will be achieved, but when you will need to focus upon implementing the corresponding tasks; you also need to ensure that each task is implemented in conjunction with the associated training modules which are relevant; then break each single task down into a list of specific to do’s, say approximately ten to do’s for each task and enter these into your study plan; once again you could use MS Outlook to incorporate both your time and task planning and this could constitute your study plan; you could also use a project management software like MS Project. You should now have a clear and realistic forecast detailing when you can expect to be able to do something about undertaking the tasks to achieve your program objectives.
Performance management
It is one thing to develop your study forecast, it is quite another to monitor your progress. Ultimately it is less important whether you achieve your original study forecast and more important that you update it so that it constantly remains realistic in line with your performance. As you begin to work through the program, you will begin to have more of an idea about your own personal performance and productivity levels as a distance-learner. Once you have completed your first study module, you should re-evaluate your study forecast for both time and tasks, so that they reflect your actual performance level achieved. In order to achieve this you must first time yourself while training by using an alarm clock. Set the alarm for hourly intervals and make a note of how far you have come within that time. You can then make a note of your actual performance on your study plan and then compare your performance against your forecast. Then consider the reasons that have contributed towards your performance level, whether they are positive or negative and make a considered adjustment to your future forecasts as a result. Given time, you should start achieving your forecasts regularly.
With reference to time management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual time taken in your study plan; consider your successes with time-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; consider your failures with time-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future time planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to time planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your time expectations. You need to be consistent with your time management, otherwise you will never complete your studies. This will either be because you are not contributing enough time to your studies, or you will become less efficient with the time that you do allocate to your studies. Remember, if you are not in control of your studies, they can just become yet another cause of stress for you.
With reference to your task management: time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual tasks that you have undertaken in your study plan; consider your successes with task-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; consider your failures with task-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case and take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning; re-evaluate your study forecast in relation to task planning for the remainder of your training program to ensure that you continue to be realistic about your task expectations. You need to be consistent with your task management, otherwise you will never know whether you are achieving your program objectives or not.
Keeping in touch
You will have access to qualified and experienced professors and tutors who are responsible for providing tutorial support for your particular training program. So don’t be shy about letting them know how you are getting on. We keep electronic records of all tutorial support emails so that professors and tutors can review previous correspondence before considering an individual response. It also means that there is a record of all communications between you and your professors and tutors and this helps to avoid any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation. If you have a problem relating to the program, share it with them via email. It is likely that they have come across the same problem before and are usually able to make helpful suggestions and steer you in the right direction. To learn more about when and how to use tutorial support, please refer to the Tutorial Support section of this student information guide. This will help you to ensure that you are making the most of tutorial support that is available to you and will ultimately contribute towards your success and enjoyment with your training program.
Work colleagues and family
You should certainly discuss your program study progress with your colleagues, friends and your family. Appleton Greene training programs are very practical. They require you to seek information from other people, to plan, develop and implement processes with other people and to achieve feedback from other people in relation to viability and productivity. You will therefore have plenty of opportunities to test your ideas and enlist the views of others. People tend to be sympathetic towards distance-learners, so don’t bottle it all up in yourself. Get out there and share it! It is also likely that your family and colleagues are going to benefit from your labors with the program, so they are likely to be much more interested in being involved than you might think. Be bold about delegating work to those who might benefit themselves. This is a great way to achieve understanding and commitment from people who you may later rely upon for process implementation. Share your experiences with your friends and family.
Making it relevant
The key to successful learning is to make it relevant to your own individual circumstances. At all times you should be trying to make bridges between the content of the program and your own situation. Whether you achieve this through quiet reflection or through interactive discussion with your colleagues, client partners or your family, remember that it is the most important and rewarding aspect of translating your studies into real self-improvement. You should be clear about how you want the program to benefit you. This involves setting clear study objectives in relation to the content of the course in terms of understanding, concepts, completing research or reviewing activities and relating the content of the modules to your own situation. Your objectives may understandably change as you work through the program, in which case you should enter the revised objectives on your study plan so that you have a permanent reminder of what you are trying to achieve, when and why.
Distance-learning check-list
Prepare your study environment, your study tools and rules.
Undertake detailed self-assessment in terms of your ability as a learner.
Create a format for your study plan.
Consider your study objectives and tasks.
Create a study forecast.
Assess your study performance.
Re-evaluate your study forecast.
Be consistent when managing your study plan.
Use your Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) for tutorial support.
Make sure you keep in touch with those around you.
Tutorial Support
Programs
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. They are implemented over a sustainable period of time and professional support is consistently provided by qualified learning providers and specialist consultants.
Support available
You will have a designated Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and an Accredited Consultant and we encourage you to communicate with them as much as possible. In all cases tutorial support is provided online because we can then keep a record of all communications to ensure that tutorial support remains consistent. You would also be forwarding your work to the tutorial support unit for evaluation and assessment. You will receive individual feedback on all of the work that you undertake on a one-to-one basis, together with specific recommendations for anything that may need to be changed in order to achieve a pass with merit or a pass with distinction and you then have as many opportunities as you may need to re-submit project studies until they meet with the required standard. Consequently the only reason that you should really fail (CLP) is if you do not do the work. It makes no difference to us whether a student takes 12 months or 18 months to complete the program, what matters is that in all cases the same quality standard will have been achieved.
Support Process
Please forward all of your future emails to the designated (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit email address that has been provided and please do not duplicate or copy your emails to other AGC email accounts as this will just cause unnecessary administration. Please note that emails are always answered as quickly as possible but you will need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general tutorial support emails during busy periods, because emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. You will also need to allow a period of up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Please therefore kindly allow for this within your time planning. All communications are managed online via email because it enables tutorial service support managers to review other communications which have been received before responding and it ensures that there is a copy of all communications retained on file for future reference. All communications will be stored within your personal (CLP) study file here at Appleton Greene throughout your designated study period. If you need any assistance or clarification at any time, please do not hesitate to contact us by forwarding an email and remember that we are here to help. If you have any questions, please list and number your questions succinctly and you can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each and every query.
Time Management
It takes approximately 1 Year to complete the Balancing Entrepreneurship corporate training program, incorporating 12 x 6-hour monthly workshops. Each student will also need to contribute approximately 4 hours per week over 1 Year of their personal time. Students can study from home or work at their own pace and are responsible for managing their own study plan. There are no formal examinations and students are evaluated and assessed based upon their project study submissions, together with the quality of their internal analysis and supporting documents. They can contribute more time towards study when they have the time to do so and can contribute less time when they are busy. All students tend to be in full time employment while studying and the Balancing Entrepreneurship program is purposely designed to accommodate this, so there is plenty of flexibility in terms of time management. It makes no difference to us at Appleton Greene, whether individuals take 12-18 months to complete this program. What matters is that in all cases the same standard of quality will have been achieved with the standard and bespoke programs that have been developed.
Distance Learning Guide
The distance learning guide should be your first port of call when starting your training program. It will help you when you are planning how and when to study, how to create the right environment and how to establish the right frame of mind. If you can lay the foundations properly during the planning stage, then it will contribute to your enjoyment and productivity while training later. The guide helps to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate time for study and to cultivate good study habits. It helps you to chart your progress so that you can measure your performance and achieve your goals. It explains the tools that you will need for study and how to make them work. It also explains how to translate academic theory into practical reality. Spend some time now working through your distance learning guide and make sure that you have firm foundations in place so that you can make the most of your distance learning program. There is no requirement for you to attend training workshops or classes at Appleton Greene offices. The entire program is undertaken online, program course manuals and project studies are administered via the Appleton Greene web site and via email, so you are able to study at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office as long as you have a computer and access to the internet.
How To Study
The how to study guide provides students with a clear understanding of the Appleton Greene facilitation via distance learning training methods and enables students to obtain a clear overview of the training program content. It enables students to understand the step-by-step training methods used by Appleton Greene and how course manuals are integrated with project studies. It explains the research and development that is required and the need to provide evidence and references to support your statements. It also enables students to understand precisely what will be required of them in order to achieve a pass with merit and a pass with distinction for individual project studies and provides useful guidance on how to be innovative and creative when developing your Unique Program Proposition (UPP).
Tutorial Support
Tutorial support for the Appleton Greene Balancing Entrepreneurship corporate training program is provided online either through the Appleton Greene Client Support Portal (CSP), or via email. All tutorial support requests are facilitated by a designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). They are responsible for deciding which professor or tutor is the most appropriate option relating to the support required and then the tutorial support request is forwarded onto them. Once the professor or tutor has completed the tutorial support request and answered any questions that have been asked, this communication is then returned to the student via email by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). This enables all tutorial support, between students, professors and tutors, to be facilitated by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM) efficiently and securely through the email account. You will therefore need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general support queries and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because all tutorial support requests are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Consequently you need to put some thought into the management of your tutorial support procedure in order to ensure that your study plan is feasible and to obtain the maximum possible benefit from tutorial support during your period of study. Please retain copies of your tutorial support emails for future reference. Please ensure that ALL of your tutorial support emails are set out using the format as suggested within your guide to tutorial support. Your tutorial support emails need to be referenced clearly to the specific part of the course manual or project study which you are working on at any given time. You also need to list and number any questions that you would like to ask, up to a maximum of five questions within each tutorial support email. Remember the more specific you can be with your questions the more specific your answers will be too and this will help you to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or duplication. The guide to tutorial support is intended to help you to understand how and when to use support in order to ensure that you get the most out of your training program. Appleton Greene training programs are designed to enable you to do things for yourself. They provide you with a structure or a framework and we use tutorial support to facilitate students while they practically implement what they learn. In other words, we are enabling students to do things for themselves. The benefits of distance learning via facilitation are considerable and are much more sustainable in the long-term than traditional short-term knowledge sharing programs. Consequently you should learn how and when to use tutorial support so that you can maximize the benefits from your learning experience with Appleton Greene. This guide describes the purpose of each training function and how to use them and how to use tutorial support in relation to each aspect of the training program. It also provides useful tips and guidance with regard to best practice.
Tutorial Support Tips
Students are often unsure about how and when to use tutorial support with Appleton Greene. This Tip List will help you to understand more about how to achieve the most from using tutorial support. Refer to it regularly to ensure that you are continuing to use the service properly. Tutorial support is critical to the success of your training experience, but it is important to understand when and how to use it in order to maximize the benefit that you receive. It is no coincidence that those students who succeed are those that learn how to be positive, proactive and productive when using tutorial support.
Be positive and friendly with your tutorial support emails
Remember that if you forward an email to the tutorial support unit, you are dealing with real people. “Do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you”. If you are positive, complimentary and generally friendly in your emails, you will generate a similar response in return. This will be more enjoyable, productive and rewarding for you in the long-term.
Think about the impression that you want to create
Every time that you communicate, you create an impression, which can be either positive or negative, so put some thought into the impression that you want to create. Remember that copies of all tutorial support emails are stored electronically and tutors will always refer to prior correspondence before responding to any current emails. Over a period of time, a general opinion will be arrived at in relation to your character, attitude and ability. Try to manage your own frustrations, mood swings and temperament professionally, without involving the tutorial support team. Demonstrating frustration or a lack of patience is a weakness and will be interpreted as such. The good thing about communicating in writing, is that you will have the time to consider your content carefully, you can review it and proof-read it before sending your email to Appleton Greene and this should help you to communicate more professionally, consistently and to avoid any unnecessary knee-jerk reactions to individual situations as and when they may arise. Please also remember that the CLP Tutorial Support Unit will not just be responsible for evaluating and assessing the quality of your work, they will also be responsible for providing recommendations to other learning providers and to client contacts within the Appleton Greene global client network, so do be in control of your own emotions and try to create a good impression.
Remember that quality is preferred to quantity
Please remember that when you send an email to the tutorial support team, you are not using Twitter or Text Messaging. Try not to forward an email every time that you have a thought. This will not prove to be productive either for you or for the tutorial support team. Take time to prepare your communications properly, as if you were writing a professional letter to a business colleague and make a list of queries that you are likely to have and then incorporate them within one email, say once every month, so that the tutorial support team can understand more about context, application and your methodology for study. Get yourself into a consistent routine with your tutorial support requests and use the tutorial support template provided with ALL of your emails. The (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit will not spoon-feed you with information. They need to be able to evaluate and assess your tutorial support requests carefully and professionally.
Be specific about your questions in order to receive specific answers
Try not to write essays by thinking as you are writing tutorial support emails. The tutorial support unit can be unclear about what in fact you are asking, or what you are looking to achieve. Be specific about asking questions that you want answers to. Number your questions. You will then receive specific answers to each and every question. This is the main purpose of tutorial support via email.
Keep a record of your tutorial support emails
It is important that you keep a record of all tutorial support emails that are forwarded to you. You can then refer to them when necessary and it avoids any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Individual training workshops or telephone support
Please be advised that Appleton Greene does not provide separate or individual tutorial support meetings, workshops, or provide telephone support for individual students. Appleton Greene is an equal opportunities learning and service provider and we are therefore understandably bound to treat all students equally. We cannot therefore broker special financial or study arrangements with individual students regardless of the circumstances. All tutorial support is provided online and this enables Appleton Greene to keep a record of all communications between students, professors and tutors on file for future reference, in accordance with our quality management procedure and your terms and conditions of enrolment. All tutorial support is provided online via email because it enables us to have time to consider support content carefully, it ensures that you receive a considered and detailed response to your queries. You can number questions that you would like to ask, which relate to things that you do not understand or where clarification may be required. You can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each individual query. You will also then have a record of these communications and of all tutorial support, which has been provided to you. This makes tutorial support administration more productive by avoiding any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Tutorial Support Email Format
You should use this tutorial support format if you need to request clarification or assistance while studying with your training program. Please note that ALL of your tutorial support request emails should use the same format. You should therefore set up a standard email template, which you can then use as and when you need to. Emails that are forwarded to Appleton Greene, which do not use the following format, may be rejected and returned to you by the (CLP) Program Administration Manager. A detailed response will then be forwarded to you via email usually within 20 business days of receipt for general support queries and 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Your tutorial support request, together with the corresponding TSU reply, will then be saved and stored within your electronic TSU file at Appleton Greene for future reference.
Subject line of your email
Please insert: Appleton Greene (CLP) Tutorial Support Request: (Your Full Name) (Date), within the subject line of your email.
Main body of your email
Please insert:
1. Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) Tutorial Support Request
2. Your Full Name
3. Date of TS request
4. Preferred email address
5. Backup email address
6. Course manual page name or number (reference)
7. Project study page name or number (reference)
Subject of enquiry
Please insert a maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Briefly outline the subject matter of your inquiry, or what your questions relate to.
Question 1
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 3
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 4
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 5
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Please note that a maximum of 5 questions is permitted with each individual tutorial support request email.
Procedure
* List the questions that you want to ask first, then re-arrange them in order of priority. Make sure that you reference them, where necessary, to the course manuals or project studies.
* Make sure that you are specific about your questions and number them. Try to plan the content within your emails to make sure that it is relevant.
* Make sure that your tutorial support emails are set out correctly, using the Tutorial Support Email Format provided here.
* Save a copy of your email and incorporate the date sent after the subject title. Keep your tutorial support emails within the same file and in date order for easy reference.
* Allow up to 20 business days for a response to general tutorial support emails and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because detailed individual responses will be made in all cases and tutorial support emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received.
* Emails can and do get lost. So if you have not received a reply within the appropriate time, forward another copy or a reminder to the tutorial support unit to be sure that it has been received but do not forward reminders unless the appropriate time has elapsed.
* When you receive a reply, save it immediately featuring the date of receipt after the subject heading for easy reference. In most cases the tutorial support unit replies to your questions individually, so you will have a record of the questions that you asked as well as the answers offered. With project studies however, separate emails are usually forwarded by the tutorial support unit, so do keep a record of your own original emails as well.
* Remember to be positive and friendly in your emails. You are dealing with real people who will respond to the same things that you respond to.
* Try not to repeat questions that have already been asked in previous emails. If this happens the tutorial support unit will probably just refer you to the appropriate answers that have already been provided within previous emails.
* If you lose your tutorial support email records you can write to Appleton Greene to receive a copy of your tutorial support file, but a separate administration charge may be levied for this service.
How To Study
Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can help you to plan a task list for getting started so that you can be clear about your direction and your priorities in relation to your training program. It is also a good way to introduce yourself to the tutorial support team.
Planning your study environment
Your study conditions are of great importance and will have a direct effect on how much you enjoy your training program. Consider how much space you will have, whether it is comfortable and private and whether you are likely to be disturbed. The study tools and facilities at your disposal are also important to the success of your distance-learning experience. Your tutorial support unit can help with useful tips and guidance, regardless of your starting position. It is important to get this right before you start working on your training program.
Planning your program objectives
It is important that you have a clear list of study objectives, in order of priority, before you start working on your training program. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance here to ensure that your study objectives have been afforded due consideration and priority.
Planning how and when to study
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. This approach is designed to let you study efficiently away from the traditional classroom environment. It is important however, that you plan how and when to study, so that you are making the most of your natural attributes, strengths and opportunities. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance and useful tips to ensure that you are playing to your strengths.
Planning your study tasks
You should have a clear understanding of the study tasks that you should be undertaking and the priority associated with each task. These tasks should also be integrated with your program objectives. The distance learning guide and the guide to tutorial support for students should help you here, but if you need any clarification or assistance, please contact your tutorial support unit.
Planning your time
You will need to allocate specific times during your calendar when you intend to study if you are to have a realistic chance of completing your program on time. You are responsible for planning and managing your own study time, so it is important that you are successful with this. Your tutorial support unit can help you with this if your time plan is not working.
Keeping in touch
Consistency is the key here. If you communicate too frequently in short bursts, or too infrequently with no pattern, then your management ability with your studies will be questioned, both by you and by your tutorial support unit. It is obvious when a student is in control and when one is not and this will depend how able you are at sticking with your study plan. Inconsistency invariably leads to in-completion.
Charting your progress
Your tutorial support team can help you to chart your own study progress. Refer to your distance learning guide for further details.
Making it work
To succeed, all that you will need to do is apply yourself to undertaking your training program and interpreting it correctly. Success or failure lies in your hands and your hands alone, so be sure that you have a strategy for making it work. Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can guide you through the process of program planning, development and implementation.
Reading methods
Interpretation is often unique to the individual but it can be improved and even quantified by implementing consistent interpretation methods. Interpretation can be affected by outside interference such as family members, TV, or the Internet, or simply by other thoughts which are demanding priority in our minds. One thing that can improve our productivity is using recognized reading methods. This helps us to focus and to be more structured when reading information for reasons of importance, rather than relaxation.
Speed reading
When reading through course manuals for the first time, subconsciously set your reading speed to be just fast enough that you cannot dwell on individual words or tables. With practice, you should be able to read an A4 sheet of paper in one minute. You will not achieve much in the way of a detailed understanding, but your brain will retain a useful overview. This overview will be important later on and will enable you to keep individual issues in perspective with a more generic picture because speed reading appeals to the memory part of the brain. Do not worry about what you do or do not remember at this stage.
Content reading
Once you have speed read everything, you can then start work in earnest. You now need to read a particular section of your course manual thoroughly, by making detailed notes while you read. This process is called Content Reading and it will help to consolidate your understanding and interpretation of the information that has been provided.
Making structured notes on the course manuals
When you are content reading, you should be making detailed notes, which are both structured and informative. Make these notes in a MS Word document on your computer, because you can then amend and update these as and when you deem it to be necessary. List your notes under three headings: 1. Interpretation – 2. Questions – 3. Tasks. The purpose of the 1st section is to clarify your interpretation by writing it down. The purpose of the 2nd section is to list any questions that the issue raises for you. The purpose of the 3rd section is to list any tasks that you should undertake as a result. Anyone who has graduated with a business-related degree should already be familiar with this process.
Organizing structured notes separately
You should then transfer your notes to a separate study notebook, preferably one that enables easy referencing, such as a MS Word Document, a MS Excel Spreadsheet, a MS Access Database, or a personal organizer on your cell phone. Transferring your notes allows you to have the opportunity of cross-checking and verifying them, which assists considerably with understanding and interpretation. You will also find that the better you are at doing this, the more chance you will have of ensuring that you achieve your study objectives.
Question your understanding
Do challenge your understanding. Explain things to yourself in your own words by writing things down.
Clarifying your understanding
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your understanding.
Question your interpretation
Do challenge your interpretation. Qualify your interpretation by writing it down.
Clarifying your interpretation
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your interpretation.
Qualification Requirements
The student will need to successfully complete the project study and all of the exercises relating to the Balancing Entrepreneurship corporate training program, achieving a pass with merit or distinction in each case, in order to qualify as an Accredited Balancing Entrepreneurship Specialist (APTS). All monthly workshops need to be tried and tested within your company. These project studies can be completed in your own time and at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office. There are no formal examinations, assessment is based upon the successful completion of the project studies. They are called project studies because, unlike case studies, these projects are not theoretical, they incorporate real program processes that need to be properly researched and developed. The project studies assist us in measuring your understanding and interpretation of the training program and enable us to assess qualification merits. All of the project studies are based entirely upon the content within the training program and they enable you to integrate what you have learnt into your corporate training practice.
Balancing Entrepreneurship – Grading Contribution
Project Study – Grading Contribution
Customer Service – 10%
E-business – 05%
Finance – 10%
Globalization – 10%
Human Resources – 10%
Information Technology – 10%
Legal – 05%
Management – 10%
Marketing – 10%
Production – 10%
Education – 05%
Logistics – 05%
TOTAL GRADING – 100%
Qualification grades
A mark of 90% = Pass with Distinction.
A mark of 75% = Pass with Merit.
A mark of less than 75% = Fail.
If you fail to achieve a mark of 75% with a project study, you will receive detailed feedback from the Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and/or Accredited Consultant, together with a list of tasks which you will need to complete, in order to ensure that your project study meets with the minimum quality standard that is required by Appleton Greene. You can then re-submit your project study for further evaluation and assessment. Indeed you can re-submit as many drafts of your project studies as you need to, until such a time as they eventually meet with the required standard by Appleton Greene, so you need not worry about this, it is all part of the learning process.
When marking project studies, Appleton Greene is looking for sufficient evidence of the following:
Pass with merit
A satisfactory level of program understanding
A satisfactory level of program interpretation
A satisfactory level of project study content presentation
A satisfactory level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
A satisfactory level of the practical integration of academic theory
Pass with distinction
An exceptional level of program understanding
An exceptional level of program interpretation
An exceptional level of project study content presentation
An exceptional level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
An exceptional level of the practical integration of academic theory
Preliminary Analysis
Online Article
By Phuong V.Nguyen, et al
ScienceDirect
June 2021
”The Impact Of Entrepreneurial Leadership On Smes’ Performance: The Mediating Effects Of Organizational Factors
Abstract
This research empirically examines the effect of entrepreneurial leadership, entrepreneurial orientation, and technological innovation capability on SMEs’ performance. Interestingly, this study investigates the mediating effects of internal organizational factors such as entrepreneurial orientation, team creativity, dynamic capabilities, and competitive advantage on the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and SMEs’ performance. The consistent PLS-SEM approach was applied to analyze valid data collected from 182 small and medium IT enterprises operating at Quang Trung Software City, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The empirical results reveal that entrepreneurial leadership via the full mediators of team creativity, dynamic capabilities, and competitive advantages can enhance the performance of IT SMEs. While entrepreneurial orientation does not influence SMEs’ business performance, technological innovation capabilities can provide some benefits. Besides, entrepreneurial orientation plays no mediation role in the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and SMEs’ performance. Finally, the results allow us to provide meaningful insights and recommendations to manage and promote better entrepreneurial inspiration.
1. Introduction
Several emerging economies are expected to transform from an industrial society to an entrepreneurial one in which entrepreneurial leadership and orientation are supposed to be the core elements contributing to the success of the companies (Cho and Lee, 2018). As the practice of startups becomes rapidly popular and dramatically broad, some scholars have tried to analyze factors affecting the business performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (Cassar, 2014; D’Angelo and Presutti, 2019; Park et al., 2020). After Miller (1983) explored entrepreneurship’s correlations, further studies have explored the entrepreneurial process. The scholars focused on entrepreneurial behavior and how companies form the basis of entrepreneurial actions and strategic decisions to accomplish high performance (Basco et al., 2020; Li et al., 2009; Lumpkin and Dess, 1996; Miller and Le Breton–Miller, 2011; Wales et al., 2013).
Entrepreneurial orientation refers to an organization’s strategic orientation and its capacity to capture particular market elements and decision-making styles, strategies, and procedures (Boso et al., 2013b). On one side, many researchers point out the positive link between entrepreneurial orientation and business performance, which means companies adopting a more entrepreneurial orientation are likely to perform better (Kajalo and Lindblom, 2015; Rauch et al., 2009). Similarly, other papers suggest that companies with an entrepreneurial orientation are prone to capitalize on opportunities with their commitment and efforts (Covin and Miller, 2014; Wiklund and Shepherd, 2003). However, in some of them, the expected benefits did not materialize (Matsuno et al., 2002), which has brought up the need to elaborate its various contingencies (Wiklund and Shepherd, 2005).
On another side, the positive relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and business performance have been confirmed by prior studies since the business performance is a consequence of strategies implemented by leaders (Jansen et al., 2012; Ren and Guo, 2011; Uhl-Bien and Arena, 2018). Leadership has a strong influence on the implementation of entrepreneurial orientation (Engelen et al., 2014; Hmieleski et al., 2012). Yet, amid today’s growingly competitive and dynamic business environment, the traditional leadership approaches for a better performance of firms have been observed to be ineffective (Leitch and Volery, 2017). According to these previous studies, many different mediators have been taken into consideration to better illustrate the correlations and clarify the influence on business performance. However, entrepreneurial orientation, entrepreneurial leadership, business performance, and the mediators have not been studied simultaneously. Thus, there exist limitations to examine the relationships between entrepreneurial orientation, entrepreneurial leadership, and business performance within different business contexts and corresponding mediating factors.
When testing different mediating factors in the two relationships, some studies provide evidence of a connection between entrepreneurial orientation, technological innovation capabilities (TIC), and business performance (Calantone et al., 2004; Hull and Rothenberg, 2008; Miller, 1983). Meanwhile, team creativity, dynamic capabilities, and competitive advantage have frequently been suggested as mediators for the relationship between entrepreneurial leadership and business performance (Huang et al., 2014; Leitch and Volery, 2017). More importantly, considering the gaps from previous studies, business context should receive a significant focus. In this paper, the information technology (IT) sector was selected to be the emphasis due to the presence of short product lifecycles and excellent demand for customization (Liu et al., 2012; Moitra and Ganesh, 2005), which helps highlight the competitiveness and dynamism of business environment. The IT firms operating at Quang Trung Software City (QTSC) in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam, were taken as the sample for this study. QTSC is the first and most significant software park in Vietnam that concentrates around 200 firms of different sizes.
Primarily, this study aims to examine the influence of entrepreneurial leadership on entrepreneurial orientation, thereby investigating the impact of entrepreneurial orientation, and technological innovation capabilities on SMEs’ business performance. Another concern is the mediating effects of internal organizational factors, including entrepreneurial orientation, team creativity, dynamic capabilities, and competitive advantage on entrepreneurial leadership – business performance relationship. Finally, the research proposes the theoretical and managerial implications for both companies and the authorities to manage better and promote entrepreneurial inspiration.
2. Literature review and research hypotheses
2.1. Definition of business performance
Business performance generally includes two components, financial performance and non-financial performance (Seo and Lee, 2019). On the one hand, financial performance is used to describe the performance of firms that can be measured in money value and financial operations. On the other hand, non-financial performance is the performance of firms that cannot be measured in money value, such as brand reputation, customer satisfaction, organizational performance, and innovation activities. Financial performance is typically associated with the short-term survival of companies, whereas non-financial performance is more likely to deal with long-term sustainable growth. Hence, for startups or businesses at the early stage, mainly, financial performance is, to some degree, more critical compared to non-financial performance (Choi et al., 2018; Spender et al., 2017). However, it is the most essential to control and combine the two types of performance for startup development (Seo and Lee, 2019).”
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Online Article
Tatjana Bojko
University of Twente
July 3rd, 2013
”Influence Of Past Experience On Leaders Entrepreneurial Leadership And Leaders Influence On Entrepreneurial Behavior Of Employees
While current businesses give much emphasis on entrepreneurial leadership the previous research gave limited results on how such leadership style can be encouraged by leaders to develop an entrepreneurial behavior in employees and how it is influenced by past experience. This study combines works on entrepreneurial leadership and past experience influence on behavior for a new theoretical framework. Qualitative interview results of leaders in diverse companies show that while most leaders do encourage their employees to be entrepreneurial in categories autonomy, proactiveness, risk-taking and innovativeness they put less emphasis on letting them create networks and being strategic. Entrepreneurial leaders have to encourage their employees to work entrepreneurial to see them being engaged in entrepreneurial behavior. At the same time not all individuals are encouraged by entrepreneurial leadership as they associate their work with more hierarchy and less autonomy and risk-taking. Therefore, leaders have to identify which employees need more entrepreneurial leadership behavior and which not to gain most out of their work and motivate them. Additionally, past experience shows an influence on leaders’ behavior and leadership style regardless of the experience being positive or negative. Although, negative experience does not show a higher influence on leaders behavior it did show that it can direct the entrepreneurial behavior in a way where individuals either are discouraged to take risks if it failed before or they are more encouraged to give others autonomy and creative space if such was not given by past leaders. At the same time, if proactiveness was learned and encouraged in the past it is more potential that it will be encouraged currently as a leader.
1. Introduction
In recent years there was a rise in interest in entrepreneurship across scientific studies and organizations calling at a “entrepreneurial revolution” (Kuratko, 2007). It is seen as a tool to cope with the changes in environment by bringing major and innovative changes to business and market and is part of strategies of many companies (Knight, 1997; Kuratko, 2007). At the same time the concept of entrepreneurial leadership is in current interest of researchers as it shapes the idea of organization today (Leitch, McMullan, & Harrison, 2013).
Entrepreneurial leadership is often seen as a link between leadership activities such as vision communication, decision making, problem solving and encouragement together with entrepreneurial activities such as risk-taking, innovation and proactiveness to foster continuous innovation as a competitive advantage (Fernald, Solomon, & Tarabishy, 2005; Kuratko, 2007). While most publications deal with defining behaviors and attributes of entrepreneurial leader (Chen, 2007; Fernald, Solomon, & Tarabishy, 2005; Gupta et al, 2004; Nicholson, 1998; Ruvio, Rosenblat & Hertz-Lazarowitz, 2010) less emphasis was made into developing a basis to identify how entrepreneurial leadership is developed and influenced by external factors such as experience and behaviors of leaders. Since entrepreneurial leadership distinguishes itself from the other types of leadership in terms of higher risk-taking, proactiveness and innovativeness (Fernald, Solomon, & Tarabishy, 2005; Gupta et al, 2004; Kuratko, 2007) identification of how these specific traits can be developed in an employee can contribute to ways to increase the entrepreneurial attitude in an organization for higher growth and performance of firm.
In work place leaders are the influential individual for their employees to communicate their ideas and foster growth (Fernald, Solomon & Tarabishy, 2000). Therefore, such influence may contribute to the development of attitudes of entrepreneurial leaders. At the same time development of behaviors is a long term process which may or may not be influenced by a range of events occurred in the past (Ajzen, 1991; Bird, 1988; Krueger, Reilly & Carsrud, 2000; Boyd & Vozikis, 1994). To look closely on the development should include the identification of past experiences of an individual which led to behave in a more entrepreneurial way.
Hence, the aim of this research is to provide insights into how do negative/positive past and current experiences in work-life in terms of risk-taking, proactiveness, autonomy, innovativeness, communication and strategic skills positively affect the development of an entrepreneurial leadership style to close the gap in current literature. To gain research results two perspectives are taken into account: actual past experience in workplace that did influenced the leader to behave in an entrepreneurial or not entrepreneurial way and the behaviors of current leaders towards their employees in terms of encouraging them and their reaction showing how leaders’ behavior influenced their development.
This research paper firstly introduces past research results in the fields of both leadership and entrepreneurship to define entrepreneurial leadership and establish a framework for specific behaviors liked to it. Afterword, it focuses on the influence of past experience on decisions and behaviors of individuals and a theoretical framework links both literature researches into one idea to be tested. To test this framework several interviews with current leaders in diverse companies provide insights into their own behavior towards employees and their past experiences contributing to them becoming leaders in a more entrepreneurial way. The results are then analyzed and discussed on basis how such can be applied in other situations. It finishes with providing practical implications for current managers to be used on how to influence their employees to develop an entrepreneurial leadership.”
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Online Article
Geoffrey A. Vanderpal, et al
ResearchGate
November 2017
”Entrepreneurs’ Leadership Experiences with Specific Regard to Mentorship
Abstract
This paper explores leadership of entrepreneurs through the specific lens of mentorship, a dimension on which to date only limited research has been conducted. Narratives behind the motives of mentorship are examined to uncover the elements that allow for a healthy mentor relationship between entrepreneurs, the mentors, and their followers, the mentees, in organizations. Participants reported that role-models influenced them as mentors. Furthermore, participants emphasized the importance of being role-models when practicing as mentors. This paper contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between role-modeling and entrepreneurial success.
Introduction
Entrepreneurs, apart from being primarily inspired by innovation, driven to implementation, and challenged by risk, are often expected to assume the role of enterprise leader (in addition to being enterprise initiator). The necessity for entrepreneurs to embrace the tripartite innovation, implementation, and risk, is borne out in the following definition: an entrepreneur is a person who creates something of value and assumes the risks of building a business around it (Robinson et al., 2007). Thus, it is useful to know how entrepreneurs deal with these challenges. Interestingly, this is one aspect that has remained relatively unexplored in the mainstream literature on entrepreneurship (Chen et al., 2014; Kansikas et al., 2012; Pitts, 2008; Pearson and Marler, 2010; Roomi and Harrison, 2011), which seems to have focused more on the processes inherent to venture formation than the leadership processes necessary to sustain a venture once it is formed. According to Contín-Pilart and Larraza-Kintana (2015), the concept of a dominant entrepreneurial role-model, often represented by parents, teachers, and other entrepreneurs, emerged as a significant source of the entrepreneurial learning processes. This process of having a role model involves interaction from both the entrepreneurs (also mentors) and the mentees. It seems that personal affinities, rather than formal reporting relationships, are important elements in building mentoring relationships (Eby and Lockwood, 2005). One of the reasons for this was found to be an individuals need to feel at ease in relaying experiences, emotions, beliefs, fears, and failures to the mentor (Hinde, 1997). In order to understand the relationship between a mentor and a mentee thoroughly, it is important to explore how mentorship is practiced in various facets of a mentor-mentee relationship structure. This, in turn, helps to understand how such activities can lead to a prospective healthy relationship and improve entrepreneurs mentorship function.
Literature Review
Mentorship is about providing the mentees with guidance, support, knowledge, and opportunities for whatever period the mentor and protégé deem this help to be necessary (Burlew, 1991, p. 213; Steele, 2013). For more than 30 years, mentoring has been studied and the many positive benefits discussed in management literature. ((See Allen, Eby, OBrien, & Lentz, (2008) for a comprehensive overview)) The nature of this relationship can be understood as a liaison which includes influence, communication, and obligations, as there is an influencing learning process taking place between the mentor and the mentee that engages the parties to accomplish a mutual purpose or perform required tasks. The liaison is expressed in various aspects within a business and management setting, including teamwork, empowerment, support, and organizational development.
Mentoring in Teamwork
The role of a mentor within the dimension of teamwork is similar to an individual holding a leadership role guiding a team towards goal attainment. Bass (2008) summarized leadership elements as the leader formulating and articulating the mission and goals for organizational members: the leader provides direction for goal attainment; the leader provides the structure and methods to achieve organizational goals; the leader resolves issues; and the leader evaluates members contribution to the effort (Tichy, 2004). Additionally, a leader demonstrates the capacity to communicate his experience and knowledge in a transferable way so subordinates are able to internalize this know-how. To do so, leaders need to be aware of their followers values and to generate congruence of values between both parties. Value system congruence amounts to the extent of agreement between value systems of a leader and a follower, which has been found to be significantly related to employee satisfaction and commitment (Krishnan, 2002). This is also supported by findings of Schminke et al. (2005), who found that convergence between a leaders level of cognitive moral development and a subordinates level of cognitive moral development have the most positive effect on subordinates satisfaction and commitment. Even though subordinates may not work closely with the organizations overall leader, value congruence with this leader affects the subordinates attitudes. Weak value system congruence between an organization and its members could result in changes in a members value system, changes in organizations value system, or resignation of members (Schminke et al., 2005).”
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Online Article
Sarah e. Strang
The University of Georgia
2004
”Big Five Personality And Leadership Developmental Levels As Predictors Of Leader Performance
Abstract
There are many methods and theoretical frameworks used to predict leader performance, yet little is known about how these methods compare with one another. This study investigates and compares the predictive abilities of Big Five personality characteristics and Leadership Developmental Levels (constructive/developmental theory) in a model of leader performance. Leadership Developmental Level was found to predict leader performance and was also found to account for a unique component of the variance in leader performance, even above and beyond that which can be accounted for by personality
Introduction
“Leadership” is a popular buzzword in today’s corporate environment. Popular press business magazines and practitioner journals are regularly peppered with leadership fables and advice. Leadership in the workplace is the topic of many recent best-selling books, such as Lifton and Buckingham’s (2001) Now, Discover Your Strengths: How to Develop Your Talents and Those of the People You Manage, Lencioni’s (2002) The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, and many, many others. Corporate spending on leadership improvement efforts such as executive coaching are estimated to be as high as one billion dollars per year and rising (Sherman & Freas, 2004). Given the business world’s seeming enthusiasm for leadership, one may wonder, “Why all the fuss?” Does leadership in the workplace really matter?
Studies of leadership consistently report that leader support and leadership ability are directly linked to subordinate performance, behaviors, and reactions, including job satisfaction, positive mood, affective commitment to the organization, reduced turnover, reduced withdrawal behaviors, improved work performance, pursuit of more challenging goals, goal attainment, perseverance, greater resistance to stress, and value of progress (Bass, 1990; Garder & Schermerhorn, 2004; Hogan, Curphy, & Hogan, 1994; Hughes, Ginnett, & Curphy, 1993; Luthans, 2003; Yukl, 1989). Furthermore, subordinate reactions to inept leadership have been found to include turnover, malingering, insubordination, and industrial sabotage (Bass, 1990; Hughes, Ginnett, & Curphy, 1993; Hogan, Curphy, & Hogan, 1994). Due to the links between these types of subordinate reactions to individual-, team- and organizational-level performance criteria, perhaps the corporate buzz surrounding the topic of leadership is justified (e.g., Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002; Shaw, Duffy, & Johnson, 2005; Vandenberghe, Bentein, & Stinglhamber, 2004).
An organization with a specific goal or vision is most successful at reaching this goal when it establishes a human resource management system that integrates the goal into all human resource functions (Burt, 2005; Cohn, Khurana, & Reeves, 2005; Effron, Greenslade, & Salob, 2005). Despite this knowledge, leadership is most often viewed only from the perspective of career development; leadership ability is not yet commonly used as a criterion for other human resource functions, including leader selection systems (Day, Zaccaro, & Halpin, 2004; Effron, Greenslade, & Salob, 2005). For example, Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan (1994) found that firstline supervisors are often chosen from the workforce on the basis of their technical talent rather than their leadership skills, and middle managers are often chosen from the ranks of first-line supervisors on the basis of likeability and perceived ability to cooperate with senior management. Leaders who are not promoted from within the workforce are most frequently selected on the basis of personality characteristics (Lievens, Highhouse, & de Corte, 2005; Morgeson, Reider, & Campion, 2005; Pandey, 1976). The purpose of this study is to close the gap between leadership theory and practice by investigating Leadership Developmental Level as a predictor of leader performance. In this study, I have investigated and compared the predictive ability of a common leader selection tool, Big Five personality, with the predictive ability of leadership developmental level (constructive/developmental theory) in a model of leader performance.”
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Course Manuals 1-12
Course Manual 1: Talent Acquisition
Take Advantage of the Talent Your Hiring Algorithms Are Ignoring
The Great Resignation has been coined: In 2021, about 20 million people in the United States lost their jobs, and the trend is spreading to Western Europe, Asia, and beyond. Despite the fact that employers are scrambling to fill unfilled positions, millions of qualified candidates are fighting just to be considered. Why is there such a chasm, and how can businesses bridge it?
The near-ubiquitous use of automated hiring platforms, which systematically screen out significant numbers of job seekers who may well fit the bill if their résumés ever reached hiring managers’ desks, is a major explanation for the difference, according to a study by Harvard Business School and Accenture. Applicants with unusual backgrounds, such as carers, veterans, immigrants, persons with physical and mental disabilities, and those who have previously been incarcerated, are more likely to be “hidden” from potential employers by the platforms. According to the data, there are about 27 million undocumented workers in the United States alone. “These are folks who want to work,” says Joseph B. Fuller, an HBS professor and study coauthor. Some may be underemployed or working part-time, while others have been completely shut out of the labor market.
After studying 8,720 hidden workers and 2,275 CEOs in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany in 2020, the researchers came to these conclusions. According to Fuller, the technology-driven exclusion of such a big pool of potential is a tale of unexpected consequences. In the 1990s, the introduction of online recruiting promised firms access to a larger pool of candidates than traditional methods could provide. However, the result was an uncontrollable flood. In the early 2010s, each job posting attracted an average of 120 candidates, and the number continued to climb. As a result, companies turned to applicant monitoring and recruiting management systems to help sift through the throngs, often employing filters to catch those who most closely fit the job’s specifications. They did, in fact, winnow: Employers interviewed four to six people for each job opening by 2020, on average, from a pool of 250 applicants.
Many of those who are excluded, especially those in middle- and high-skilled professions, may be extremely productive workers, according to the study. An algorithm might weed out anyone without a college diploma, a criminal record, a gap in employment, or a deficiency in just one of several very specific skills—but “none of those are particularly good proxies for measuring aptitude, work ethic, and self-efficacy,” says Manjari Raman of HBS, another study coauthor. She goes on to say that as companies layer on requirements over time, “credential creep” exacerbates the problem. In the previous five years, the hidden employees she and her colleagues examined had applied to an average of 25 jobs, frequently without receiving a single answer. She wonders aloud, “Is it any surprise they eventually give up?”
According to Fuller, today’s tight labor market provides employers with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reconsider their recruiting techniques. To be sure, recruiting from previously untapped talent pools is a significant task, but he believes it is achievable. The researchers point out that “companies constantly make remarkable efforts to remodel commercial supply chains in response to changes in market conditions.” “However, few have extended core supply chain management principles to hiring people, ranging from gathering data on supplier quality control to engaging with [suppliers] to address recurring problems.”
The benefits of doing so could be substantial. According to the studies, organizations that actively seek out hidden workers are 36 percent less likely to encounter talent and skills shortages than those that do not. Furthermore, those employees surpass their peers in six critical areas: attitude and work ethic, productivity, job quality, engagement, attendance, and creativity. Because they are so enthusiastic to work, they are less likely to quit than others, lowering the costs of turnover. Hiring them can help a company achieve its DEI goals because many are women or members of underrepresented groups.
Many large corporations have started to think more broadly about how and who they hire. Many employment at IBM no longer require a college diploma, and JPMorgan Chase no longer inquires about applicants’ criminal records. CVS Health employs neurodiverse people to fill its aisles. In its kitchens, the fast-casual company Hot Chicken Takeover employs people who are recovering from substance abuse. Volkswagen, Daimler, and Porsche have all hired migrants to work on their production lines.
Employers should consider the following suggestions from the research team: The metrics should be changed.
Short-term indicators of hiring success, such as cost and time to fill vacancies, should be replaced with longer-term indicators, such as how long it takes new employees to get up to speed, how long they stay, and their promotion rates. Fuller believes this is more difficult than it appears because many companies have separate recruiting and operations teams and aren’t used to sharing performance management and other data.
Fuller believes this is more difficult than it appears because many companies have separate recruiting and operations teams and aren’t used to sharing performance management and other data.
Rewrite Job Descriptions After Analyzing Data
Employers should look at this data over time to see what qualities are required for long-term success in each position. They should revise job descriptions to reflect this, paying specific attention to removing unnecessary abilities and those that can be learned on the job. Employers can use this information to collaborate with their technology vendors to ensure that candidates are vetted and ranked based on the new criteria.
Employers should then make educated guesses about which sectors of hidden workers are most likely to hold the desirable qualities. Call centers, for example, have benefited from recruiting older workers, while aerospace and defense industries have been successful in attracting unemployed veterans. Companies will frequently want assistance in establishing connections with the identified segments. For some populations, such as veterans, immigrants, and those who have been convicted, businesses may seek advice from relevant NGOs and social entrepreneurs. Job postings should always be as comprehensive as possible. That involves getting rid of intimidating jargon, superlatives like “world-class” and “expert” (which have been proved to dissuade female and minority applicants), and gender-biased terminology (no more ads looking for “rock stars” or “ninjas”).
Concentrate On The Onboarding Process
Finally, employers employing hidden workers should be willing to endure slightly higher onboarding costs, as a standard “one size fits all” strategy is typically inefficient for hidden workers, who have unique needs, skills, and experience gaps. Employers must also ensure that hidden workers are not shunned, maybe by incorporating more colleagues in onboarding than simply the recruiting manager, or by enlisting the help of a senior leader to dispel stereotypes about hidden workers.
The researchers find that “the practices that help pave the road for re-entry for concealed workers [are] neither exorbitantly expensive nor unusual.” “They’re common-sense methods for attracting any worker.” They suggest that by changing methods, businesses will be better equipped to attract all types of talent more swiftly and sensibly.
Course Manual 2: Big 5
Openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism are all measured in the Big-5 model, which is a multidimensional approach to assessing personality. Since the 1980s, it has been the most widely used model for personality traits, and the Big-5 personality traits have been found to influence profession choice and work performance. The five “macro features” cover a different collection of characteristics:
• Openness to experience describes the breadth, depth, originality, and complexity of an individual’s mental and experimental life.
• Conscientiousness: describes socially prescribed impulse control that facilitates task- and goal-oriented behavior
• Extraversion: implies an energetic approach to the social and material world and includes traits such as sociability, activity, assertiveness, and positive emotionality
• Neuroticism: compares emotional stability and even-temperedness with negative emotionality, such as feeling uneasy, nervous, unhappy, and tense
• •Agreeableness: includes emotional stability and even-temperedness
Introduction
Corporate scandals involving unethical tactics, such as those involving Enron, WorldCom, Lehmann Brothers, and Volkswagen, have led to a fall in trust in corporate leadership during the last few decades. Employees and other stakeholders in the organization are now clamoring for all-star leaders who are positive (i.e., ethical, moral, and real) (Hoch et al., 2018). Because of the growing importance of ethics in businesses, researchers have turned their focus to the notion of all-star leaders, which is seen as the root construct or forerunner to all other forms of constructive leadership.
Different researchers have defined all-star leaders from various views since the early 2000s. These concepts, on the other hand, are based on positive psychology. all-star leadership is a pattern of leader behavior that draws on and promotes both positive psychological capacities and a positive ethical climate to foster greater self-awareness, an internalized moral perspective, balanced information processing, and relational transparency on the part of leaders working with followers, fostering positive self-development.
Existing research has theorized and empirically verified the impact of leadership on various individual-level outcomes, such as work engagement, supervisor satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior, and work-engagement; group-level outcomes, such as perceived team effectiveness; and organizational-level outcomes, such as financial performance.
Personality has been related to many types of leadership in the past. Personality factors are definitely effective in predicting leadership behaviors. We believe that a person’s personality has an impact on their authenticity, which may be used to forecast their authentic leadership style. We show how the Big Five qualities predict leadership, given the importance of traits in predicting leadership styles and in response to recommendations to investigate the antecedents of AL.
We show how the Big Five qualities predict all-star leadership, given the importance of traits in predicting leadership styles.
In certain ways, all-star leaders are distinct from other types of leaders. all-star leaders, for example, have balanced processing, relational transparency, and genuine behavior. No other form of positive leadership, including behavioral theory of charismatic leadership, self-concept–based theory of charismatic leadership, servant leadership, and spiritual leadership, emphasizes any of these attributes Exploring the relationship between personality and all-star leadership can assist a business in selecting, training, and developing authentic leaders, which will benefit the organization in the long run.
One of the most investigated and well-established taxonomies of personality is the Big Five, which includes extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. In personality psychology, these features are thought to be basic trait dimensions. The Big Five model has been investigated in relation to many types of leadership, such as ethical leadership, charismatic leadership, transactional leadership, and transformational leadership. Personality qualities have remained crucial in forecasting an individual’s leadership style. As a result, we believe it is relevant and crucial to investigate how the Big Five personality traits predict a person’s all-star leadership style.
Theories
Self-awareness refers to a person’s worldview and how beliefs impact his or her self-perception. The tendency to be original (i.e., to offer one’s real self to others) is known as relational transparency. The inclination to make data-driven decisions is known as balanced processing (i.e., leaders analyze all relevant data before reaching a decision). Internalized moral attitudes refer to internalized and integrated self-regulation. In comparison to other slightly different conceptions of AL, this definition is broad and thorough.
The Big Five Personality Traits and All-Star Leadership
Extraversion
The disposition to be gregarious, aggressive, and optimistic is known as extraversion. Extraverts are people who are outgoing, enthusiastic, and energetic. They are described as ecstatic, gregarious, and attention-seeking by several researchers. Extraversion is the biggest indicator of effective leadership, and it is suggested that extraverted leaders instill confidence in their followers, based on the belief that extraverts are cheerful, ambitious, and persuasive. The root of all-star leadership is confidence, which is a fundamental component of positive psychology and organizational behavior. Individuals with a high level of extraversion are enthusiastic about the future and are extremely self-aware and self-regulatory. all-star leadership’s main components include self-awareness and self-regulation, as well as optimism. Extraverts are more likely to have good communication skills and to convey their message clearly and fully, which can aid to increase followers’ perceptions of authenticity. Extraversion has already been demonstrated to be a predictor of other favorable leadership styles, such as charismatic and transformative leadership. Authenticity is also a requirement for charismatic leaders, according to researchers.
Agreeableness
The terms trusting, nurturing, conforming, and accepting are examples of agreeableness. Kind, friendly, trusting, honest, altruistic, and warm people have a high level of agreeableness. Leaders that are agreeable have a high idealized influence and are role models because they are trustworthy and caring, two attributes that are fundamental to real leadership. Because agreeable people treat their subordinates with kindness, honesty, warmth, and fairness, they are more likely to be viewed as honest, and their behaviors are less subject to distortions and exaggerations. Managers that are agreeable treat their staff fairly and politely and never try to insult them. For honest leaders, the same holds true.
Agreeable Leaders are more likely to build followers’ confidence and increase their views of genuineness. People that are pleasant have considerable regard for others’ interests and take team members’ judgments seriously. These characteristics are crucial for true leaders. Previous research has related agreeableness to other desirable forms of leadership, such as transformational leadership and ethical leadership.
Conscientiousness
Individuals with high levels of conscientiousness are described as cautious, dependable, methodical, realistic, ambitious, fair, and cultured. Because of their honesty, people with a high level of conscientiousness uphold transactional contracts. Being real also necessitates a high level of integrity and moral principles. Conscientious people are also self-disciplined, self-reliant, and well-organized, making them self-aware and self-regulatory. According to research, conscientious people are open and fair and believe in following rules. As a result, highly ethical leaders would treat their followers fairly and maintain relational transparency. Individuals who are highly conscientious consider their options carefully before making judgments and are committed to fulfilling their moral obligations and responsibilities. Because all-star leaders have features of balanced processing and internalized moral perspectives, these actions are also relevant for them. Conscientiousness has been shown to predict positive leadership styles in previous studies .
Openness to Experience
Original, creative, complex, and analytical people have a high level of openness to new experiences. Being creative and presenting oneself to others in this way makes one relationally transparent. Such openness to experience and all-star leadership are linked by such transparency. Individuals with a high level of openness to experience are emotionally responsive, intellectually curious, and engage in divergent thinking, making them extremely self-aware and improving their view of being fair and truthful. According to research, those who score high on openness are change-oriented, autonomous, and judgmental. We believe that being honest, trustworthy, and fair will have a beneficial impact on all-star leadership. In dynamic situations, previous empirical data supports the link between openness to experience and charismatic and transformational leadership.
Furthermore, leaders with a high level of openness to experience are highly imaginative, cerebral, and analytical, as well as having a strong vision, all of which are attributes necessary of an all-star leader. As a result, we believe that persons who have a high level of openness to new experiences will be seen as true leaders.
Neuroticism
Nervous, troubled, emotional, vulnerable, anxious, hostile, and depressed people are characterized by high neuroticism. Anxious, moody, and stressed people are neurotic. They are pessimists who are poor role models. Genuine leaders, on the other hand, serve as role models for their followers. In instances where there is a significant level of risk or the environment is dynamic, true leaders tend to remain cool and make decisions, whereas neurotic persons get worried and nervous. Neuroticism has been linked to low self-esteem and self-efficacy in studies. Previous research has found a negative relationship between neuroticism and other positive leadership styles, such as ethical leadership, transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and charismatic leadership.
Course Manual 3: Entrepreneurs vs Managers
Entrepreneur vs Manager, And Why Can’t You Be Both?
What is the difference between a manager and an entrepreneur? A manager is a leader in a well-established company who supervises the work of other employees in a department or, in some cases, a broader section of the company. They delegate duties, offer assistance, solve issues, and make sure deadlines are reached. They are still employees of the company and must report to a supervisor or the company owner, although being granted more responsibility and hence higher pay.
Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are persons who identify a consumer need, develop a solution, and launch a company to make that answer available to the general public. They come up with a product or service idea, develop it, build a company around its sales and marketing, and take on the financial risks of beginning and maintaining a firm. They will very certainly engage more personnel to assist them in various elements of the firm’s development, but they will eventually fulfill multiple responsibilities as owner, manager, and entrepreneur, ensuring that the company adheres to its vision and objective.
Of course, anyone who has watched the excellent film “Steve Jobs (2015)” knows that the “average” entrepreneur is not a manager. With Apple, ex-Pepsi CEO John Sculley was entrusted with the duty of leading the company. On the other hand, one can wonder if a manager is also an entrepreneur. So, let’s take a deeper look at their personalities and thoughts and analyze them.
Many of the entrepreneur coaches indicate that their clients have difficulty managing their businesses. It is difficult for them to manage their employees. The expansion of the company necessitates the growth of the small business owner.
One of the challenges that frequently comes up in coaching sessions is role transition during the growth process of an entrepreneur.
Can a small business owner, on the other hand, be as good a leader as a manager? In the other direction, Is it possible for a manager to be an entrepreneur? What distinguishes an entrepreneur from a manager?
Characteristics of a Good Manager
Good managers are enthusiastic about the firm where they work and positively express the corporate culture, or the reason why the organization is different from others, to the employees under them. Managers have the ability to prioritize activities and lead their departments by making difficult decisions. They must, however, be people-oriented, not only focused on completing work, but also on listening to employees’ problems and keeping the company on a positive track. Integrity, honesty, and the willingness to assume responsibility and hold themselves and others accountable for their actions are some character traits that supervisors seek for in a manager.
Successful Entrepreneurial Characteristics
Part of why people become entrepreneurs is because they have a natural aptitude to see issues and come up with solutions. They are extremely determined to see their ideas through to completion and display a high level of self-assurance in their abilities. They are not afraid to take risks, both financial and otherwise, and they are unfazed by failure. Challenges they face are frequently viewed as a learning opportunity, with the potential to lead to even better solutions. As a result, these astute businesspeople are willing to admit when they require additional information and are constantly eager to learn.
Entrepreneurs are also devoted to their businesses and willing to put in long hours. They thrive in networking with other businesspeople and developing sales skills for their firm’s products and services. Finally, if they want to stay financially successful, they must be effective money managers.
An Entrepreneur Isn’t The Same As A Manager
An entrepreneur’s job is to recognize opportunities, put a plan in motion, and accept some level of financial risk. Choosing the optimal strategy for the venture’s future, taking into account its opportunities and threats. Having a long-term vision and ensuring that funding is available when it is most required. The entrepreneur is preoccupied with what is going on outside of the company. Setting up a business is simple for the entrepreneur. The pioneer’s usual entrepreneurial thinking approach is the polar opposite of the manager’s (see below, an example of an entrepreneurial mindset profile taken with the entrepreneurial mindset tool). It is similar to the entrepreneur’s position.
Setting up a business is a risk that the entrepreneur is willing to take. Everything may not go as planned during the early stages of a company’s development, known as the startup phase. But who cares if the invention appears to work out in the end. That is the prize for taking a chance. However, the company may require a different job at some point in the future. You must now expand to the point where you can hire a competent all-star leader. If there is enough money to hire someone, that is. Professional management does, however, play a role in one way or another.
Many entrepreneurs, particularly those in the early stages of their business, face this organizational stumbling block on a frequent basis. The company’s expansion, as well as the employees – particularly the new ones – drive them to find a solution to this serious problem. A manager’s responsibilities are not the same as those of an entrepreneur. As a result, their positions are distinct.
A Manager Isn’t The Same As An Entrepreneur
The manager’s job is to direct the continuous operation so that products and services are delivered smoothly, on schedule, and efficiently. Managing people and ensuring that they perform to their full potential. The leader’s attention is drawn to what is going on within the organization. Running a business fits like a glove for the management.
It’s apparent that the manager thinks differently. Although critical to every business, a manager’s thinking style is dependent on the current situation. A situation that requires order and organization. They’ll be able to get their hands on something. They struggle more in new situations where nothing is set in stone. It is the polar opposite of the pioneer’s entrepreneurial mindset (see an example of an entrepreneurial mindset profile).
Why Can’t You Be An Entrepreneur And A Manager At The Same Time, Or Can You?
Despite the fact that they have significant differences, their entrepreneurial thought approaches are far more important. Because the Manager’s thinking style can produce a great entrepreneur.
An entrepreneur, according to the entrepreneurial personality, is someone who recognizes possibilities, seizes them, and creates value for himself and others. An entrepreneurial firm owner is one who is continually looking for fresh ideas and ways to meet the demands of people in his – ever-changing – surroundings. A businessperson.
Now comes the difficult and possibly perplexing part. That business owner’s entrepreneurial thinking style could very well be that of a manager. That’s how they think by nature. To bring order to a chaotic situation. When a company reaches maturity, the manager’s thinking style may be exactly what the organization requires. What, though, distinguishes them as entrepreneurs? Perhaps he isn’t the one who notices the possibilities, but his coach or spouse does. He’s figured out how to play up his ‘flaws’ and make the most of them. That is the entrepreneurial mindset in its purest form. Even if you don’t have any knowledge or skills, if you know how to organize the skills and attitudes around you, you’re engaging in entrepreneurship: creating value for yourself and others by recognizing and acting on market possibilities (you are in or want to be in).
Only very rarely do you come across an entrepreneur — a business owner who combines the thinking styles of a manager and a pioneer or innovator. In fact, only 10% of the population of entrepreneurs experience this. It’s referred to as entrepreneurial management.
Why Do You Need To Develop As An Entrepreneur As Your Business Grows?
It’s difficult to expand your business without also growing as an entrepreneur.
Your company will only enjoy quantitative growth if you do not grow as an entrepreneur. So, it’s the same old story. More personnel, more hours, and more turnover. That just implies that more people are falling for the same ruse. However, this does not always imply a higher profit margin. More frequently than not, there is a decrease in profit or perhaps a loss.
The majority of business owners believe that this is the best way to expand their company. The corporation, on the other hand, swiftly approaches its limit. Often, entrepreneurs are blind to the fact that they are approaching their boundaries. Only as you develop as an entrepreneur and as a person do you begin to realize how things might and should be done differently. Work smarter, more focused, and do half as much but twice as well. Only then will you be able to perceive chances anew, work in new ways, and delegate chores rather than performing them yourself.
Learning Suggestions
First and foremost, it makes no difference whether you are an employee, an owner-manager, or a major corporation’s employed business manager. That is simply your job title. What matters far more is your entrepreneurial thinking approach. What kind of work, tasks, and responsibilities are most suitable for you? In that circumstance, you should position yourself. A pioneer thinking style can exist in even a professional management of a government entity, for example. It’s simply his job title. As a result, don’t mix a person’s job title with his or her entrepreneurial characteristics and thinking style.
As an entrepreneur, what can you do with this?
• Assess your level of self-awareness. You can do this by using the E-Self Scan’s Awareness Index.
• Talk to people who know you well about which of the four thinking patterns you prefer.
• determine your genuine entrepreneurial thinking style
As a business coach, what can you do with this?
• assist the owner in determining their genuine entrepreneurial thinking style; ensure that their self-awareness is accurate; and determine with the owner the best personal approach for securing the future of his or her company.
Course Manual 4: Managing Teams
How to Lead a Team of Superstars
When Bain & Company questioned top executives from 308 large organizations how they establish teams for their most significant initiatives, the majority said they put together teams depending on who is available at the time. Only a small percentage of respondents said they often form all-star teams, made up of their top employees, to address their company’s most pressing issues. This is a huge opportunity: we discovered that the most productive firms are more than 25% more productive than the rest because of how they deploy, team, and lead rare, differentiating talent.
Our findings are as follows:
The best employees are far more productive than the rest. Most of us have witnessed firsthand how much better our best players are than our average teammates. However, we may not realize how much better they are.
The top can be 8 to 12 times more productive than the average in creative or highly unstructured work. The greatest Apple software developer, for example, creates nine times more usable code per day than the average Silicon Valley software engineer. However, even for normal or highly repetitive tasks, the productivity difference might be significant. The top fish butcher at New York’s Le Bernardin restaurant can butcher three times as many fish per hour as the average Manhattan prep cook.
The elite can accomplish more — and do so more effectively – than the rest. As a result, the more all-stars in a company, the more productive it will be.
Bringing together top talent functions as a productivity multiplier, raising output by a factor of ten. When people with various abilities and viewpoints work together, they virtually always produce more than if they worked alone. After all, it’s nearly always better to have two heads than one. This association is more intense when it comes to outstanding talent. The percentage of all-stars on a squad does, in fact, boost the productive power of the team. A five-member team made up entirely of all-stars may produce 16 times as much production – or the same output in one-sixteenth the time – as a five-member team made up entirely of ordinary players.
Case Study
Take, for example, NASCAR pit teams. Kyle Busch’s pit crew was regarded as the finest in NASCAR for many years. His team is made up of all-stars that train together all year. Their performance may be measured objectively. In NASCAR, a typical pit stop includes 73 different procedures, such as replacing all four tires or fuelling. The pit crew of Kyle Busch can perform a conventional pit in 12.12 seconds. It’s fascinating to see. When one of his crew members is replaced by an average crew member, like as a tire changer, the time it takes to perform the identical pit climbs to almost 23 seconds. When you take two out and locate average replacements, the time climbs even further – to almost 45 seconds. In other words, as the percentage of stars on the crew declines, production decreases geometrically.
The influence of top personnel on team productivity is enormous. The higher a team’s percentage of all-stars, the more productive it will be.
The productivity of remarkable teams is amplified even more by great leaders. Not all team leaders are created equal, just as not all coaches are created equal. Coaches who are great achieve better results from their teams than coaches who are mediocre. They urge each team member to play to his or her greatest ability while harnessing the talents of others on the squad.
The National Bureau of Economic Research investigated the impact of exceptional managers on team productivity in 2012. They discovered that a terrific leader (those in the top 10% of the organizations they surveyed) may boost the productivity of an average team by 10% – nearly the same as adding another member to a nine-person team. However, if you put that same outstanding boss in charge of an all-star team, he or she will raise the team’s output by more than 10%. Keep in mind that that all-star team’s output was already substantially higher to begin with.
So, what does it take for your company to tap into this productive potential? At least five actions are highlighted by our research and experience:
1. Keep an eye on rising stars. People who are inventive and creative are uncommon. In reality, according to our research, in most firms, only one out of every seven employees is a star. It’s impossible to properly team, deploy, and lead these people until you know who they are, where they’re currently deployed, and whether or not they’re capable of taking on new and different tasks. Unfortunately, most HR systems fail to convey this critical information to leaders. They may be able to recognize stars, but they are unable to monitor where they are deployed. They may keep track of deployments, but they overlook opportunities to effectively assign them to new roles and teams. Finally, the criteria used by firms to identify all-stars – often a combination of “high performance” and “high potential” – are typically so subjective that they fail to reliably distinguish between the company’s star employees and those who are just good enough.
Differentiating talent is a scarce resource for the best-performing firms. They keep meticulous watch of it and ensure that it is always put to its highest and best use.
2. Put together all-star teams. Most businesses strive to build balanced teams, subject matter expert teams, or teams depending on who is available at the time. This applies to both everyday tasks and mission-critical undertakings. This balanced approach may appear fair, even laudable, but it misses out on the force multiplier that all-star teams and excellent bosses provide. In short, most teams are put together in such a way that they nearly guarantee ordinary performance.
When faced with a mission-critical undertaking, the best-performing firms are nine times more likely than the others to build all-star teams.
3. Concentrate your efforts on mission-critical tasks. Not all efforts are created equal. In order to maintain or extend a company’s strategic position, some challenges must be addressed quickly and effectively. Many companies are hesitant to elevate these activities as a greater priority, worried that others who aren’t involved would feel betrayed. However, treating all efforts equally comes at a cost: mission-critical efforts are shortchanged in terms of resources.
The most successful businesses use methodical approaches to identify their most important and urgent concerns. As a result, these concerns get extra attention. Senior management gives them more time. They assemble the greatest teams to ensure that they are effectively dealt with.
4. Remove any impediments to good teamwork. Organizations frequently place impediments in the way of good teamwork. Many firms, for example, have remuneration schemes that reward individual performance excessively, even for team-based accomplishments. They may use stacked-ranking systems, which require a bell-curve distribution of performance across all members of a team, guaranteeing that only a few people receive positive feedback. These approaches create a “market mechanism” that actively inhibits A-players from forming alliances with other A-players, or face salary cuts. Stack ranking is no longer used by several firms, including Microsoft, GE, Amazon, and others.
The top businesses understand that outstanding work is generally done in groups rather than by individuals. As a result, when it comes to evaluating compensation, professional growth, or career promotion, these firms value team performance as much as (or more than) individual achievement. As a result, these businesses benefit from the full force multiplier provided by exceptional teams.
5. Control the egos of team members. The assumption that “egos will get in the way of team effectiveness” is perhaps the most significant reason limiting the deployment of all-star teams. While this is true in some instances, the finest firms do not give up on establishing all-star squads. Instead, these businesses figure out how to keep team members’ egos in check.
Making team achievement necessary for individual success is the key route for regulating individual egos. When the so-called “Dream Team” won gold in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, the egos of NBA all-star team players were kept in check by the reality that no single squad member could win gold until the entire team did. This allowed bitter rivals to compete as a team and emerge victorious. In the business sphere, similar techniques can be implemented to keep team members’ egos in control.
Extraordinary teams have the potential to produce and perform at a high level. Regrettably, most businesses fail to recognize its potential. They ignore the pairing of scarce star talent as an afterthought – or use antiquated team-building methods. The finest organizations are significantly more systematic and rigorous in their approach, especially when it comes to assembling their top staff. They’re not hesitant to put together all-star teams to take on mission-critical projects. They also commensurately reward team performance.
Course Manual 5: Personality Traits
In the mid-twentieth century, research on entrepreneur personality traits exploded, bringing together economics, psychology, sociology, and business management to address the question, “Who is an entrepreneur?” What are their motivations? What are their distinguishing characteristics? Researchers tried to build a strong theoretical framework and proper measurement instruments in the first few decades, which presented many conceptual obstacles. In 1971, economist Peter Kilby famously compared the entrepreneur to A.A. Milne’s imaginary elephant Heffalump, whom all investigators approached with improvised proxies from their specialties, each claiming to have found the ever-elusive creature’s behavior. This disparity in the literature prompted some scholars in the 1980s to conclude that personality and entrepreneurship had no relationship.
The entrepreneurial personality literature has experienced a resurgence and convergence toward an increasingly consistent set of theoretical frameworks, with meaningful insights toward innovation policy and business education, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, and with the notable rise in public and intellectual fascination with startup culture. The majority of contemporary research focuses on two primary issues:
(1) Do certain personality traits predict a person’s likelihood of becoming an entrepreneur, and
(2) Do certain personality traits predict a person’s likelihood of reaching “successful” outcomes?
These questions are answered by examining the prevalence of personality traits in entrepreneurs vs other groups, as well as the relationship between these traits and entrepreneurial success metrics like survival and growth.
While personality theory has its own set of debates, academics have mostly focused on the Big-5 component personality model over the last few decades. Self-efficacy, innovativeness, locus of control, and risk attitudes are among the attributes that have been added to the Big-5 for entrepreneurial work. In order to describe a multimodal “entrepreneurial orientation,” researchers frequently combine these characteristics. We will explore the newest wave of personality study and cutting-edge concerns in this literature review, which was published after 2000.
Effective Leadership’s 15 Most Important Personality Traits
1. Friendliness And Openness
When people believe they can trust their boss, communicate openly, and not be afraid to say the incorrect thing, they respond more positively. People feel safe dealing with a strong leader because they know they will get an honest answer.
The all-star leader is kind, approachable, and relatable.
2. Generosity
People respond positively to others who are upbeat, kind, and appear to put others first. Even with those who are difficult to get along with, developing kindness makes a leader more effective.
It is possible to put faith in the humanistic leader.
3. Consciousness
When their leader acknowledges and embraces their ideas, people are able to enjoy their work more and thus be more productive. A leader can develop trust and loyalty by thinking of others and, in many cases, putting their needs first.
Humanistic leaders are able to empathize with their followers and put themselves in their position.
4. Emotional Control
People want leaders to be emotionally stable throughout the day, despite the fact that emotions at work fluctuate throughout the day. As a result, the team members’ emotional stability improves, and work gets done more efficiently.
The emotional resiliency of the humanistic leader is impressive.
5. Creativity
To succeed at work, people need new ideas and insight from their leaders. In the business, a creative mind that can think beyond the box is extremely valuable.
Humanistic leaders are multi-perspective thinkers, systems thinkers, deep thinkers, and full of imagination and new possibilities!
6. Effective Communicators
People are willing to follow leaders who can clearly communicate what they want and expect through written, oral, and non-verbal means. Strong leaders are able to connect with others by communicating openly and honestly.
The humanistic leader understands how to communicate their objectives in a way that others can comprehend.
7. Integrity
Because people are more likely to follow those they believe they can totally trust, leaders must be honest, reliable, and trustworthy. Being a person of integrity is keeping your word and showing up when you say you will; this trait demonstrates to everyone around you that you can be trusted not only professionally, but also personally.
The humanistic leader is truthful in all of their interactions with the individuals they lead, which fosters team trust.
8. Awareness Of One’s Own Self
A leader must be aware of his or her own needs, strengths, and weaknesses in order to lead others, and must demonstrate this by taking steps to improve when necessary. Leaders will only be able to make changes to become greater leaders if they are self-aware. Others respond favorably to people who are conscious of their own personality characteristics and how they effect others.
The humanistic leader is aware of themselves, and they use that awareness to better influence those around them.
9. Empathy
A strong, personable leader is able to comprehend and respond to the emotions and experiences of people. Empathy is essential for forging deep bonds with team members, and these bonds enable the leader to accomplish more.
Humanistic leaders have a sympathetic knowledge of people’ feelings and experiences, and they use that empathy to make better decisions that affect the team.
10. Involved
Throughout the day, an engaged leader is actively communicating with team members. This leader is aware of what is going on in their employees’ life, how their projects are progressing, and what might occur to allow things to flow more freely throughout the day.
The humanistic leader is a fully involved and active participant in the job that is being done, and he or she is not hesitant to get their hands dirty with the everyday tasks.
11. Humorous
When it comes to leading a team, being too serious can backfire. Laughter lifts people’s spirits in an organization, especially during stressful or difficult circumstances. Even if something terrible occurs, humor allows a leader to see the positive side of any situation. Appropriate comedy has a positive effect on people.
Humanistic leaders recognize and appreciate the power of laughter, which can help reduce stress and increase overall morale when used appropriately and at the right time.
12. Passionate
Leaders who are committed to their objective are able to express a clear vision to their teams. That enthusiasm can translate into a captivating demeanor that people respond positively to. They are great at conveying the reason for their acts, and their enthusiasm can rub off on others.
Humanistic leaders are enthusiastic about what they do and can instill that enthusiasm in those they lead.
13. Respectable
Respect is earned, and when a strong leader’s integrity and passion are given with openness and empathy, people will respect it. Leaders that embrace these character traits will acquire the respect of those they lead. These leaders have a way of carrying themselves that commands and demands respect from people around them.
Humanistic leaders conduct themselves in a respectable manner in all of their actions and reactions.
14. Responsible
Leaders that are successful recognize the necessity of holding themselves accountable for their actions. Good leaders will check in with others to verify they are meeting their objectives, whether through individuals in positions of leadership or by accountability to their own teams.
Humanistic leaders recognize the importance of accountability and hold themselves, not only their colleagues, responsible for their accomplishments.
15. Ethical
Ethical leaders believe in the dignity and worth of others and will endeavor to ensure that they are protected throughout the organization’s activities. Every choice must be made in an ethical manner, and these leaders will press for steps that defend the general good.
Humanistic leaders have strong ethical beliefs that they utilize to guide their own decisions.
How Do You Develop Humanistic Leadership Skills?
A humanistic leader is one who embraces leadership characteristics that enable them to relate to others more successfully. It’s time to develop these humanistic leadership skills if you’re in a position of leadership and want to be successful. Begin by going over this list and identifying the areas in which you need to improve. Then, on a daily basis, strive for greater openness, integrity, passion, or any other aspect of your work. While it may take some time, concentrating on becoming a humanistic leader will help you lead those around you more effectively.
Entrepreneurs Vs. Other Populations: The Prevalence Of Personality Traits
Many scholars compare the characteristics of entrepreneurs to those of employed individuals or the general population in order to find attributes that distinguish entrepreneurs as a group. It can seem silly or pointless to compare Steve Jobs or Elon Musk to the typical person, but many books have been written about their unique backgrounds and personalities. The literature, on the other hand, focuses on a completely different topic here. Thousands of entrepreneurs are looking for growth-oriented enterprises, and many more are looking to start their own business as self-employed owners. For every Jobs or Musk, there are thousands of others. Even if they don’t start Apple or SpaceX, their collective impact on our economy is huge. The purpose of this manualis to investigate and define the regularities and variances in these entrepreneurs’ personalities to help identify all-stars.
The terms “risk preference,” “risk propensity,” “risk aversion,” and “risk tolerance” were used to search for research on risk attitudes. We used a variety of risk indicators, such as self-reported responses in longitudinal surveys, hypothetical gambling scenarios, and investment history data. The most widely utilized personality concepts were covered (Big-5, need for achievement, internal locus of control, innovativeness, and self-efficacy). We went to the stated underlying data for disaggregation of individual variables in a few studies that employed composite measures of “entrepreneurial orientation.”
If personality traits are measured before entrepreneurial decisions, this does not mean that this trait was the driving force behind the decision. Individuals from wealthy households, for example, may have a high risk tolerance because they have the security of their family’s money, and possibly the underlying factor that motivates entrepreneurship, independent of risk tolerance, is the availability of financial resources. We are likely to miscalculate the relevance of risk tolerance for decisions if we do not observe and measure individual wealth. This worry about omitted variable bias is valid for individual studies, but it’s amplified when comparing studies from different nations and settings with different cultural elements that are known to influence personality traits like entrepreneurial drive and achievement oriented (Stewart and Roth, 2007).
Course Manual 6: Power Motivation
The Great Motivator Is Power
The majority of motivational writings focus on managers and the individuals they supervise. Surprisingly, the authors presume that managers’ motivation is so well linked with organizational goals that it doesn’t need to be examined.
However, studies found that managers fall into three motivational groups. Those in the first group, affiliative managers, care more about being liked than getting things done. Instead of furthering the organization’s aims, their decisions are made to increase their own popularity. The second type of managers, those driven by a need to achieve, are unconcerned with what others think of them. They are focused on developing and achieving goals, yet they prioritize their personal accomplishments and recognition. Institutional managers, the third group, are primarily concerned with power. Recognizing that you can only get things done inside companies if you can influence the people around you, they concentrate on gaining power by influence rather than personal accomplishment.
What distinguishes or drives an all-star leader? The scale of the topic is huge. Some may define an all-star leader as one who is successful, and most business scholars and businesspeople today understand what motivates people who operate successful small enterprises. The need for achievement, or the desire to do something better or more efficiently than it has been done before, has proven to be the secret to their success, according to psychologists. A variety of books and articles detail research studies demonstrating how a person’s accomplishment motive is required for success.
But what does need for achievement have to do with good management? Theoretically, there is no reason why someone with a strong desire to be more efficient should make a good manager. While it may appear that everyone should have a desire to succeed, as psychologists define and assess success motivation, the desire to succeed causes people to behave in ways that are not always conducive to excellent management.
Achievement-motivated people, for example, like to accomplish things themselves because they are focused on personal progress. For another, they want immediate, concrete feedback on their performance so they can assess their progress. Managers, especially in large, complicated organizations, cannot undertake all of the activities required for success on their own. They must supervise people in order for them to work well for the company. They must also be willing to work without immediate or personal feedback because assignments are distributed among a large number of people.
The position of an all-star leader appears to require someone who can inspire others rather than someone who can do things better on their own. In terms of motivation, we may expect a successful manager to have a larger desire for power than for achievement. But, aside from the desire for power, a good manager must possess other characteristics. We’ll go through what these attributes are and how they interact in this section.
Case Study
Measuring the Effectiveness of Managers
What does it imply to suggest that a successful manager is more concerned with power than with accomplishment? Consider Ken, a sales manager at a prominent American business who attended one of our management sessions. (All of the following cases’ names and details have been changed.) Ken was elevated to a management position at headquarters around six years ago, where he was in charge of salespeople who handled the company’s largest accounts.
Ken demonstrated that he accurately comprehended what his job demanded of him by completing out his questionnaire at the workshop—namely, that he should focus on influencing others’ success rather than achieving new goals or socializing with his subordinates. When invited to compose a tale about a managerial problem with other members of the workshop, Ken unintentionally demonstrated that he did not share those concerns through his fiction. Indeed, he discovered that his desire for achievement was extremely high—in fact, it was greater than the 90th percentile—while his need for power was extremely low, falling somewhere around the 15th percentile. Ken’s strong desire to succeed was unsurprising—after all, he had been a highly successful salesman—but his desire to influence others was clearly far less than what his work demanded. Ken was perplexed, but reasoned that the measuring tools might not be reliable, and that the disparity between the ideal and his score was not as large as it appeared.
Then came the bombshell. Ken’s subordinates corroborated what he had told them: He was a bad boss who didn’t have much of an impact on those who worked for him. They felt as if they had been given very little responsibility. He never praised them, only chastised them. In addition, the office was disorganized, confusing, and chaotic. In comparison to national standards, his office scored in the tenth to fifteenth percentile on all of these criteria.
What motivates a good manager if the desire to succeed does not? It is not enough to think that power motivation is significant; strong evidence is required that persons who are better managers than Ken Briggs are more highly motivated by power and may also have higher scores on other traits. However, how can one determine who is the all-star leader?
However, how can one determine who is the all-star leader?
When it comes to evaluating managerial effectiveness in production, marketing, finance, or research and development, real-world performance measurements are scarce. We didn’t want to rely solely on determining who the stronger managers in Ken’s firm were. Superiors’ assessments of their subordinates’ real-world performance may be erroneous for a variety of reasons. We concluded that, in the absence of a conventional measure of performance, the best indicator of a manager’s competence would be the climate he or she fosters in the workplace, as reflected in subordinate morale.
An all-star leader, almost by definition, helps subordinates feel strong and responsible, pays them appropriately for good performance, and ensures that things are arranged so that subordinates feel confident in their abilities. Above all, managers should instill a strong feeling of team spirit in their employees, as well as pride in working as part of a team. If a management fosters and encourages this attitude, his or her employees will almost likely perform better.
The graph “The Link Between Morale and Sales” demonstrates how, at least in Ken’s company, high morale at the start of the year became a good predictor of how well the sales division would do during the year. Furthermore, it appears that a manager who can boost salespeople’s morale may do the same for personnel in other departments (manufacturing, design, and so on), resulting in improved overall performance. So, what qualities does a manager need to instill that kind of spirit in his or her employees?
Morale and Sales: What’s the Connection? Early in the year, the greater the morale, the higher the sales by the end of the year.
Case Study
Managers Can Change Their Styles Training Managers Clearly Improves Their Employees’ Morale
What if a person is unwilling to shift employment but realizes that he or she lacks the necessary motivational profile to be a manager? One manager’s case (Charlie) is instructive. Charlie had low power motivation, an average drive to achieve, and an above-average affiliation motivation. As a result, he fit the affiliative manager profile(those whose primary motivation is to be liked), and his subordinates’ morale was low, as one might predict. Charlie was taken aback when he discovered that his employees’ sense of duty and perception of a reward system were both in the tenth percentile, while team spirit was in the 30th. When Charlie was shown a film illustrating three managerial climates, he stated that he liked the authoritarian climate. When the workshop trainer and other members of the group pointed out the drawbacks of this management approach, he grew enraged. He became a hindrance to the group’s work, and he vehemently protested to what was being taught.
“I blew my cool,” Charlie admitted in a much later interview. “When I started yelling at you for being all wrong, I got even madder when you pointed out that, according to my style questionnaire, you bet that that was just what I did to my salespeople. Down underneath, I knew something must be wrong. The sales performance for my division wasn’t so good. Most of it was due to me anyway and not to my sales-people. Obviously, their reports that they felt I delegated very little responsibility to them and didn’t reward them at all had to mean something. So I finally decided to sit down and try to figure what I could do about it. I knew I had to start being a manager instead of trying to do everything myself and blowing my cool at others because they didn’t do what I thought they should. In the end, after I calmed down, on the way back from the workshop, I realized that it is not so bad to make a mistake; it’s bad not to learn from it.”
Charlie put his plans into action after the course. His subordinates were asked to appraise him again six months later. “I was nervous on the way home,” he said after attending a second workshop to review the data. ” I knew I had been working with those guys and not selling so much myself, but I was afraid of what they would say about how things were going in the office. When I found out that the team spirit and some of those other low scores had jumped from around the 30th to the 55th percentile, I was so delighted and relieved that I couldn’t say anything all day long.”
His new attitude toward his job has paid off handsomely. His office’s revenues increased by more than 16 percent in 1973 over the previous year, and they increased even more in 1974. His office’s increase over the previous year ranked seventh in the country in 1973, and third in 1974. He wasn’t the only one in his firm that switched up their management approaches. Overall sales at his company increased significantly in 1973, contributing significantly to the company’s turnaround from a $15 million deficit in 1972 to a $3 million profit in 1973. In 1974, the company improved its performance even more, with an 11% increase in revenue and a 38% increase in earnings.
Even while there must be sufficient of such desire someplace in his or her business, the good manager in a huge company does not have a great demand for achievement, as we define and assess that purpose. The desire for power outweighs the desire to be liked by top executives. The manager’s desire for power should be socialized—managed in such a way that the institution as a whole benefits, not just the person. People and countries with this motive profile are empire builders; they have a proclivity for instilling strong morale in their organizations and expanding them. This motive profile, like that of countries, has the potential to lead to imperialism and authoritarianism in businesses. The same motivation that leads to effective power management can also lead to a company’s attempt to control others, ostensibly for the sake of organizational growth. As a result, it’s not unexpected that big company has had to be regulated by federal agencies on a regular basis.
Similarly, the best managers have two characteristics that operate as regulators: more emotional maturity and a democratic, teaching managerial style. Maturity checks a manager’s institutional power incentive, which does not lead to aggressive, egotistic expansiveness. As a result, managers can exert control over their colleagues and influence others without resorting to coercion or an authoritarian management style.
When summarized in this way, what we’ve learned via empirical and statistical research may appear to be common sense. But it’s more than common sense; we can now determine objectively what qualities make a good manager. Corporations can choose and teach those who are likely to be good managers, as well as those who are already in management roles, to be more effective and confident.
Course Manual 7: Goals & Aspirations
When most of us think of leaders, we tend to think of those who stand out as unusually powerful, popular, or influential. Current and former Presidents and politicians, world-famous speakers and thought leaders, business and corporate gurus, and even sports and entertainment superstars come to mind.
True leadership, on the other hand, isn’t measured by popularity, outward power, or influence. Strong leaders are typically seen working quietly and out of the limelight, confident in their capacity to influence change and bring out the best in others.
The designation of leader has no bearing on leadership. Power and control over others are not desired by a great leader. A strong leader’s success is measured by the number of individuals he or she inspires and empowers.
They do it without using force, intimidation, or coercion, and without relying on their name, position, or rank to do so. They accomplish so by always demonstrating their personal power, ideals, and integrity via their acts.
Let’s take a look at what makes a successful leader and what types of leadership goals motivate them to improve.
1. Personal Responsibility And Self-Discipline Development
If you want to improve as a leader, you must first learn to understand and lead yourself. A strong leader attempts to display and model these qualities in order to teach people to accept responsibility and leadership in their own work and lives.
This entails taking complete responsibility for one’s current state of affairs, including decisions, actions, behaviors, and outcomes, whether favorable or negative. It entails appreciating both one’s failures and one’s triumphs equally for the lessons and blessings they provide.
Being a strong leader also entails practicing and developing self-control so that one’s decisions and actions are unbiased and controlled, and one is always fully aware of and prepared for the consequences of those actions and decisions.
2. Learning to Fail With Grace
True leadership aspires to perfection while acknowledging that it is an illusion that cannot be realized. As a result, they anticipate failing at least as frequently as succeeding, and they simply factor losses into the equation.
Attempting to hide or cover up their faults and failures, giving in to fury, or blaming others for their losses not only makes them look dumb, but it also prevents them from learning from their mistakes and growing as leaders.
A successful leader isn’t frightened of failing; instead, he or she evaluates the setbacks carefully for opportunities to learn and make modifications and improvements in the future. A leader refuses to overlook the worth of their blunders.
In this sense, a competent leader can gracefully and dignifiedly walk away from his or her mistakes and failures, empowering and allowing others to do the same.
3. Practice Active and Careful Listening
Jordan B. Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor from Canada, taught that we should approach everyone we meet as though they know something we don’t.
As a result, we approach each individual with the curiosity of a beginner’s mind, regardless of status or title, and we treat others with natural respect.
When a successful leader practices active listening, he or she not only fosters respect in those they lead, but they also benefit from the insight that each individual possesses.
4. Creating a Well-Rounded Person
Developing multiple areas of knowledge is a crucial part of becoming a successful leader in any field.
This may include mastering distinct subjects that appear to have no clear link at first glance, but which, in the end, provide a robust and varied ‘toolbox’ of skills and information from which to choose when faced with difficult or challenging situations. Even the most lofty ambitions necessitate the skills and knowledge required to achieve them in the actual world.
Being well-rounded in one’s range of experience and skills also implies being able to relate to, comprehend, and so lead a wider range of individuals.
5. Strengthening Resilience
This one ties very nicely with #4 above. A successful leader builds resilience in the face of adversity by always seeking to expand and diversify his or her knowledge and ability.
You might think of resilience as the polar opposite of powerlessness, but resilience is a set of qualities and character traits that enable us to remain adaptable in the face of change, to bend rather than break when faced with stresses and challenges, and to persevere and overcome life’s inevitable setbacks and failures.
Financial resilience can be built by creating a firm foundation in which one can handle money without yielding to temptation, being unduly swayed by passing trends, or behaving irresponsibly, allowing one to weather financial storms elegantly and independently.
6. Strengthening Your Leadership Presence
To be a successful leader, you must first earn the respect of others. It’s not enough to have the abilities and knowledge to get things done; a leader must also acquire the trust and loyalty of the people he or she hopes to lead.
While confidence, communication skills, and composure can all contribute to generate a leadership aura, they are insufficient. Your power will be paper thin if you are not a person of integrity, no matter how polished you are.
Knowing who you are, being clear about your basic values and what you stand for, and then doing and speaking in accordance with all of that is what integrity is all about. If you don’t act in an honest, loyal, and respectful manner, you won’t be able to inspire others’ loyalty, honesty, or respect.
If you want to be an inspiring and recognized leader, you should also cultivate humility and open-mindedness.
7. Recognizing and Developing Others’ Leadership
Followers are crucial. People who receive orders and oversee the day-to-day operations of complex procedures literally keep the world running.
The leader’s primary responsibility, on the other hand, is to coach, delegate, and direct others. He or she realizes how critical it is to make themselves obsolete by developing new leaders who can ultimately take over the position they presently hold.
True industrial and company leaders understand that in order to succeed, they must surround themselves with capable individuals, and they will actively seek out and cultivate leadership traits in others.
They aren’t concerned with keeping top rank or protecting ego; instead, they recognize that supporting others to improve and become leaders allows them to achieve their goals faster, which benefits both them and the organization/business/society as a whole.
8. Persuasion Techniques
Being a good leader is mainly a psychological and behavioral exercise. A leader recognizes that all people, including themselves, are emotional beings who will not respond positively to instructions, information, or guidance that they are hostile to, confused about, or doubtful about.
As a result, a leader understands that he or she must learn to communicate successfully in the emotional language that most people speak. A skilled leader may persuade people that he or she is coming from a place of integrity and knowledge by creating rapport and speaking to the emotional limbic system, and remove any skepticism or disagreement.
A successful leader also recognizes what inspires others to want to help them in their goal, and works to inspire others by boosting their confidence and highlighting their best attributes.
9. Managing Your Personal Assets
Like a muscle, the brain is capable of exerting a given level of labor effort for a set amount of time. It, too, requires rest in order to repair and replenish itself, just like any other muscle.
Our emotional and energy bodies are connected in a similar way. If any of these systems are subjected to excessive production or stress for an extended period of time, they will become ineffective, exhausted, and eventually fail.
Those who are dedicated to mastering the art of leadership understand that their personal resources – their energy, emotions, and intellect – are finite and must be replenished on a regular basis.
Leaders who take care of themselves physically, intellectually, and emotionally avoid overworking themselves.
10. Constantly Looking At The Big Picture
A strong leader strives to think in terms of the big picture, having a bird’s eye view of the day-to-day events and happenings so as not to lose sight of the wider picture.
Regardless of where you are in life, this is a valuable endeavor. The iNLP Center reminds out that looking at problems from a distance has been clinically demonstrated to be a good way to solve problems. They strive for clarity at all times, practicing seeing through the fog of the fleeting and ever-shifting and keeping their sights fixed on the route ahead. In this way, a good leader avoids being caught up in the stress or drama of current issues, missteps, or impediments, and is able to deal with the unexpected effectively and calmly without getting thrown off track.
Conclusion
While true leaders are uncommon in our society, we can learn to strengthen our own leadership skills and become more effective in our roles as bosses, managers, teachers, and visionaries by studying other great leaders — those who lead by example, inspire trust and loyalty through their integrity, remain humble and open-minded, and are able to make difficult decisions for the greater good.
Course Manual 8: Environmental Factors
Personality traits are related to one another while also being influenced and molded by external factors. Personality elements commonly interact with or are influenced by other individual features (e.g., gender, education) and environmental conditions, according to researchers across disciplines (e.g., industry dynamics, city traits). On surveys, techno-entrepreneurs in the United Kingdom scored higher in autonomy, risk propensity, and LOC, while those in Switzerland scored higher in achievement need, tolerance for ambiguity, innovativeness, and confidence. Tajeddini and Mueller (2009) explain the disparities to cultural differences rather than other environmental factors because the technological industries in both nations are relatively similar in terms of development and institutional support.
Similarly, Hmieleski and Baron (2008) investigate the impact of ESE, dispositional optimism, and environmental dynamism on business performance in a three-way interaction (e.g., revenue growth and employment growth). They discovered that environment and industry differences may interact substantially with personality traits in terms of their impact on venture results.
Some fields go beyond studying interactions to develop a “complex process model of the entrepreneur,” in which the relationships between various factors are mapped out and ultimately influence venture success. To demonstrate this process, the diagram below was taken from Frese (2009) and Brandstätter (2011).
Entrepreneurship does not happen in a vacuum, and personality qualities, human capital, and the surrounding environment all play a role in any endeavor to start and run a new business.
Environmental Factors Associated with Leadership
Genetics is responsible for one-third of leadership occupancy (i.e., how many people hold official leadership positions in organizations). According to research, if you are naturally extroverted, have a charismatic personality, are brave, and fiercely competitive, you have a “genetic shortcut” to rising to the top of a peer group since you are likely to carry the leadership gene.
But what if you don’t have the innate leadership skills that the leadership gene provides but still want to be a leader? Is there anything you can do to improve your chances of landing a position of substantial power and influence? The short answer is yes; there is a lot you can do, according to study, because environmental effects and learning account for almost two-thirds of leadership occupancy.
Leadership is something that can be learned; two-thirds of it, to be exact.
Four scientifically validated concepts for environmental leadership development are listed below. Follow these four guidelines to gain a head start on becoming an all-star leader if you aren’t a “natural born” leader, or even if you are.
1. Read, Read, Read Some More… And Then Some More
One established way to improve your leadership abilities is through training and development. It is advised that you immerse yourself in as much “leadership” reading material as possible. After all, you’re in charge of your own education and development.
When it comes to getting your “leadership legs” under you, “The Leader’s Guide: 15 Essential Skills” by Randall D. Ponder is a great resource. It’s a very practical “blueprint” that concentrates on fifteen basic leadership essentials. Mark Anderson’s “The Leadership Book” is a similarly useful but more recently produced manual. “The Leadership Book” largely covers the same material as “The Leader’s Guide,” but in a significantly different format that highlights 50 critical leadership topics that any leader may face on any given day. “Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading,” by Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, is a last choice. If you don’t have the leadership gene, this book will provide you with knowledge and tactics to help you stay in the game when things go tough.
2. Identify Two Mentors
Learning from a mentor has also been shown to help people develop their leadership abilities. Find not one, but two mentors if you don’t have the leadership gene. The first should be someone who fits your personality – a “taught” leader who lacks the leadership gene but has yet risen to a position of substantial power and/or influence. The goal of this relationship is for you to learn from someone who is similar to you about relevant areas of leadership, such as how to study and practice various leadership skills to how to stand out and be noticed among colleagues who have leadership gene-type personalities. Because his or her temperament will be similar to yours, this is the type of leader you should attempt to mimic.
Your second mentor should be a strong leader with the ability to inspire others. Your rationale and aim in forming this relationship is to learn, but this time from someone who represents individuals you’ll be competing against for those coveted leadership positions in your company. You should compare your thoughts, approaches, and actions for any relevant issue to how your mentor would handle the same situation with this mentor. This gives you the opportunity to compare your approach to that of someone who thinks, behaves, and is “wired” differently than you.
3. Experiment in a “safe” setting.
An environmental factor that influences one’s ability to lead is direct experiential practice. However, if you lack the leadership gene, stepping into a high-profile leadership role when and where it matters most, such as at work, can be frightening and perilous. If you fail, your performance and leadership stock may suffer irreversible damage. As a result, strive to develop leadership experience in a “safe” (i.e., non-work-related) setting, such as within a family, community, civic, educational, or religious setting. You will be able to experiment with your style, language, and actions as a result of this. You’ll be able to examine what works well and what doesn’t without the extra burden of potentially jeopardizing your job status if things don’t go as planned.
4. Locate a “Leadership” Partner
For various reasons, gaining feedback from a peer or peer group is crucial for building your leadership skills, especially if you don’t have the leadership gene. To begin with, peer learning is a two-way activity based on the Law of Psychological Reciprocity, which states that we are unconsciously psychologically obliged to respond in kind to every deed or gesture aimed at us. As a result, if you can provide input on leadership growth to your peers, they will feel bound to return the favor and provide you with feedback on your skill development. Peer relationships, on the other hand, can last a long time. Establishing open, honest, and trusting relationships with peers who can provide relevant, easy-to-understand feedback allows you to measure your skill growth over time. Third, peer learning allows you to learn and teach at the same time based on shared experiences, increasing your confidence in offering feedback and broadening your knowledge based on others’ experiences.
To sum up, even if you lack the leadership gene, the leadership arena is not closed to you. To become a leader, you will have to work harder than those who already have it. To be clear, whether you have the leadership gene or not, you can learn the majority of what we consider to be great leadership. Begin your educational adventure right now. You will develop your “leadership legs” quickly if you focus on training, learning from mentors and peers, and practicing in safe contexts.
Course Manual 9: Growth & Success
Leaders that have a growth mentality can help their staff become responsible problem-solvers. Here’s how a growth mentality can help you develop your leadership skills.
What is the single most important factor that determines whether or not your company will scale to success? Is it the market conditions, the amount of funds you manage to raise, or the presence of high-profile investors?
None of these are correct. In truth, even when things appear to be going well, scaling your business will be a slow and painful process if you don’t have one key ingredient — a growth mentality.
Behind the scenes of any successful business is an exceptional team leader who has adopted a development attitude. That is why the most important factor in determining if a firm or its leadership is successful is whether the leader has adopted a growth mindset and let go of a fixed attitude.
The Main Distinctions Between a Growth and a Fixed Mindset
A growth mindset is the concept that people may improve their talents, abilities, intelligence, and emotional intelligence by adopting a growth mindset. It basically indicates that you feel that success comes from making a persistent effort to overcome obstacles. Leaders who have a growth mentality are more concerned with the process than with the end result.
We have a fixed mindset on the other hand. People’s basic attributes, such as intelligence and talent, are fixed features that cannot be changed or developed, according to this worldview. Leaders with a fixed mindset are obsessively focused on achieving their objectives. They see problems as failures, believing that all of their efforts have been in vain, rather than seeing challenges as opportunities to learn and improve.
Let’s look at the differences between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset and how they affect a business.
How a Fixed Mindset Affects Your Company’s Bottom Line and Leadership
Executives who run their firms with a fixed mindset foster a fear-based culture.
When issues arise — and they always do — leaders with a fixed attitude see the situation as a failure and look for someone to blame.
The leader can even fire or replace the individual who is being accused. This is because they do not believe a person’s ability to address the problem can be improved. Because they don’t trust anyone else, the leader will sometimes step in to fix the problem themselves.
Leaders that have a fixed perspective can become entangled in difficult situations that limit business progress, such as:
1. A fear-based culture in which their staff is afraid to take risks, innovate, or voice ideas for fear of being labeled inept if they make a mistake.
2. An unmotivated team that isn’t reaching its full potential or expanding its horizons.
3. Constantly putting out fires or micromanaging their team, resulting in everyone being overworked, burned out, and anxious.
This setting produces a defensive, finger-pointing mentality, in which people are more concerned with their own safety than with working together to improve the company. When a company’s culture reflects these characteristics, scaling up becomes difficult, if not impossible. Scaling up is, at best, a route fraught with drama, hostility, miscommunication, and stress.
How a Growth Mindset Aids in the Development of Your Team’s Talent
Leaders that embrace a development mentality, on the other hand, will maximize their team’s potential and foster a healthy culture of accountability that promotes corporate success.
Even in times of crisis, a leader with a growth mindset recognizes possibilities for their people. They don’t retreat into a corner, convinced that their efforts have been in vain, and they don’t hunt for someone to blame. Instead, they make every effort to help their team grow as quickly as possible in order to overcome any commercial challenges.
Case Study
Scaling Up Sherpa Kids in Ireland
Dawn Engelbrecht, the Managing Director of Sherpa Kids International, has been the driving force behind the sKids and Sherpa Kids businesses rising from ten locations in New Zealand to over 260 globally in under 20 years.
What was the secret to her success? She possessed a growth mindset, which she instilled in her team. Take a look at how she assisted John Miles, one of her team members, in expanding Sherpa Kids across Ireland.
John had over 20 years of experience working as a financier on Wall Street in London, but no experience in childcare when he became Ireland’s master franchisor of Sherpa Kids. He was also in his fifties, an age when most people would be thinking about retirement rather than beginning a new company.
Someone with a fixed mindset could believe John lacks the necessary skills to succeed in the daycare franchising company. After all, his skills and experience are in finance, and he’s supposed to be retiring, right?
Dawn, thankfully, believed in John’s drive and potential for development. She helped John build new skills in order to scale Sherpa Kids in Ireland, and she encouraged him to do so.
Even John doubted his own ability to master new skills. But, because Dawn believed in him, he chose to enroll in the course she suggested. “I’ll give it my best shot.” “Perhaps you can teach an old dog new tricks,” John says as he reflects on his decision.
For John, learning new talents was crucial. “It gave me more clarity,” he added.
It’s not merely that I want to get from point A to point B. Now I know how we’ll get there, which road we’ll take, and, most importantly, which vehicle we’ll be driving and who will be accompanying me. In my career and personal life, I also have more time.”
How did John’s development affect Sherpa Kids?
After that, John travelled to Ireland to climb Sherpa Kids. From Derry to Cork, Dublin to Galway, he received new queries from potential Sherpa Kids franchisees. With a strong demand for this product/service and a new sense of direction, John set out to grow Sherpa Kids to all 32 counties in Ireland within five years.
Dawn’s growth attitude, which supported and inspired her team to develop their potential and build the business, was the only reason for this success.
You may see how leaders that push forward with a growth mindset motivate their people to do the same by reading Dawn and John’s tale.
It’s vital to lead with a growth mentality if you want to develop your team into proactive, accountable, and motivated problem-solvers. The company will develop and evolve as your team does.
You’ll soon have a culture of individuals who are receptive to feedback, responsible for their own development, and resilient enough to take on new challenges, all of which support innovation and corporate growth.
How a Growth Mindset Expands Your Scaling Options
A growth attitude is just as vital for your leadership development as it is for your team’s talent.
Your company will go through four stages of development as it grows:
• 1–5 staff for a start-up
• As you get older, you’ll have 6-15 staff.
• Employee scale-up: 16-250
• Be the best in your field: 250+ workers
Each level presents its own set of obstacles. An entrepreneur who has grown their firm successfully through the first two phases may not have the skills to make it through the third stage. Because the leader will need to adapt their talents to face the next stage of growth, having a growth mindset is crucial.
A leader may have also assisted another company in scaling up in the third and fourth stages. However, this does not imply that they are qualified to guide a startup through its early stages of development. Learning and developing the new skills needed at these unknown company stages will be vital to their success once again.
Now that we’ve seen why having a growth mentality is crucial, the question becomes: How can a leader acquire a growth mindset?
What Does It Take for a Leader to Foster a Growth Mindset?
To keep up with the demands of a quickly changing digital world, the most effective modern leaders all have a development mindset.
When you intentionally adopt the behaviors and ideas of a growth mindset, you will be able to explore new avenues without being limited by your fear of failure. “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go,” T.S. Eliot once stated.
Course Manual 10: Risk Attitudes
Taking a calculated risk with your time, abilities, and money is at the heart of entrepreneurship.
In today’s management literature, the term “risk” and “risk management” has become a bit of a cliché. Let’s take a more comprehensive look at it in the context of the journey you want to take.
There is, of course, a perfectly sensible method to this analysis that you should follow. However, there is a gut-level element to this question: how do you feel about risk, and what type of mentality and demeanor do you have when confronted with it? This is equally, if not more, critical.
In terms of the former, you should spend time preparing projected P&L and cash flow statements for your new endeavor (along with poor/expected/good scenarios and sensitivity analysis). In most cases, this will result in a time value – how many weeks/months can I live if my prediction about future sales proves to be incorrect? You’ll have a mortgage, liabilities, and possibly dependents, so this rapidly becomes a question of seeing a ‘line in the sand’ where you’ll have to – in the worst-case scenario – accept failure and return to the employee model.
So, do the math, but then consider what you stand to lose if it doesn’t work.
Clearly, the’safe brigade’ will claim that you have missed months of professional continuity, that you may have slipped a few rungs down the Big Firm plc career ladder as a result, that your confidence has been dented, and that you are unquestionably poorer.
Even in the worst-case scenario, you will have gained significant experience and, I believe, elevated yourself above the majority who would never take such a risk. Every day, I would hire a failed entrepreneur – as someone who truly exhibited some ‘get up and go’ – over a journeyman with equivalent technical skills.
The key thing is to not put too much emphasis on the cost of failing. You obviously don’t seek it, but simply moving into the world of self-employment will have given you a unique opportunity for ‘personal brand distinction’ and experiential value. The United States has a significantly more entrepreneur-friendly regulatory framework and culture than other countries (for example, it does not stigmatize failing directorship to the extent that the United Kingdom does). With that national attribute in mind, you may get a sense of what these people accomplished simply by observing them embark on their initial projects.
So, while rational risk analysis is crucial, it must be viewed in context.
Attitude Towards Risk Activity
This may not be the path for you if you are naturally drawn to a risk-averse lifestyle and worldview. However, there will always be exogenous variables beyond your control. Indeed, the world outside your office window can be a fickle place at times, so you’ll need a strong constitution to deal with the uncertainty ahead.
In your life, you should also consider the ‘Important Others’ (more of which in a subsequent extract). How will they handle the danger you may be sharing, both emotionally and practically? Is it fair to bring a scared, reliant spouse along for the journey, even if you are a confident risk taker? Only you have the authority to make a decision.
The explanation for this has to do with the contrast between risk and uncertainty, which is often misunderstood. The eminent economist Frank Knight brilliantly highlighted this in his important text Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921, Schaffner & Marx). The difference between ‘Knightian Risk’ and ‘Knightian Uncertainty’ is that ‘Knightian Risk’ can be calculated with known probabilities (like the roulette wheel) and ‘Knightian Uncertainty’ cannot be measured or computed. The reality is that ‘computable’ risks are largely absent from real life outside of a casino game, as Nicholas Nassim Taleb explains in his brilliant book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2008, Penguin). In all honesty, we have no idea what the true chances are on which we are wagering. As a result, entrepreneurs are the most important economic catalysts, as they pioneer in the lack of perfect data. They must be the irrational breakers of the deadlock, more artist than scientist, the type of people who will take a risk and hope that a net will appear to catch them.
In the end, being an entrepreneur means taking risks.
Methods For Gauging Risk Aversion
Self-reported metrics are one method of assessing risk attitudes. Many of these questions are obtained from longitudinal surveys that aren’t explicitly oriented to entrepreneurship, therefore their specificity varies. Caliendo et al. (2009), for example, include the general risk-attitude question, “How do you perceive yourself: Are you normally a person who is completely prepared to take chances or do you strive to avoid taking risks?” in their GSOEP. The Northern Finland 1966 Birth Cohort Study is used by Ekelund et al. (2005) to investigate more indirect questions about general risk attitudes, such as “I usually feel tense and worried when I have to do something new and unfamiliar” and “Most of the time I would prefer to do something a little risky (like riding in an automobile over steep hills and sharp turns)—rather than having to stay quiet and inactive for a few hours.” “Are you prepared to take chances in your entrepreneurial decisions, or do you strive to avoid taking risks?” asks Block et al. (2015) in a self-scoring question.
The most obvious objection of self-reported risk-aversion measures is that respondents with little understanding of themselves may see themselves differently than others do. Overconfidence is common among entrepreneurs (stebro et al., 2014), potentially skewing self-reported outcomes. Furthermore, general attitudes may not translate to startup attitudes, as one’s risk attitude toward driving a fast car may be unrelated to one’s risk attitude regarding one’s work or finances. To test risk attitudes, some researchers give fictional but business-specific scenarios (or “vignettes”). Other academics concerned about the self-confidence or self-knowledge gap look at entrepreneurs’ investment portfolios and indexes of shown action to see whether they might reveal anything about their risk views.
There is a difference between questions on general financial risk-taking and more entrepreneurship-specific circumstances among hypothetical situational questions used to test risk attitudes. In certain polls, respondents are asked to choose between two career options. “Assuming you are the sole owner, which situation would you prefer?” the PSED, for example, asks. (1) A business that would provide you a solid living but with minimal danger of failure and little prospect of making you a billionaire, or (2) a business that would make you a millionaire but with a far larger risk of going bankrupt.” “Suppose you are the only income earner in the family, and you have a decent job that will pay you your current (family) income every year for the rest of your life,” the NLSY79 asks. You are given the option of taking a new and equally good job, with a 50–50 probability of doubling your (family) income and a 50–50 chance of halving your (family) income. “Would you be interested in the new position?” These situational questions are more reliable than broad riskattitude questions because they directly engage one’s disposition toward risk propensity in business ventures.
Some risk-attitude questions, such as those involving a hypothetical lottery or investment opportunity, allow for a broader range of replies than an either/or dichotomy. “Imagine you’ve won $100,000 in a lottery,” says Block et al. (2015) in their study. You have the option of investing the money in an entrepreneurial endeavor once you have received it. You double the sum if you have a 50% chance of winning. With a 50% chance of losing, you would lose half of your money. How much money would you invest if you won the lottery?”
Finally, other research look directly at demonstrated investment measures of individuals and organizations, as well as other behaviors that show risk preferences, to overcome the self-confidence and self-knowledge gap (e.g., Puri and Robinson, 2007; Brown et al., 2006; Uusitalo, 2001). Hvide and Panos (2014) use stock market participation, personal leverage, and the percentage of wealth invested in the stock market to assess risk preferences at the individual level. To determine how willing a person is to endure earnings-related risk, Lazear (2005) utilizes the standard deviation of industry-wide wages in the individual’s first employment. Caggese (2012) measures risk attitudes at the firm level using R&D expenditure behavior, assuming that research for introducing new products is riskier than investing in upgrading existing items.
Although individual investment data is restricted and does not represent the full entrepreneurial community (for example, a tiny convenience shop owner may not have a large stock portfolio), it eliminates the worry that people act differently than they say in hypothetical self-report surveys. Similarly, given the wide range of exit outcomes (ranging from failure to highly successful sales and public offerings) for VC-backed companies, Hall and Woodward (2010) use a model-based approach to back out what an entrepreneur’s relative risk aversion has to be for a given wealth level and external guaranteed earnings option.
Course Manual 11: Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
How Does Self-Efficacy Relatively Relate To Leadership?
It’s all about skill and effectiveness when it comes to efficacy. It refers to the ability to create or achieve a specific result. The term “self-efficacy” relates to one’s belief in one’s own capacity or effectiveness in a specific situation. Self-efficacy, like many other words with the prefix’self’ (self-esteem, self-consciousness, self-awareness, and so on), is more about your conviction in your capacity than a genuine restriction.
That’s a crucial distinction to make.
Your psychology is heavily influenced by your beliefs about your own efficacy. It has an impact on how your brain responds to stress and hurdles. Believing that you can overcome a problem sets in motion the coping strategies you’ll need to succeed.
Simply said, Henry Ford was dead on. “Whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right.”
Self-Efficacy Assists You In Completing A Task
Self-efficacy also has a psychological advantage. People who have strong self-efficacy also put in the effort required to achieve their goals. As a result, they’re more likely to succeed. This advantage could be more intuitive than it appears. Here are a few examples from everyday life that you’re likely to recognize:
• Your friend claims they “can’t cook,” but then subscribes to a meal delivery service such as Blue Apron or Hello Fresh. With the supplies and instructions in front of them, their perceptions of their own abilities shift. They feel they can prepare the dinner, so they attentively follow the directions. What’s the end result? A delectable supper prepared at home!
• A project you’ve been meaning to do, such as creating a blog, feels daunting and unachievable. However, you uncover some materials or speak with a friend who assists you in making a strategy. You gain inspiration to construct and publish your blog by following the stages laid out in front of you!
• Your child is disappointed and discouraged by a mathematics difficulty. They grumble, “I’ll never understand division!” Then you show them that they’ve already successfully solved three comparable issues. Your youngster is encouraged, and they begin to believe in themselves once more. They resolve to try once more and answer the division issue successfully! (In a perfect world.) It’s also possible that your youngster will continue to scream.)
Self-efficacy, in a nutshell, prevents you from quitting.
What Is The Relationship Between Self-Efficacy And Leadership?
It’s not easy to give up. When we resign, we often feel regret, insecurity, and as if we’ve let ourselves down. Those are feelings I never want you to experience. But especially not when it comes to your previous leadership roles. That’s why I chose leadership self-efficacy as the theme for this week’s Feminine Foresight.
So, what exactly is self-efficacy in leadership?
You know what you’re doing, but it’s your belief in your ability to lead that counts. High leadership self-efficacy affects both your personal effectiveness as a leader and the performance of the group you’re leading. That makes it significant.
Your self-efficacy affects your thoughts, motivation, perseverance, well-being, vulnerabilities, and decisions as a leader. Every aspect of the leadership experience is impacted in some way.
When faced with adversity, people who have a high level of leadership self-efficacy fare better. Even in the most difficult situations, they maintain their composure and self-control. They are also more eager to put in the effort required to lead properly and care for the needs of their group.
That is the kind of leader you want to be and follow.
Self-Efficacy of Leaders in Obtaining Commitment
For a leader to succeed, he or she must first gain commitment. After all, who are you leading if no one is committed to your cause? Interpersonal skills play an important role in gaining commitment. How well can you relate to people, for example? Are you able to effectively confront and guide others? Do you have a good command of the English language? Do people believe they can trust you and that you are looking out for their best interests?
All of these abilities can be honed in any relationship with another person. If you have a high level of self-efficacy at obtaining commitment, you’re definitely a natural ‘people person’ with good interpersonal interactions.
Self-awareness of your fears is a fantastic place to start when it comes to dealing with them. I’ll provide more techniques to help you enhance your leadership self efficacy in the following weeks. For the time being, think about where you are in terms of defining goals, overcoming hurdles, and developing commitment.
What is the significance of innovation leadership?
Because successful innovation begins with ideation — the phase in which remarkable ideas are produced as the foundation of innovation success — innovation leadership is critical for every firm.
Managers must think beyond cascading instructions when considering how leadership affects employee productivity and efficiency. Managers and employees have always had a relationship based on obedience and authority.
Innovative leadership goes beyond this setup in that innovative leaders are receptive to their employees’ suggestions and eager to provide constructive feedback. Innovation culture is created, nurtured, and practiced through innovation leadership.
To improve the organization’s innovation performance, business executives utilize proven techniques to increase the involvement, knowledge, and capabilities of their teams. They make sound decisions, especially when the company’s innovative efforts are on the line.
They meticulously plan and research every stage of the innovation process, and they equip their staff with the resources they need to bring their innovative ideas to reality.
When establishing key strategies for the company’s future products and services, innovative business leaders also consider trends. They keep everyone on board by stressing the improvements that are required for the company to succeed in its field.
By the way, we understand that as a leader, it’s critical to get your people to be as engaged in innovation as possible. If you’re interested in learning more, we’ve created a free employee engagement booklet that you can download.
What Are The Traits Of A Leader That Leads With Innovation?
It is critical for firms to continue to innovate in today’s world. Innovation aids firms in gaining a competitive advantage and ensuring their long-term success. As a result, innovation leadership is beneficial since it motivates, encourages, and impacts creative endeavors.
Companies would struggle to survive in a dynamic market without it.
The following are seven characteristics that characterize innovation leadership:
1. Creativity Is Aided By Innovation Leadership
An innovative leader recognizes that extraordinary achievements necessitate inventiveness. This is why management that practices innovative leadership goes above and beyond the solutions that are commonly used.
They push past traditional limitations and encourage their staff to pursue bold ideas. They motivate employees to think of new ideas and allow them to debate them completely in order to improve.
Managers allow their employees to explore their creative sides by introducing concept challenges and other competitions that may stimulate creative processes and teamwork, as this type of leadership focuses on innovation.
2. Innovative Leadership Solicits And Responds To Feedback
When team members come up with fresh ideas, innovation managers are willing to explore them further to discover if they are practical and how they may be executed efficiently. They also give accurate, detailed, and actionable feedback.
In exchange, they are open to candid feedback. They recognize that being willing to receive input is critical in resolving difficulties and other challenges that may stymie the company’s ability to innovate.
They believe in the importance of teamwork, that their employees’ opinions matter, and that offering and receiving feedback is an important part of the company’s long-term success.
3. Innovation Leadership Understands The Value Of Taking Risks
Although innovation leadership encourages creativity, innovation managers are aware that unbridled creativity carries a number of risks. Business executives with a high risk tolerance are more likely to increase their innovation performance.
They investigate every conceivable perspective that comes with a problem with great attention and precision. They also recognize that advancement entails dangers, but they believe that these risks may be used to learn more about their chosen subjects.
Above all, they are well aware of the potential dangers that come with implementing a new concept. These innovators, on the other hand, have already considered every possible setback and are ready to deal with them all.
4. Innovation Leadership Pays Close Attention To The Finer Points
When it comes to the implementation of innovation projects, innovation managers think that even the smallest things count. The slightest errors can have a negative impact on the success of the innovation process, yet taking precise baby steps can assist them in doing things correctly.
Tasks and obligations carried out with a lack of attention to detail can lead to inefficiency. Employees who aren’t interested in learning new things or keeping track of deadlines might substantially harm the company’s innovation portfolio.
Time and resources are wasted when this happens. As a result, innovation leaders prefer to get things right the first time by taking a holistic picture of the project. In order to complete tasks on time, they remain task-oriented, time-driven, and accountable.
5. Innovation Leadership Understands That Boredom Does Not Inspire Creativity
People can become stuck in a rut as a result of traditional thinking and repetitive employment. The will and drive of innovation teams might become stale for a variety of reasons.
However, innovation managers are acutely aware of the necessity to seek out strategies that will enable their employees to develop a new wave of knowledge and insight in these situations.
They use software with built-in gamification features to anonymously share ideas or use non-traditional methods like experimentation and rapid prototyping to try to infuse fun into innovation.
6. The Power Of Cooperation Is A Belief Held By Innovation Leaders
When people with diverse backgrounds, knowledge, and experiences collaborate with the goal of using innovation to propel the business to new heights, creative insights emerge.
As a result, innovation leaders aren’t always need to be in perfect agreement. They, on the other hand, advocate for collaborative arguments that encompass all potential scenarios and offer ideal solutions for any challenges that the invention may face along the route.
They want to make innovation as painless as possible by bringing together different skills and knowledge that the firm can utilize to generate new concepts, products, and services that will help them break into new markets in the future.
7. Innovation Leadership Fosters A Culture Of Innovation
Managers of innovation have embraced innovation as a mindset. They prefer to foster innovation as a natural element of the organization’s day-to-day operations. Every employee is encouraged to produce and collect ideas that can lead to revolutionary improvements when they work with them.
A culture of constant innovation and development is prioritized under their guidance. They believe that the best inventions come from groups that incorporate people of all races, abilities, backgrounds, and experiences.
To carry out a structured innovation workflow, they appoint innovation committees with various roles and duties. Finally, excellent innovation leadership persuades teams to collaborate in order to achieve success by engaging and participating in the enterprise’s innovative efforts.
Course Manual 12: Values & Experience
Leadership or Industry Experience: Which is More Important?
What attributes would you prioritize if you were writing a job description for your company’s ideal CEO? Consider the best employer you’ve ever had: what three qualities did they possess that made them so great? You’ve probably mentioned some of the most sought-after leadership qualities, such as motivation, engagement, trustworthiness, and focus.
Returning to the CEO issue, what kind of experience do you think they should have? Maybe you’ve been through a revolutionary change, or maybe you’ve proven you can turn a firm around. Are you concerned, though, about their experience in your industry?
Consider the case of Sir Richard Branson. Record stores, restaurants, airlines, train companies, beverages, telecommunications, gyms, and even space travel are among his businesses (and this is by no means an entire list)! Richard Branson has been able to take his leadership talents and apply them to a variety of industries in order to propel his brand ahead.
Case Study
Take, for example, Richard Branson’s airline, Virgin Atlantic. Virgin Atlantic was founded when Richard was stranded in Puerto Rico after his flight was canceled owing to a lack of passengers. Richard then rented his own plane and went around the airport encouraging other disgruntled passengers on the canceled flight, offering them discounted tickets in order to fill his plane — and thus the airline was formed.
Richard, did he have any experience with planes? No. Was he capable of leading the team to success? Without a doubt.
In an age where technology, methods of working, and means of communicating with customers are continuously changing, a leader’s capacity to adapt is critical. Someone with industry experience may discover that the organization’s requirements alter frequently.
Take a look at some of the world’s most successful organizations, and you’ll notice that their leadership teams come from a variety of backgrounds. Consider the companies from which you’d like to hire: what attributes do their employees possess that make them so desirable? Employees at Disney provide excellent customer service. Employees at Google are creative. You consider the values rather than the experience.
These leadership skills, or their lack thereof, can make or destroy an aspiring manager’s career. Someone who is promoted because of their depth of knowledge in a technical function, for example, may lack the leadership experience needed to encourage their team or look beyond the day-to-day components of the job, disregarding factors like how their team fits in with the rest of the firm. That is not to suggest that these talents cannot be taught – they can – but if this is not addressed early on and new leaders are not given the tools to understand how to lead, the outcomes may be incredibly demotivating for both the rising leader and their staff.
It’s unusual when the inverse is true. It’s a given that a new employee with relevant leadership experience will need to learn more about the firm, its goods, and services if they are moving into a new capacity when they have no prior industry knowledge. An experienced leader with good abilities may quickly recognize both opportunities and threats to the business as an outsider because they can take a step back and see the organization through the eyes of a consumer, an investor, or a shareholder.
It’s evident that, while industry-specific talents can be learned quickly, leadership values are the key to actual success when it comes to a product or service.
Why Do CEOs with a Multi-Industry Background Succeed?
“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short, but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.” ― Michelangelo
You’ve probably heard of mobile number portability in India, where customers of one service provider can easily switch to another without having to change their phone number. Similarly, by leveraging their knowledge and expertise, some CEOs shift industries and succeed as CEOs without losing their identity or image. In truth, enthusiasm, determination, commitment, flexibility, adaptability, conceptual talents, and transferable skills, to name a few, are all necessary attributes for a CEO to succeed. They place a premium on corporate culture and tailor their strategy to the industry, rivals, and the global business climate.
Let’s look at a few CEOs with cross-industry experience and see how they managed to excel in other businesses despite having no prior experience. Alan Mulally, for example, worked in the airplane sector (Boeing) before becoming a successful CEO in the automobile industry (Ford). Daniel Akerson, for example, grew up in the technology and telecommunications industry yet rose to become the CEO of General Motors. Bob Wright, the former CEO of GE Capital, moved on to become the president of NBC. It is clear that the success of these CEOs had little to do with subject knowledge. Several aspects, including transferable leadership, contributed to the success of these legendary CEOs.
Leadership That May Be Transferred
When successful CEOs are engaged by companies in other industries because of their previous industry experience, image, and leadership brand, the stock market rises. Leaders can be moved around, and leadership abilities can be learned. The capacity to transfer leadership talents and abilities from one industry to another depending on the business environment is known as transferable leadership. Regardless of the sector or situation, some leadership skills are generally required to lead. CEOs with transferable leadership skills and abilities can thrive in any industry or setting because they have a distinct mentality, skill set, and tool set for leading enterprises. To summarize, these CEOs have soft talents as well as cross-industry experience.
It is critical to effectively integrate self-management skills, domain skills, and transferrable abilities in order to become a successful leader. When switching industries, however, your transferable talents are more important than so-called self-management and domain skills. When CEOs move from one field to another, they leverage their transferable abilities and leadership to achieve success. They are also visionaries who can form effective teams and work under duress, especially in turbulent, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous global corporate contexts.
Transferable talents and transferable leadership are often known as “portable skills” and “portable leadership,” respectively. I learned skills like discipline, determination, team spirit, leadership, and commitment while serving in the Indian Air Force. I used these abilities when I started my own business. I’m currently working in the field of education and training, and these abilities come in handy. To succeed, I made some changes in each career.
CEOs have a baseline leadership style and background that they adapt to the new industry. They stay the same at the heart, but adapt their conduct and leadership to the needs of the business or sector they are entering.
Cross-Industry Experience Is Beneficial
“Lead and inspire people. Don’t try to manage and manipulate people. Inventories can be managed, but people must be led.” ―Ross Perot
CEOs with “medium or moderate experience” in an industry performed better than CEOs with “high industry-specific experience,” according to a 1996 study published in the Academy of Management Journal. CEOs with cross-industry experience are frequently curious and ask questions to have a better understanding of the systems and structures in place. Because they come from a different industry, they are devoid of preconceived conceptions and beliefs. They are adaptive and eager to learn and discover new things.
C-suite executives with cross-industry experience can take the best of everything and discard the rest. It encourages children to consider from a variety of angles and encourages them to think outside the box. CEOs in the same industry have a tendency to think in similar ways and employ the same tried-and-true tools and tactics. CEOs with cross-industry experience, on the other hand, display adaptation and flexibility while experimenting with new leadership tools and tactics.
When CEOs switch industries, they must grasp the new industry’s lingo and understand the products and operations. They don’t always have contacts in the new industry. Putting these considerations aside, CEOs with cross-industry experience can outperform those with only industry experience. When you look at Lou Gerstner of IBM, Meg Whitman of eBay, and Alan Mullaly of Ford, for example, you can see how their previous industry expertise helped them contribute value to their current firms.
Broad-Based Generalists Vs. Industry Specialists
Do you think industry experts or broad-based generalists would do better? Although it relies on the CEO’s personality and leadership style, broad-based generalists often outperform industry experts. CEOs with cross-industry experience are masters of leadership attributes and talents, which distinguishes them from CEOs with specific sector experience. In a word, there’s a difference between breadth and depth of experience. Of course, both have advantages and disadvantages. However, having a broad range of experience aids CEOs in effectively delivering their goods and developing as outstanding CEOs globally.
“Skills make dreams happen. They build economies. They make people rich and famous. In today’s world, the demands for skills are staggering. Government, businesses, and individuals have too much to achieve, their goals are huge. They are constantly, and I do mean constantly, looking for people with the right skills. People who can get the job done.” ―Emi Iyalla
Workshop Exercises
All-Star Identification Exercises
01. Talent Acquisition: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
02. Big 5 : Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
04. Managing Teams: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
05. Personality Traits: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
06. Power Motivation: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
07. Goals & Aspirations: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
08. Environmental Factors: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
09. Growth & Success: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
10. Risk Attitudes: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
12. Values & Experience: Explain in your own words how this process will directly impact upon your department?
SWOT & MOST Analysis Exercises
01. Undertake a detailed SWOT Analysis in order to identify your department’s internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats in relation to each of the 12 All-Star Identification processes featured above. Undertake this task together with your department’s stakeholders in order to encourage collaborative evaluation.
02. Develop a detailed MOST Analysis in order to establish your department’s: Mission; Objectives; Strategies and Tasks in relation to All-Star Identification . Undertake this task together with all of your department’s stakeholders in order to encourage collaborative evaluation.
Project Studies
Project Study (Part 1) – Customer Service
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 2) – E-Business
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 3) – Finance
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 4) – Globalization
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 5) – Human Resources
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 6) – Information Technology
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 7) – Legal
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 8) – Management
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 9) – Marketing
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 10) – Production
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 11) – Logistics
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Project Study (Part 12) – Education
The Head of this Department is to provide a detailed report relating to the All-Star Identification process that has been implemented within their department, together with all key stakeholders, as a result of conducting this workshop, incorporating process: planning; development; implementation; management; and review. Your process should feature the following 12 parts:
01. Talent Acquisition
02. Big 5
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers
04. Managing Teams
05. Personality Traits
06. Power Motivation
07. Goals & Aspirations
08. Environmental Factors
09. Growth & Success
10. Risk Attitudes
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness
12. Values & Experience
Please include the results of the initial evaluation and assessment.
Program Benefits
Management
- Time management
- Defined responsibilities
- Executive oversight
- Resource leveraging
- Performance accountability
- Standardized costs
- Streamlined estimating
- Streamlined purchasing
- Standardized processes
- Project tracking
Marketing
- Market research
- Value proposition
- Defined expertise
- Ideal client
- Brand awareness
- Market share
- Marketing strategy
- Streamlined sales
- Sales tracking
- Social proof
Financial
- Reducing costs
- Cash flow
- Streamlined forecasting
- Automated reporting
- Trend analysis
- Budget monitoring
- Budget controls
- Systemized book-keeping
- Systemized accounting
- Systems redundancy
Client Telephone Conference (CTC)
If you have any questions or if you would like to arrange a Client Telephone Conference (CTC) to discuss this particular Unique Consulting Service Proposition (UCSP) in more detail, please CLICK HERE.