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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 the