Analysing the Skills and Behaviours of Successful Entrepreneurial Leaders

There are thousands of research done and hundreds of papers published to analyse the key skills and behaviours of a successful entrepreneurial leader. Have you ever wondered, is it the tech genius of Bill Gates or the ultimate focus on the user experience of Steve Jobs? Is it about educational excellence, pure luck, or previous experience and wisdom? 

We can state the example of Marla Malcolm and Barry Beck, who coupled high-end beauty stores and spas with online stores. Their contemporaries and investors were suspicious about their business model and declared their existence is likely to meet a dinosaur's end. But the unimaginable and unexpected success of Bluemercury, shut the critics' mouths. 

Despite numerous attempts that are made to explain the ingredients of entrepreneurial success, the answers are far from comprehension. The fact is most studies come up with conflicting assessments and results.

I found a great research done by Harvard Business School in the midst of all the other apparently tangled studies. The idea was of a self-assessment program with the aid of hundreds of successful entrepreneurs complimented with evaluations from their friends, co-partners, peers, and employees. The research was done on the basis of gender and different types of entrepreneurs.

An experienced researcher and professor of Harvard Business School, Prof. Lynda Applegate, states that they had a hard time in being able to identify different skills and behaviours of entrepreneurial figures. She adds that the problem also lies in the fact that people usually focus on understanding the entrepreneurial personalities rather than their unique skills, beliefs, and behaviours. What furthermore complicates things are the different types of entrepreneurs that exist along with their cliché peculiarities, skills, and perceptions. The types can include high-growth businesses, small “lifestyle” businesses, multi-generational established family businesses, and the list goes on. 

After two successful sessions of self-assessing pilot tests for skills and behaviour analysis of entrepreneurial leaders, the answer started to come in, and the group of HBS alumni and professors team structured richly informative research results.  

Dimensions of Analysing Entrepreneurial Leadership

From interviews and self-assessments of the entrepreneurial leaders, the study has concluded 11 essential dimensions to analyse and determine the elements of any entrepreneurial success.

1. Identifying Opportunities

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours associated with abilities to seek and identify high-growth opportunities for the business.

2. Vision and Impacting Power

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours associated with the ability to regulate and influence the stakeholders of the business to have a unified vision and strategy.

3. Comfort Level for Uncertainties

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours associated with the adept and positive approach towards challenges in the face of apparent uncertainties or adverse circumstances.

4. Building and Motivating a Business Team

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours associated with building a business team with the most deserving members and motivate them to achieve the target and goals.

5. Decision-Making Ability

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours associated with the ability to make wise business decisions even in the face of relatively insufficient information and statistics. 

6. Building Network Capability

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours associated with the right approach and effort for building a network with business resources and massive customer bases to keep the business growing.

7. Collaboration and Team Management

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours associated with the ability to be an expert team player and leader to manage the other members and fuel them with the primary business agenda.

8. Supervising Operations

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours associated with the task of successfully supervising and overseeing the ongoing operations and projects of a business. 

9. Financial Management

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours related to the dexterous handling of financial aspects and elements of a business model.

10. Sales Management

It is an approach to measure skills and behaviours related to the effective management of business sales and consumer interests.

11. Inclination Towards Established Structure

It is an approach that measures the preference for existing and established structure over exploring new horizons of business possibilities.

Even though all the factors are crucial and play their part in determining entrepreneurial skills and behaviour; five of them are perhaps, the most important and show significant statistical differences. The five prime factors are Identifying Opportunities, Comfort Level for Uncertainties, Financial Management, Inclination towards Established Structure, and Vision and Impacting Power.

Male and Female Entrepreneurs: How Do They Differ?

Differentiating between male and female entrepreneurs is a bit tricky. And the readers need to be open-minded and honest enough to grasp and accept the gender-based healthy differences of natural qualities that reflect in business. The pilot study revealed statistical relevance and reached some essential conclusions such as women are more confident and skillful regarding their business project and operation management and adept in portraying compelling business vision, while men show more significant potential in their comfort with facing business challenges and handling business finance.

Successful women entrepreneurs can surely translate great ideas into action by creating a powerful vision to push their employees to action, although these same women often hesitate to express their bigger dreams and show conservation in taking a step further. It is proven through research that women launch more businesses than men but rarely make them large.

The HBS research shows that women entrepreneurs' vision and impacting power and supervising operations is higher than male entrepreneurs and the same time men are ahead in the game when it comes to comfort with uncertainty and financial management. 

The little or big differences revealed through the research could potentially help the present and future entrepreneurs to reflect on their current drawbacks and help them to recognise and rebuild their way to success. At the same time, learning what you lack and doing nothing about it, is not going to help you. 

One entrepreneur-in-residence of the Harvard team remarked that the entrepreneurial leaders of the future are constantly in search of better insights into the business world and trying to become more self-aware to create a better version of themselves that will eventually help them grow more.

It is a privilege when you get the opportunity to know where you are lacking. Once you know it, your journey to get better starts from there. My upcoming book covers all the important topics covered by this excellent research, and I believe the book will also help you understand the importance of expertise in finance, human resource, information technology, and other such things to stay ahead in the business world, always!

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Reach out to Kamelia Allow, an ICF Certified Business Coach, via email coach@kameliaallow.com or visit www.kameliaallow.com to book your free discovery session with Kamelia.