Entrepreneurial Leadership

entrepreneurial leaders are generally humble, proactive, predictable, and perseverant, recognizing these as core values to cultivate will be the first step in finding one’s North Star for developing a deep-seated, reliable trust. Since trust is the most powerful currency of the entrepreneurial leader, and since creating durable change is almost impossible in a low-trust environment, entrepreneurial leaders must be able to convince others that they can rely on a leader’s ability to learn (humility), willingness to take measured risks (proactivity), and integrity and commitment to overcome (perseverance).

since successful entrepreneurial leaders are generally humble, proactive, predictable, and perseverant, recognizing these as core values to cultivate will be the first step in finding one’s North Star for developing a deep-seated, reliable trust.

Identify your core values by making a clear-eyed assessment of where you spend your time, money, and mind share. Then decide if your values are getting in the way of your effectiveness.

Evaluate how you might increase your tendency to (1) run toward the fire, (2) display a version of integrity that aligns actions with utterance, and (3) demonstrate dogged persistence.

“Great managers are not philosophers, entertainers, doers, or artists. They are engineers. They see their organizations as machines and work assiduously to maintain and improve them. They create process-flow diagrams to show how the machine works and evaluate its design.

Next to knowing one’s core values, the most important attribute an entrepreneurial leader can possess is a predictable, reliable, and intentional personal operating system.

And like a programmer, you can rewrite and repair your own operating system so that it represents your best self and makes you the predictable, reliable leader that people will want to follow.

“Deliberate actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, made into habits; [and] compounded together, added up over time yield excellence.”

“I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday”—and that in recognizing this, they realize that if they make different choices today, they will be different people tomorrow.

As a young leader, when I undertook an effort to rewrite my operating system, I began with three mantras—sometimes repeating them several times a day in an effort consciously to override my natural instincts: It’s not about me. I am not my emotions. I have all I need.

Everyone’s attempts at self-correction will be different. The point is to identify what needs fixing and begin to fix it.

Any attempt to repair or improve one’s own operating system must begin with an honest appraisal of flaws, imperfections, and negative tendencies.

When a team is made up of fewer than a half-dozen people, a new leader’s job may be simply to serve as domain expert with assistants to carry some of the load. In this role, the fledgling leader may work as a sort of supercharged performer, an enhanced doer, an incipient manager—but not yet a full-fledged leader.

Initially, the transition from producer to manager is about dealing with increased complexity—about keeping more balls in the air, about taking responsibility for the work of others, about intervening with discretion, and about managing tasks that are part of a strategic whole.

We become what we think about. Decide what you want to be, design your personal brand, and repair the operating system you inherited.

Realize you will need different operating systems for different tasks as you move from manager to leader. Be flexible and patient with yourself as you try on different lenses.

“We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for a brand called You.”

the strongest personal brands are built differently, via one-to-one, in-real-life interaction—that is, the things we do with and for each other. We build our brands a conversation at a time, an action at a time, and a decision at a time.

aim for a quieter and more authentic consistency, reliability, and generosity.

Choose the five attributes you would like to have associated with your personal brand. Behave in ways that allow others to see these qualities in you.