Entrepreneur Leaders Drive The Success Of An Enterprise Entrepreneur must also, in fact, be a leader, especially, if he expects investors & employees to come on board
By Rohit Gera
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The entrepreneurial journey can be extremely exciting. It can, however, very quickly become extremely daunting if one isn't prepared for the issues that come along with this journey. Congratulations, if you have decided to become an entrepreneur and brace yourself for a roller coaster ride.
It is not possible to have entrepreneurship without leadership. The fundamental driver of entrepreneurship is the exploitation of an opportunity in the marketplace that is seen by the entrepreneur.
Team Building
Once the seed of the idea starts to germinate, the entrepreneur must build his team and take people along with him on his journey to make his vision a reality. This automatically means that the entrepreneur must also, in fact, be a leader, especially, if he expects investors & employees to come on board. They have to be willing to allow the entrepreneur to lead them to their respective goals.
It, therefore, comes down to the type of skills the entrepreneur leader requires to make his dream a reality. Creating a compelling vision of the future and inspiring people to engage in a key skill the entrepreneur leader must have. What is that greater purpose that teams are working towards achieving, providing this clarity often decides whether or not an entrepreneur leader is able to build an engaged team? Needless to say, engaged teams are invaluable assets and a key success factor for your venture.
Implimentation of Your Thoughts
You could be a visionary and have some fabulous ideas but that is only the beginning. It is critical that you are able to create an implementation plan and put in place an operational plan to make sure that your path-breaking ideas actually reach the end customer and deliver what they are supposed to.
The first criteria, therefore, is to ensure that your organizational setup creates enough operational capability so that your products or services are delivered well to your end customer. An often overlooked area is the need to build a team with the right skills, competencies and mindset for your business. Taking the time to recruit and build a team that is not just energized but shares your passion for the business and their work, is important to give your business the thrust it needs.
Growth
Also, an essential as your team starts to grow, is putting in place processes. Initially, with a small team, it's very easy as you typically work out of a small workspace. Everybody is in touch with each other all the time. As your organization grows it is important to be able to send your message down the line to staff who don't work in close proximity to you. Processes, therefore, well defined and put in place certainly help when new employees come on board.
As you ramp up your organization and see rapid growth in certain areas, you will also find that employees will move on to other organizations for better opportunities. Having processes defined and well documented will certainly help the new employees get on board and get productive at the earliest and also ensure that work in progress does not leave through the door with the outgoing employee.
Stuctured Programme
As your business and organization begin to mature you will also need to put in place structured programs to help teams upgrade and upskill to keep pace with the evolving business environment that you operate in. You will need to focus on capability building by way of training interventions to equip your teams with hard and soft skills that they need, to perform well in their roles.
Entrepreneurship is a journey with exciting learning opportunities, sometimes marked by more failures than successes. Face it with the courage, resilience and assertiveness of a leader and it will be joyous exploration.