Entrepreneurial leaders begin with an intuitive leadership style. In the early stages of your company, you ride the Start-up wave, put out fires and make decisions on the fly. In this Start-up phase, your business is still new enough, and generally small enough, for you to manage all its needs on a day-to-day basis and to improvise as needed. You know all the jobs to be done, make all the decisions, work from a plan that is more or less developing in your head as you go along, and make changes as opportunities present themselves.
In other words, you operate in a do-it-yourself mode. You are the Doer and the Decision Maker. But once the company begins to grow past this Start-up stage, you must alter your style from seat-of-the -pants, intuitive leadership to a more deliberate approach: growth by design. Yet as your company reaches new stages of growth and you shift roles, you need to retain the best of your entrepreneurial characteristics and lead with consistent goals. That's one tall order, calling on you to continually accomplish these tasks:
- Develop markets, products/services, customers and strategies to win.
- Develop internal processes for planning, management and work flow, as well as the infrastructure to sustain expansion and growth.
- Develop teams and people to perform the tasks that produce exceptional results.
- Develop the cultural environment so that it aligns and motivates those teams and people to work together as effectively as possible.
- Finally, and perhaps most difficult, monitor the evolution of your company and change your leadership style to match its current stage of growth.
None of these tasks will be easy. You will face challenging personal transitions. But since the ability to change grows with learning, constant learning is the most critical behavior you need to develop.
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