Leadership & Entrepreneurship
01.
The Entrepreneurial
Leadership
I am a supporter of the definition of entrepreneur that goes beyond the definition of "businessman", or someone focused on opening a company solely to make profits.
I'd rather see the entrepreneur as someone who questions the status quo and is nonconformist with the current context because he is capable of seeing a better way to make things work.
And, with a practical bias and ability to execute, generates a positive impact on society and growth opportunities for those around through a business that is sustainable.
In this perspective, the business existence is just the way to make things happen. It's the means to change the world, not an end in itself.
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Leadership, on the other hand, factors the people variable into the definition above. It also does not necessarily include business context. Beyond seeing and communicating a vision, it's mainly mobilizing people in favor of that objective, knowing how to balance the characteristics of each individual, and supporting them during the process of materializing that vision.
Furthermore, leadership is a set of behaviors, or, better said, being an example. As demonstrated in my graduation thesis "Strategies for Developing Organizational Culture to Obtain Sustainable Competitive Advantage", leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin, and the main factor that influences a given culture is the behavior of its leaders.​
In a world in which billions of people are working hard only to pay their bills, there are few who have the financial, time, intellectual, and social resources necessary to bring about the changes we need to build a better world.
During ENEJ 17 - Brazilian National Meeting of Junior Entrepreneurs in 2017, I was caught by the phrase "If not us, who? If not now, when?" which still echoes in my head 6 years after the event.
Although I still need to work to pay my bills, I do feel like I'm one of the lucky people who have not only the opportunity but perhaps the moral duty to contribute to this change.
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In this section, I tell you more about my leadership experiences and how I have sought to develop myself to become an entrepreneurial leader, whether as an intrapreneur, aiming to start my own business in the future, or just by exercising my citizen duties.
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A tip I leave for my readers is the book Leadership, by Daniel Goleman (the same author of the famous Emotional Intelligence). It's a super short but effective and science-based read.
In short, the book is a response to the various texts of dubious quality that we find on the internet about "How to be a good leader" or "What is the profile of a good leader", as its central thesis is that there are several styles of leadership, such as "Authoritarian Leadership" and "Democratic Leadership", and each type of leadership is best suited to a situation.
Therefore, a great leader is one who masters these different styles and can easily switch gears between them during day-to-day life.
Years after reading the book for the first time, I heard sort of the same advice from a former McKinsey partner in a 1-1 feedback session.
He told me that sometimes, even though he wasn't angry with someone, he needed to appear angry in order to convey the seriousness of a situation. Likewise, at times he was extremely angry, but he had to remain calm, as the context required it.
Very often, he would go from a meeting in which he needed to embody a completely different behavior, almost like an actor, playing different roles while presenting to a large internal audience, then becoming emphatical in a conversation with an employee who is upset, demanding results from a team that could be delivering more, reacting to demands from a partner, among others.
No wonder, this person held the position of CEO of a multinational company.
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Being resourceful in this sense is a key skill for leaders and entrepreneurs alike and that's what we will be exploring further in the next chapters of this section.