AT THE CORE OF ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP IS AN INDIVIDUal’s deep understanding of him- or herself, the context in which he or she is operating, and his or her network of relationships. Returning to the Clorox Green Works example discussed in the introduction, the success of the venture was dependent on a few entrepreneurial leaders’ being deeply connected to their values regarding the environment and the safety of families. These leaders’ passion to follow their values and put them into practice brought Green Works to market. Similarly, Robert Chatwani’s passion for supporting artisans in developing countries was fundamental to the founding of WorldofGood.com (see chapter 4). Focusing on their own passions, these entrepreneurial leaders created teams who shared their vision for bringing a social and economic opportunity to fruition.
Beyond understanding themselves, these entrepreneurial leaders were also successful because they were aware of and responsive to the context in which they were operating. In the case of Green Works, the entrepreneurial leaders developed insight into why a certain population was interested in natural cleaning products. By connecting to the values and not the demographics of this group, they opened up a new market for Clorox and for the natural-products industry as a whole. Similarly, Chatwani’s interactions with the local artisans in India helped him understand the needs of this community. His knowledge of eBay and its values also enabled him to garner internal support for WorldofGood.com by showing how the opportunity connected to eBay’s culture.
Finally, these entrepreneurial leaders did not bring about these changes alone. They engaged others who co-created these opportunities. In the case of Clorox, the corporate marketing group, the new Clorox CEO, and the Sierra Club brought Green Works to market together. In Chatwani’s case, he motivated co-creators inside eBay and connected with a critical outside partner, Priya Haji. For both sets of entrepreneurial leaders, these connections arose because they had passion for their ideas and they used experiments to build momentum for these initiatives. Network connections transformed how both of these innovative ideas developed.
In this chapter we explore how to teach entrepreneurial leaders to identify and engage their awareness of their passions, values, and skills. We focus on how budding entrepreneurial leaders can learn from and leverage personal and professional self-awareness.
These examples indicate that the new entrepreneurial leaders need an extraordinarily strong and realistic understanding of who they are. They must understand their own identities in terms of their values, drives, and background and must be honest and open about their capabilities and limitations. This understanding provides the basis for their ability to build social and economic opportunity.
Consider, for example, John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, the largest networking communications firm in the world. Chambers has dyslexia, a condition characterized by difficulty reading written words and text-based communications. When he was growing up, the condition led him to appreciate the world of learning and human communication that existed outside of books. Chambers openly draws on this experience as he encourages employees to experiment and grow Cisco’s video and web conferencing business, which aims to make virtual face-to-face meetings a more engaging alternative to sending long e-mails.
Similarly, Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric (GE), one of the most admired global corporations and known for its leadership, has newly refocused on what he describes as becoming “self-reflective on steroids.” Immelt views his approach, and the one he hopes other leaders at GE will adopt, as a means to promote greater innovation to drive GE’s performance (Brady 2010). While most entrepreneurial leaders do not have the high-profile roles of Chambers and Immelt, each has unique strengths and challenges as well as passions, values, and skills that he or she needs to understand and engage to drive opportunities.
Unfortunately, too many leaders have not done the work to know who they are and what they want. Worse yet, some even discount the inner voice that tries to inform them about their passions, strengths, and limitations. They have a poor understanding of their current strengths and weaknesses and have not given much thought to how to identify and improve on the critical competencies required to be successful in their current or desired careers. Even if they have done some self-reflection about their goals and abilities, few leaders understand how to engage their passion and goals to drive new social and economic opportunity. Thus to develop entrepreneurial leaders, management educators must help them assess their values, abilities, and interests. We need to educate these future leaders in how to improve their skills and competencies in ways that will enable them to create value for themselves and their organizations.
When individuals decide to enroll in business school or participate in a leadership development program, they are often looking to discover new ways of thinking, build new networks, and expand their horizons. Sadly, this is not the reality of what most individuals experience when they take a management development course and particularly when they enter an MBA program.
Both managers and academics have argued that MBA programs have become divorced from the realities of the workplace, disconnected from working students’ day-to-day organizational experiences, and overly technical, teaching students concepts rather than introducing them to new ways of thinking and new insights to inform their leadership approach (Bennis and O’Toole 2005; Mintzberg 2004; Rubin and Dierdorff 2009). Organizations have complained that MBA graduates often emerge with unrealistic expectations of their self-worth and have not acquired the self-awareness and the social skills to quickly become effective leaders (Feldman 2005).
In essence most MBA students have not developed self-awareness of their goals and abilities in the context of their existing or future organizations. As such they are unprepared to help others build their self-awareness. What ultimately makes MBA graduates successful entrepreneurial leaders is their ability to not only proactively manage their own careers but also help develop the careers of others. Few MBA programs provide students with training and practice in talent development, particularly on how to prepare direct reports, identify personal career goals, assess and improve critical competencies, and provide coaching and support. This gap represents a largely untapped opportunity for management educators and leadership development professionals.
The context of talent and career management provides the perfect backdrop for introducing students to the importance of self-awareness and showing them the value that comes from a deep understanding of oneself. Against this backdrop we have developed an innovative course—Managerial Assessment and Development (MAD)*—which teaches future entrepreneurial leaders how to be more self-reflective and how to use that knowledge to guide their careers. The MAD course has the following objectives for students:
Develop self-awareness by articulating their aspirations and gaining systematic insight into their strengths and weaknesses in relation to those aspirations
Take ownership of their professional futures through a stepwise curriculum that leads to an individual development plan
Take action to negotiate next steps with key stakeholders in their workplaces
Learn to facilitate these activities with their direct reports
The learning experience in the MAD course deepens participants’ ability to place themselves in context, whether for their own professional development or for working with and through others. This is particularly important in today’s economic climate, where leaders are more likely to have protean careers that are self-determined and follow non-traditional paths (Hall 2002). This learning can be seen in the following quote:
The MAD class taught me that I need to be challenging myself in a different way than I currently am in my role right now…. Furthermore, by implementing my development plan, I had one of the best reviews I have had yet. My manager was totally amazed that I was able to implement her direct feedback so effectively from her last review. I knew that getting my MBA would help me grow my career in the long term but never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that coming to business school would help my career grow in the short term!
—Account executive, Internet portal company
As this feedback suggests, the MAD course helps leaders learn to explore talent management within their own careers and organizations. For organizations, sustainable competitive advantage frequently depends on the ability to innovatively select and deploy talent (Pfeffer 1998). Understanding how to attract, develop, and retain talented individuals is a strategic imperative for performance excellence, and understanding how to do this specifically with entrepreneurial leaders is all the more complicated. Furthermore, as demographic shifts continue in the United States and many other developed economies, the significance of talent management increases.
At the start of the twenty-first century, McKinsey and Co. reported on the “war for talent” and an updated report a decade later reiterated the importance of paying attention to the impacts that demographic changes have on human capital in organizations (Guthridge, Komm, and Lawson 2008; Michaels, Handfield-Jones, and Axelrod 2001). As populations age and become more diverse, shifting demographics also represent a new challenge for organizations (Guthridge, Komm, and Lawson 2008; Strack, Baier, and Fahlander 2008). These trends influence the selection, retention, and development processes in organizations and broaden the concept of fit. Entrepreneurial leaders will achieve great results only if they are able to carefully marshal and develop talent—both their own and that of their employees (Buckingham and Coffman 1999).
The basic concepts of talent management underlie the best practices of effective career management. For example, a fundamental concept underlying talent management is that of the fit between an individual’s competencies and the role that he or she plays. Career development requires that one is aware of one’s career and personal identity (Hall 2002), of the drivers that motivate the individual (Schein 1978, 2006), and of the relationship between oneself and one’s context (Holland 1958). Developing self-awareness and the various aspects of emotional intelligence is a competency for professional success and leadership (Goleman 1995, 2000).
Developing talent also means that entrepreneurial leaders understand the issue of competency development and are capable of developing their own competencies and those of the individuals around them. Competency development, which helps the self adjust to a changing context, occurs largely through on-the-job learning and requires that employees have a chance to take on challenges, assess their progress in meeting those challenges, and have access to learning supports such as coaching, training, and continuing education (McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison 1988; Van Velsor and McCauley 2004).
By connecting competencies to the needs of the organization, entrepreneurial leaders are able to connect and build on employees’ developmental interests, provide them with challenging work, and help them reflect on their efforts (Hunt and Weintraub [2002] 2010). All of this also requires self-awareness on the part of the employees, an awareness that can grow especially through dialogue with a manager who is self-aware. Talent management at its best is a negotiated outcome between two parties, both of whom understand what they want and need.
For future entrepreneurial leaders, career and talent management provide the ideal conditions to examine who they are in terms of their skills, values, and drives and how this connects to their careers and their life work. While entrepreneurial leaders are focused on developing their organizations and their teams, they are also driven by their desire to develop their own careers in a way that connects to their passions. Without this connection they are not likely to be successful. The MAD course facilitates the development of this critical connection.
In our design of the MAD course, conceptual material regarding talent management is linked to a series of self-assessment and analysis exercises that lead to the creation of an individual development plan. In this process students focus on the following questions:
Where and how should they invest their career energy?
What do they have to invest (talent, values, competencies, and motivation)?
What do they want in return for that investment (career and life aspirations)?
How can they as managers maximize the effectiveness of the talent their organizations need to achieve business goals?
What do they know about how their team members and colleagues would answer the first three questions, and how might that change the way they work with them or provide opportunities to them?
By focusing on these questions, participants learn to engage creation logic as they devise action experiments to assess and build their own personal talent, values, and drives and support others with the same approach.
The MAD course is taught in the context of our blended-learning MBA program designed for professionals with 15 years of experience. As a blended-learning program, the course is delivered primarily online. Program participants meet in person only once, for a day-long session during the fifth week of the seven-week course. While many educators have questioned the use of distance learning to teach interpersonal concepts, we have found that this format provides new opportunities for students, as it enables them to wrestle with questions regarding their personal development in ways that better fit their individual learning styles and time frames.
Next we discuss in more detail the four central components of the course design: assessment, feedback and coaching, the development plan, and personal reflection. We conclude with a discussion of how these components work together to enhance participants’ self-awareness and creation-oriented approach to career and talent management.
The foundation of the MAD course is a diverse set of self-assessment activities. Students are required to complete three different assessments:
The DISC Inventory, which provides insight regarding behavioral style tendencies (Target Training International, n.d.)
The Career Anchors Self-Assessment, which provides insight into the motivations that drive career choices and satisfaction (Schein 2006)
A Multi-Rater Survey (360-degree) that we have developed specifically for this program
Reading assignments and course discussion prompt students to assess their learning style (Kolb 1976), the structure of their social networks, and the strength of their networks and networking skills (Bolt 2005; Ibarra and Hunter 2007).
As the course progresses, we introduce new assessment data, and students make sense of its meaning for themselves through small- and large-group discussions and personal reflection. We remind students that no data or assessment tool is “the last word” on who they are. Rather students must interpret the array of data they receive to develop their self-awareness and establish their direction. Thus students are taught to engage a creation approach to building their careers.
One of the innovative instruments that students use in this self-assessment process is the Multi-Rater Survey. The strength of this instrument is that it provides feedback on five competencies that are central to entrepreneurial leadership:
Creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship
Leadership, coaching, teamwork, and change management
Decision-making and problem solving
Business acumen
Ethics, moral values, and law
These competencies connect to cognitive ambidexterity, SEERS, and self- and social awareness.
Course participants invite at least 10 individuals to participate in an anonymous online survey. We encourage students to seek feedback that can help them better understand their effectiveness in practice, not just in the classroom. We also encourage them to invite feedback from diverse work colleagues, who are likely to have different perspectives on their skills.
Even the process of inviting individuals to participate in the survey helps develop students’ self- and social awareness because they are coached in how to invite their raters to participate, by explaining that the raters’ feedback would be valuable to their learning. By understanding issues of reciprocity, the process of soliciting raters’ feedback helps students develop their networking skills and encourages them to consider their raters as potential partners in their ongoing development. The effectiveness of this feedback is captured in one student’s comment:
The feedback was much more consistent and actionable than I had anticipated. This was my first time doing a 360, and the feedback was quite a bit more useful than manager assessments that I have received in the past. The 360 got into the details; there was a very consistent theme of my not expressing my opinions in meetings early on … Those stakeholders I will be keeping in mind are the same ones who filled out the 360, so they will certainly be a good sounding board for whether or not I am working toward improving this area of my work life.
—Vice president, investment management firm
An important component of the MAD course is the notion that self-awareness and professional development do not just happen. Building this insight requires conscious effort and proactive negotiation with one’s work context. Participants are taught to apply a creation approach to proactively drive their development. They also learn the importance of soliciting feedback through their network. This feedback enables them to evolve from not knowing what they don’t know, to knowing they need to improve, to perhaps even becoming expert at a particular competency.
If talent is indeed a pattern of attitudes, behaviors, and skills performed at excellence (Buckingham and Coffman 1999), entrepreneurial leaders need to create a means for gaining feedback on how they are doing so that they can uncover and develop their talents.
In teaching participants to develop their self-awareness, the MAD course also shows them how to provide feedback to help others develop their self-awareness. Students learn the importance of separating observations from inference. This involves teaching them to suspend judgment and instead ask questions to gain clarification on how to interpret what has been observed. While this skill is particularly valuable in building social skills, it is also essential for entrepreneurial leaders to use when assessing and evaluating opportunities.
The final skill students learn in this phase is the concept of what it means to be a coaching manager and how this connects to entrepreneurial leadership. Through conceptual readings on the coaching manager (Hunt and Weintraub 2002, 2010), face-to-face faculty instruction, and a practice exercise aimed at reinforcing active listening and open-ended questioning, participants hone their coaching skills.
Later in the course when the 360-degree feedback reports are returned, students test their coaching skills by working in peer learning partnerships to help their counterparts interpret their assessment reports. The peer learning partnerships continue for the entire course, and participants say that this experience helps them make sense of the self-assessment process and prepares them for coaching others in the workplace.
The culmination of the course, and of developing participants’ self-awareness and creation-based approach to career management, is the individual development plan. Creating the development plan requires students to reflect on the assessment results and feedback in the context of their professional aspirations. Given their aspirations, they are also asked to identify two to three competency-based development goals they need to make progress on their professional aspirations. This process of reflection and awareness of aspirations and competency-based development goals can be personally challenging to many participants. This exercise is often the first time that students have been forced to be intentional about understanding themselves and how this connects to their careers. As such they often need support from peer learning partners and faculty to do this self-exploration work honestly and thoughtfully.
In crafting their development plans, we encourage students to leverage the frame of challenge, assessment, and support—a concept they are introduced to early in the course (Van Velsor and McCauley 2004). While self-assessment in and of itself is valuable, entrepreneurial leaders gain true insight when self-assessment is connected with action. Thus as participants craft their development plans, we remind them that they will need to identify an opportunity that presents a challenge for their targeted developmental learning, specify how they will assess their learning along the way, and identify the resources or people available to provide support. Here again we remind students of the importance of connecting with other people when they apply this creation-oriented approach to their professional lives.
During the development plan creation phase, participants also learn to consider feasibility. They are asked to reflect on the political context of their proposed action so that they can create win-win opportunities, where moving toward their developmental goals and professional aspirations will benefit their organizations as well as themselves. If students can learn to frame their career aspirations in this way, they will have a better chance of gaining the opportunities, resources, and support they desire to enact their learning agendas and advance their career interests.
The final element of the development plan process involves engaging in a stakeholder conversation to “reality test” one’s thinking. Participants identify a key stakeholder who has a vested interest in their development. In the final week of the course, students are required to discuss their development plan with this stakeholder. Reflecting on this conversation becomes the final input to their development plan as well as the topic of their final personal reflection blog entry. Participants learn that it is possible to have these conversations about self and career with key stakeholders. The following comment illustrates this point:
I have to say that I was very pleasantly surprised with the meeting. She [the manager] really got into it and I ended up sharing a great deal more than I had planned. She also shared pretty openly about her own experiences. She was very supportive and committed to champion some of the opportunities I had outlined as well as suggested several which made their way into my final plan.
Not only did we learn more about each other and our respective strengths and weaknesses but I think that seeing the strategic way I was approaching my career and tying it back to the organization’s needs also increased her respect for me.
—Product marketing director, software firm
Overall, for participants these conversations reinforce the need for self-awareness and to use this understanding to take ownership of their own career opportunities.
A key theme that runs through the MAD course is the importance of personal reflection to one’s career and professional development as well as to one’s development as an entrepreneurial leader. Participants learn that personal reflection is the foundational competency for developing deep self-awareness and for fueling a creation-oriented approach.
Personal self-reflection is developed in the course through the use of a blog. Every other week, students must respond to specific prompts that reference the week’s work and ask for a reflection on its meaning to them. The faculty review these private blogs and provide students with feedback, questions, and insights. The personal self-reflection blog is instrumental in getting participants in the habit of making connections among different aspects of their professional lives as well as connecting their passions and interests to their careers. Faculty responses push students to reflect further or consider other possibilities.
The final reflection blog asks participants to reflect not only on the value of their stakeholder conversation for their own development but also on what they have taken away regarding how they will promote development for their direct reports. The dual focus of the course is brought full circle through the reflection blog. Students are reminded that as entrepreneurial leaders they must think about their responsibilities for development both as individuals and as talent managers.
Many participants incorporate the notion of perpetuating a weekly or biweekly reflection diary in their professional lives. Once they have gotten in the rhythm and have seen the power of personal refection, they don’t want to lose the opportunities that personal reflection provides. This is a skill that entrepreneurial leaders can tap into throughout their lives as they consider how they take action and whether it is based on an open and inclusive view of the world.
Since 2006 the Managerial Assessment and Development course has been taught more than 20 times to approximately 750 working professionals. The quotes in this chapter indicate how positively participants respond to the course. The personal self-reflections also indicate that participants use the learning experience to create new opportunities for themselves and to actively experiment with new approaches to talent management. Students’ course assessments indicate that the MAD course gives participants a new way to understand themselves and others, and it teaches skills that are central to a creation approach to career development.
Beyond this immediate impact, evidence from follow-up research also suggests that MAD makes a difference in the long-term professional development of entrepreneurial leaders. In one study 90 course participants were asked to write an ungraded, confidential reflection on their development plan 18 months after taking the course. Specifically, students were asked to revisit their MAD development plan from the prior year and consider three points:
The progress they had made
The way their plans might have changed because of their experiences
The challenges they were facing or expected to face
They were also asked to consider what had worked so far and what their next steps and commitments might be going forward. In recognition of their time, research participants received feedback from their professors on their self-reflections.
Our data analysis indicates that development planning is an invaluable action experiment that helps entrepreneurial leaders improve their understanding of their identities and their ability to use this understanding to achieve developmental learning outcomes and work toward their professional aspirations. Using content analysis, we examined students’ post-facto reflections in comparison with the development plans written 18 months earlier. Adapting Hall’s criteria for assessing career management activities and outcomes (2002), we coded the reflections with respect to career identity and work performance and then looked to understand how the development plans of those participants with strong identity and performance outcomes differed from those with weak identity and performance outcomes.
We found two distinct differences between the high-performance/high-identity and low-performance/low-identity groups. First, the high-performance/high-identity participants differed in the degree of ownership they displayed for their plans. These participants created development plans that exhibited strong evidence of insightful self-reflection, integrated use and personal interpretation of feedback and self-assessment data, and understood the connection between self-assessment and career goals. Second, high-performance/high-identity participants differed in the level of proactivity and intentionality demonstrated in their plans.
These results suggest that the MAD course has the potential to teach participants to develop the skills of ownership and intentionality—both of which are critical for entrepreneurial leadership. Ownership of one’s development is not easy and requires personal investment. Students need to be passionate enough that they are willing to engage in self-reflection based on available assessment data and feedback. To develop skills around ownership, students need to connect their self-reflection to their career goals and take responsibility for closing competency gaps to achieve those goals.
Students learn the skill of intentionality by placing specific learning goals within the context of self-assessment and career aspirations and then identifying an action agenda to achieve those goals. They also develop intentionality in exhibiting creation-oriented behavior as they proactively seek input and feedback toward the implementation of their action agenda.
For the faculty who teach the MAD course, the follow-up research has provided an impetus for an even stronger emphasis on developing participants’ competencies for self- and contextual awareness. It is important to reinforce to students that careers, like any other organizational endeavor, are often the result of a negotiated outcome, the implication being that entrepreneurial leaders must know what they desire and take action to further their interests.
The flip side of that message is that in their organizations these entrepreneurial leaders can drive social and economic opportunity by actively cultivating the talent of those they lead and manage. For both entrepreneurial leaders and the organizations in which they work, setting motivational goals, growing competencies through challenges, fitting individuals to roles, and providing both feedback and support along the way—all compose an essential recipe for strategic success. Engaging in and helping others with their self-awareness and development planning is an essential platform for entrepreneurial leadership in an increasingly ambiguous world in which careers are no longer linear but turbulent.
We began this chapter by discussing the apparent gap between the offerings of management education and the need to help students develop self-awareness of goals and abilities in the context of their existing or future organizations. Current criticisms of the relevance of management education, and of management development more generally, necessitate more than just the change of a single course.
Our experience suggests that the introduction of self-assessment and professional development work can be an important step for entrepreneurial leaders to take action to shape their careers and the talents of those they lead. Such opportunities, if they provide both the proper conceptual prompts and the mental and curricular space for reflection and planning, enable entrepreneurial leaders to develop the skills and the insight they need to shape social and economic opportunity that is connected to their personal passions and abilities.
Bennis, W., and J. O’Toole. 2005. “How Business Schools Lost Their Way.” Harvard Business Review 83 (5): 96–124.
Bolt, J. 2005. “Networking Smarter: What’s Your NQ?” Fast Company, October 10. http://www.fastcompany.com/resources/learning/bolt/101005.html.
Brady, D. 2010. “Can GE Still Manage?” Businessweek, April 15. http://www.businessweek.com/print/magazine/content/10_17/b4175026765571.htm.
Buckingham, M., and C. Coffman. 1999. First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Feldman, D. C. 2005. “The Food’s No Good and They Don’t Give Us Enough: Reflections on Mintzberg’s Critique of MBA Education.” Academy of Management Learning and Education 4 (2), 217–20.
Goleman, D. 1995. Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.
Goleman, D. 2000. “Leadership That Gets Results.” Harvard Business Review 78 (2): 78–90.
Guthridge, M., A. Komm, and E. Lawson. 2008. “Making Talent a Strategic Priority.” McKinsey Quarterly 1: 49–59.
Hall, D. T. 2002. Careers in and out of Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Holland, J. L. 1958. “A Personality Inventory Employing Occupational Titles.” Journal of Applied Psychology 42: 336–42.
Hunt, J., and J. Weintraub. (2002) 2010. The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Ibarra, H., and M. Hunter. 2007. “How Leaders Create and Use Networks.” Harvard Business Review 85 (1): 40–47.
Kolb, D. A. 1976. “Management and the Learning Process.” California Management Review 18 (3): 21–31.
McCall, M., M. Lombardo, and A. Morrison. 1988. The Lessons of Experience: How Successful Executives Develop on the Job. New York: Lexington Books.
Michaels, E., H. Handfield-Jones, and B. Axelrod. 2001. The War for Talent. Boston: Harvard Business School.
Mintzberg, H. 2004. Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
Pfeffer, J. 1998. The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First. Boston: Harvard Business School.
Rubin, R. S., and E. C. Dierdorff. 2009. “How Relevant Is the MBA? Assessing the Alignment of Required Curricula and Required Managerial Competencies.” Academy of Management Learning and Education 8 (2): 208–24.
Schein, E. H. 1978. Career Dynamics: Matching Individual and Organizational Needs. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Schein, E. H. 2006. Careers Anchors: Self-Assessment, 3rd ed. San Diego: Pfeiffer.
Strack, R., J. Baier, and A. Fahlander. 2008. “Managing Demographic Risk.” Harvard Business Review 86 (2): 119–28.
Target Training International. n.d. Accessed March 3, 2011, http://www.ttidisc.com.
Van Velsor, E., and C. McCauley. 2004. “Our View of Leadership Development,” in Handbook of Leadership Development, ed C. McCauley and E. Van Velsor. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.