Professionalize Entrepreneurial Ventures by First Knowing One’s Self

How many times have we been a customer or partner to a business in which everything pointed back to the owner? When this is the case, personal preferences and whims, self-employment aspirations, and work ethic of the founder can influence the ability to react to market changes and customer needs. While we don’t want to lose the individualism and quirkiness that made the business special in the first place, a lack of professionalism limits how far the venture will go.

The degree to which entrepreneurs are able to professionalize their businesses typically predicts their level of growth and success. For entrepreneurs, understanding how they approach new and growing ventures and the dominant perspective from which they lead their organization is invaluable. It not only helps them discover and develop their strengths, but also alerts them to some potential blind spots.

Great entrepreneurs and leaders start their journey from the inside and work their way out to results. They begin to understand themselves, lean on their strengths, and mitigate the risks associated with their weaknesses by surrounding themselves with complementary talent.

The first step toward professionalization is self-leadership — the process of influencing one’s self. It’s the first critical step in leading others. Effective self-leadership practices have a positive influence on creativity, innovation, ethics, job satisfaction, and — as expected — individual leadership performance, external leadership, and team performance.

The best leaders get serious about discovering what makes them think and behave in certain ways. It involves learning how they affect other people and bettering themselves through training and energy management. Using multiple tools and a personal coach will help in pursuing this in an authentic and productive way.

One assessment that measures thinking, creativity, innovation, and problem-solving styles is the Basadur Profile. It’s a versatile and simple four-quadrant model. The assessment is easy to take, its graphic results are simple to understand, and the website is user-friendly. The Basadur Profile helps individuals and teams better understand their preferences for various stages of the creative process.

The vertical axis measures how one prefers to gain information (by experiencing or detached, abstract thinking), while the horizontal axis measures what one prefers to do with that information (evaluate/ judge or further ideate).

The Basadur Profile’s four styles are Generator, Conceptualizer, Optimizer, and Implementer. Teams can be plotted into the four quadrants. Characteristics associated with the profile’s four styles include:

• Generators – This style is comfortable with ambiguity and loves to be around people and come up with new ideas.
• Conceptualizers – These are the big-picture thinkers who love ideas and putting concepts together into a plan or strategy.
• Optimizers – This leader focuses on facts, rules, systems, and processes to evaluate activities.
• Implementers – These are the “get it done” types who prefer to be in the middle of the action and execute.

Generators and conceptualizers are much more likely to launch a new venture and be confident about being an entrepreneur in general. This likely is because finding problems and coming up with ideas on how to solve these problems don’t always come easy and generators and conceptualizers are much more comfortable with those activities.

However, because new ventures have a high failure rate, the odds of success increase dramatically with a founding team that exhibits complementary styles in the innovative process. This means that attracting more optimizers and implementers to a new venture increases the odds of success.

If you’re an idea person and dreamer like most entrepreneurs are, it’s important to know your predisposition in the innovative process, including in the pre- or early-startup phases. You may be missing team members with evaluative and execution skills that optimizers and implementers bring to the front-end of the entrepreneurial process.

Because any venture is the sum of its people, the founding team must be built with functionality in mind. Is the team cognitively diverse enough to fulfill all the needed roles?

Leaders who understand their functional preferences and how their creative lens affects their leadership of others have an advantage in the marketplace. When they understand how they naturally think, feel, and behave, they know what motivates them and what corresponding behaviors are needed to generate the greatest results and life fulfillment for themselves and others.

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