Entrepreneurship and Leadership

Taxonomy of Leadership

By serving and supporting employees, you can create a positive and productive business environment. As a business owner, your leadership style plays a significant role in the success of your business and your employees’ perceptions of the business. By satisfying employees through listening to their needs, adapting to their situations, creating a positive exchange, and building trust, you will have the support needed to create and innovate within your business which is helpful in motivating employees and generating positive customer relationships.

Entrepreneurship

The elements of entrepreneurship include an appetite for risk and the ability to spot opportunities. The propensity to take financial and career oriented risks are often attributed to entrepreneurs. However, while entrepreneurs generally take risk involving business opportunities, they must also be innovators and willing to continually take risks that challenge the status quo.

As a business owner, you must be both an entrepreneur and an innovator to remain relevant within your industry. An innovative entrepreneur is more likely to challenge assumptions due to what is known as creative intelligence which enables discovery by engaging both sides of the brain. While your entrepreneur side may know what decisions need to be made, the innovator in you understands how to make them work for a purpose. If you don’t produce or motivate innovation within your business, you will eventually fall prey to businesses that do.

Management

Managing your business effectively involves more than meaning well and supporting popular causes. The functions of being a manager are planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. As a manager, your role is to cope with complexity and bring a degree of order and consistency to the business at hand. Exhibiting leadership traits means not only influencing others but also doing so in a manner that enables your business to attain its goals.

Leadership and management are two distinctive, yet complementary, systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristics, and both are necessary for success in an increasingly complex and volatile business environment. Of course, not everyone can be good at both leading and managing. Some people have the capacity to become excellent managers, but not strong leaders. Others have great leadership potential but have great difficulty becoming strong managers.