FOR THE ENTREPRENEURIAL ECOSYSTEM

The Psychological Science of Startups

What is high-performance?

When people talk about startups they often focus on the lead founder as “the” entrepreneur. This is a misconception. The resources required to grow a startup can quickly exceed a single founder’s capabilities. If a startup wants to scale and grow, even experienced, motivated, and visionary founders will be at risk of failure without a high-performing team.

Therefore, understanding the success of entrepreneurial ventures means not only understanding the lead founder, but more crucially, understanding the founding team (as a collective) and how it performs.

What is high-performance entrepreneurship?

Before you can expect your team to perform, you need to know how to describe high-performance. Entrepreneurship is defined as a process that involves a team aiming to create something novel — a new product or repurpose an old product. This process is complex and constantly evolving — high-performance, therefore, can be difficult to define. The good news is that we did all of the hard work for you.

Blackhawke conducted a strategic work analysis, which is a scientific process of identifying the key tasks, responsibilities, and performance behaviors (i.e., actions people take to contribute to the organization’s goals). As part of this process we meta-analyzed over 1,000 scientific studies, synthesizing findings from a century of research. To ensure the scientific understanding of entrepreneurship aligned with the practice of entrepreneurship, we also analyzed non-academic and popular press sources (e.g., books, blogs, podcasts, magazine articles).

We then codified the findings from the work analysis and organized them into eight behavioral performance categories. We called these categories the Eight Pillars of Entrepreneurship. We then used the framework with investors, entrepreneurs, and startup development organizations to help evaluate and increase startup performance. And we never stopped researching and innovating…

The New and Improved Pillar Framework

Based on the feedback we gathered from users, we enhanced the categories by organizing them according to four cornerstones of performance: cognition, action, relational, and motivational. We also learned that some categories were too broad, and therefore we split them apart.

To be clear, our initial findings still hold true, we simply identified a more useful way to present the categories by listening to you all. We are proud to introduce our new, and enhanced categorization:

The 12 Pillars of Entrepreneurship.

How you can use The 12 Pillars of Entrepreneurship

The 12 Pillar framework defines the key areas you should track and monitor as an entrepreneurial leader and in your entrepreneurial team. Awareness of your pillar assets and pillar assets of team members can help you identify gaps to build a well-rounded team. It also provides insight into the needed skills and knowledge for developing and improving entrepreneurial leadership and team performance. We’ve put together a 1-page PDF document of the 12 Pillars for you to download.

For investors, it can be used in the due diligence process to evaluate assets and liabilities of a startup’s human capital, to monitor the performance of your portfolio companies, or to develop and grow human capital in your portfolio companies.

Over the next few months, we will help you improve your team performance by:

• Diving deeply into each of the 12 Pillars
• Explaining how the psychological makeup of your team enables or hinders performance in each pillar
• Providing real-world examples of high-performance in each pillar
• Recommending ways to improve your teams’ performance in each pillar
• Sharing ways to integrate the 12 pillars into your human capital strategy
• Providing guidance for strategic performance management
• And more!

Stay tuned for some stimulating blogs from our team!

Have Questions or Need Advice?

At Blackhawke, we have several I-O psychologists with expertise in entrepreneurship performance and performance management. Feel free to schedule a 15-minute consultation; we’d be happy to provide some advice or answer questions, no strings attached!

About Blackhawke Behavior Science

Want to learn more about building a strong entrepreneurial team and healthy organizational culture? Visit Blackhawke’s Medium publication, From I-O to IPO, or www.blackhawke.io and get social with us on Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, or Twitter!