Seven Reasons Why You Need to Be an Entrepreneurial Leader
by Lyndon Rego | Director, Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at ALU
In a conversation a while back, I was challenged by an acquaintance about the need for leadership development for all students. Embedded in the question was the idea that leadership is about leaders and followers. And not everyone is cut out to be a leader.
At ALU, we focus on developing entrepreneurial leaders. Here too, one might offer that an entrepreneur is a rare breed of person who is willing to take risks to build something valuable from the ground up. Not everyone, goes the argument, is cut out to be an entrepreneur or a leader. At ALU, we beg to differ. Here’s seven reasons why it is important to develop all young people as entrepreneurial leaders.
1. Learning 21st-Century Skills
There is a lot of global data about how educational institutions are not preparing young people with the capabilities that the job market wants. Now, in the age of unlimited access to information, it is less important that we master the memorisation of facts than hone our ability to process information, make decisions, and act in collaborative ways. Entrepreneurial leadership helps us make sense of ambiguity and solve problems with others. It is what the world of work wants.
2. Knowing Your Purpose
In a world of continual change and many choices, opportunities abound and yet nothing is easy or certain. Having a personal mission is a means to set a course and navigate one’s own life journey with courage and conviction. Without this, we are left to be carried by the current of chance and flung into the vortex of circumstance. Deep inner work to know who you are, what you want to do with your life, and how to make that real is the work of entrepreneurial leadership.
3. Developing Learning Agility
With the unrelenting pace of change as we launch into the highly-disruptive “fourth industrial revolution,” there is a continual need to learn and grow. A clear purpose provides direction, but we also constantly need to navigate a changing terrain to stay on track. The things we know and are able to do today are not necessarily the things we will need tomorrow. Our ability to learn quickly is key. Entrepreneurism is centered around the readiness to learn in the face of uncertainty.
4. Strengthening Emotional Intelligence / Social Emotional Skills
Emotional intelligence is grounded in self-awareness and empathy. It is key to a happy and collaborative existence and a capability that matters for all. Because we can do little alone, social and emotional skills are essential to engage ourselves and others in positive and productive ways. This is especially true in the machine age. Our true and unique value lies in our own humanity rather than our ability to out-think or out-work machines.
5. Building Resilience
Change entails struggle, failure, and learning. We need to take challenge in stride in order to get far. Resilience is a critical capability for entrepreneurs who fail and get back up, time after time, sharpening their approach and learning along the way. The future requires that we all grow this capability.
6. Driving Innovation
Innovation is no longer a specialized skillset needed by a few individuals working in creative spaces. As the world changes, we must all continually reinvent ourselves and our solutions. The art of innovation provides us with tools to turn problems into solutions, challenges into opportunities, and disruption into advantage, While innovators build solutions, entrepreneurial leaders move ideas into action, turning the sparks of insight into bold new approaches and solutions that transform the world.
7. Finding Happiness
An ultimate human goal is to be happy. Yet, this is hardly automatic. We are biologically wired to be fearful, angry, sad, and anxious when things don’t go the way we expect. We are the most unhappy when we lack meaning in our lives. The road to happiness lies in being able to live our purpose, nurture caring relationships, and make a difference in the lives of others. Entrepreneurial leaders are guided by purpose and motivated by a mission. Rather than wait for life to lead them, they choose to proactively lead a life that is meaningful.
Howard Thurman put it this way: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
The future calls for us all to become entrepreneurial leaders. We all need to lead, we all need to create, but we must each find our own way. Education has a role in preparing young people for the journey ahead — to help us find what makes us come alive and live our purpose. And that is what we do with entrepreneurial leadership at ALU.
