9 Entrepreneur Lessons Not Taught in the Classroom

Entrepreneurship is all about leading – leading customers to a new product or service, leading a startup team to peak performance, and leading a new business to the market opportunity, while providing maximum return to stakeholders. Most entrepreneurs feel they have innate leadership talents, but struggle with how to nurture these abilities and measure their effectiveness.

Since I believe that a large part of leadership is personal confidence and initiative, I was drawn to a new leadership book by Robert S. Murray, “It’s Already Inside.” His focus and belief is that anyone can nurture their innate leadership abilities, to achieve business and life success. The key is learning from the life lessons of others, something you never get in classrooms.

He hits many of the key lessons that I have learned from my own experience, and feedback from great leaders, in both large businesses as well as startups. These include the following:

1. Practicing authentic leadership versus fake leadership. Authenticity requires honesty, self awareness, and a selfless perspective. Authentic entrepreneurs lead through the power of personal influence, rather than coercion. Fakers rely on position, authority, and manipulation – leading to short-term gain and long-term loss.

2. It all starts with a vision, but you have to execute. Vision provides direction so your startup won’t just flail about. As you communicate your vision to stakeholders, you will strengthen your own belief and get buy-in from them. But above all, leadership is defined by action. You have to execute to succeed, so trust yourself and start moving forward.

3. The importance of critical thinking. Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly, rationally, reflectively, and independently. Critical thinking is not just accumulating information, and should not be confused with being critical of other people. Entrepreneurs need to practice critical thinking to be leaders, rather than following conventional wisdom.

4. Leadership comes with building and nurturing the right team. Entrepreneurs not only have to pick the right team members, but have to continually communicate the vision, tasks required, and provide mentoring and feedback to each member. Don’t focus on the product, and assume the team will come along by osmosis.

5. Pretend to be a customer or client of the business you lead. Successful entrepreneurs practice stepping back to look at their business the way customers see it for the first time. It obviously helps to ask new customers what they see. Then it takes humility to swallow your pride and your biases, and make improvements regularly.

6. Coaching and mentoring are key to the leadership role. A good leader will make sure that each person is getting exactly what they need for their role and their maturity. Depending on the individual, the entrepreneur may look like a dictator, a high school coach, a mentor, or a country club host. People ignored see no leadership.

7. The importance of listening well. More entrepreneurs need to practice leadership by walking around (LBWA), and truly listening to the people on their frontline, as well as listening to customers, partners, investors, and vendors. It’s hard to listen while you are talking, and many people seem adept at listening without really hearing anything.

8. Time for solutions versus problems. It’s easy to become so overwhelmed by the day-to-day problems of running a business that you have no time to work on solutions or strategy that will give you greater leverage and long-term success. Ask each member of your team to be the CEO of his own problems, and you will take time for the solutions.

9. Know when to overreact or under-react. Real leaders stay in control of their emotions, and use reactions to highlight a point. For example, startup leaders should probably overreact to values violations, and under-react to the next crisis. Always reflect before you react. You don’t learn that in the classroom.

World-class entrepreneurship will never be learned totally in the classroom. It takes hard work, lots of practice, and lots of mistakes. It takes focus to become both a student and a teacher of leadership. You will soon be amazed by how things start to fall into place, despite what you don’t know. That’s the innate leadership coming out. Enjoy it.

Marty Zwilling

Martin Zwilling is the Founder and CEO of Startup Professionals, a company that provides services to startup founders around the world. See more details at www.startupprofessionals.com