Skills Every Entrepreneur Needs to Develop – 3
7. Judgement and Decision Making
Judgement and decision making is a combination of complex-problem solving, critical thinking, creativity, people management, coordination and emotional intelligence.
It’s being able to analytically assess a situation, understand the implications, recognize the scope and possibilities, harness your organizational resources both internally and externally, and oversee the solutions implementation.
This is an extremely hard thing to do consistently and it requires great mental discipline, willpower, and focus. The most effective entrepreneurs do this daily. They escape the trap of putting out the day’s fires, and instead focus on solving the organization’s highest level problems. The ones you, as a leader, can’t see today. The problems firms are running towards without realizing it.
Problems like Kodak not realizing it was missing the digital revolution. Or perhaps FaceBook missing its chance to proactively tackle its data privacy issues.
The point here is that organizational leaders need to harness these entrepreneurial skills to proactively confront the impending, and present problems unique to their value proposition.
8. Service Orientation
Service orientation is defined as:
“The ability and desire to anticipate, recognize and meet others’ needs, sometimes even before those needs are articulated.”
From the perspective of an organizational leader, I think the conversation around service orientation should focus on servant leadership.
The phrase Servant Leadership was coined by Robert K. Greenleaf’s 1970 essay “The Servant as Leader”:
“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: Do those served grow as persons? Do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society? Will they benefit or at least not be further deprived?“
As a perspective on leadership this concept is ground-breaking. Generally we think of organizations as benefiting those in the highest positions the most. The CEO is paid the most, and then the benefits trickle down.
This perspective has led to crude images like this one. Are you seen as the bird up top?
Servant leadership flips this hierarchy upside down. The CEO is responsible to the MOST people. They above all others need to help everyone in their organization: self actualize, support their families, and rise above their economic station.
Those in the most junior positions have the most people encouraging them, and seeking to help them become better servants themselves as they grow and flourish.
Think about the diagram above again. But instead of organizational waste products like blame, busy work and making coffees. Those on the bottom were instead absolutely splattered in encouragement, learning opportunities, meaningful work, care for their home lives, and emotional/mental health support.
In that world organizations would come to resemble families more than machines. This is what Frederic Laloux calls a “Teal Organization” in his insightful work “Reinventing Organizations”. The Moment, an innovation consultancy, found by shifting their company to Teal, they created more purpose, balanced decision making, and transparency.
Ask yourself as you work moving forward — in this moment am I acting as a servant or as a power leader?
9. Negotiation
Negotiation is the process by which parties mediate differences. Ideally compromise or agreements are reached which avoid arguments and dispute. The principles driving negotiation are:
· Fairness,
· Mutual Benefit,
· And Maintaining Relationships.
To effectively negotiate a leader needs a clear understanding of their current position, as well as their desired outcome, the path connecting these two creates their strategy.
Imagining an actual path both parties are moving along. We can imagine negotiation as the process where two parties with crossing paths compromise so as to both deviate from their separate paths as little as possible.
In this model it’s obvious transparency, trust, and mutual understanding are paramount to becoming enablers and not obstacles to each others paths. This holds true anywhere in life. Whether it’s romantic relationships, friendships, peers, or family. We’re constantly negotiating our desires, beliefs, hopes, and uncertainties with those of the people around us.
Whether we choose to act as allies, and mutual enablers is up to each of us. By “taking the high road” and being the first to operate openly, you create a space where others can follow your lead.
Try it. As you negotiate your unique path, attempt to understand the paths of those around you, how they align with yours, and how, as partners, you can help each other to better move along your separate paths.
10. Cognitive Flexibility
Cognitive flexibility has two components.
1. The ability to switch between thinking about two different concepts.
2. The ability to think about multiple concepts simultaneously.
Here’s an example. This image contains two concepts organized by two categories: colour and object type. Someone whose cognitively flexible can separate the concept from the specific implementation i.e “blue” separated from the blue cat, and then recombine or pull new concepts into new objects like a blue dog, or grey cat.
Cognitive flexibility draws both on ones critical thinking — what is and isn’t, and their creativity — what could be.
As an entrepreneur you’re constantly switching between different tasks, and dealing with different variations of similar problems. The more you can reduce your cognitive “switching cost”, and better synthesize new solutions from varying fields and disciplines. The better equipped you are to operate in an environment of uncertainty and speed. As most entrepreneurs do.
So we’re arrived. To recap the 10 Skills You Should Develop Are:
1. Complex-Problem Solving
2. Critical Thinking
3. Creativity
4. People Management
5. Coordinating With Others
6. Emotional Intelligence
7. Judgement and Decision Making
8. Service Orientation
9. Negotiation
10. Cognitive Flexibility
Each of these skills can be trained and developed. But it requires dedication, self-confidence and trust in others.
My advice for getting started? Pick an ambitious project for your spare time and get cracking. You’ll find by working on a complex, enjoyable project (for instance I’m building a hydroponic lettuce garden) you’ll naturally employ most, or all of these skills and will become a more effective leader, and happier, more interesting person as a result.