Personal development and personal delight: The life of the entrepreneur

Professor David Johnson
Tel 00 44 (0) 191 3846944
david@professordavid.co.uk
www.professordavid.co.uk
www.21stcenturyentrepreneurs.co.uk

Customer care is no longer sufficient, as the basic expectation is for customer delight and customer delight is reflected in customer loyalty. But what about you, are you delighted with the way you are performing, and the way you support your team and other staff to perform? Consider these four critical questions.

• Are you delighted with your performance over the past three years?
• Are you delighted with the performance of your business over the past three years and the part you have played in facilitating that?
• Are you delighted with the performance of your clients and the level of service and value you add to them?
• Are you confident that progress for the coming twelve months will achieve your targets and delight both you and your clients?

If your answer to all of these questions is yes, you need to read them again, think about the question and the honesty of your answer, and then discuss your responses with colleagues, clients and customers asking them if they concur with your confident response. If customers and clients confirm your positive response, then you should feel confident about the future. You are well on the way to success, if you have not already achieved it and deserve to be delighted with your own performance. However, if your answer to any of these questions was no, maybe you would like to do something about it!

We are now well into autumn, and the summer recharge of your batteries on the beaches of Bermuda, Italy or California is probably long forgotten. However, rather than wait for the next seasonal booster, i.e. Christmas and the New Year, now is the time to consider innovative approaches to achieving improved performance. An understanding of the relationship between attitudinal and behavioural profiles and performance can add significantly to our effectiveness and contribution at work. Many will say that profiling has been around for many years; indeed it is the essence of psychometric testing. However, how you use it and apply it is where the innovation lies. Over the past 10 years I have worked closely with hundreds of successful business owners and I believe that many of the strengths of the mindset of the successful entrepreneur can have influence across a range of organisations.

Successful business owners are aspirational. The starting point for any improvement is aspiration, the desire to make a difference and do something better. And for those who aspire the opportunity is immense. Aspiration comes before competencies and skills, indeed without aspiration competencies and skills are redundant. People with aspiration want to be seen, want to do more, want to make a difference! Having personally profiled over 3000 entrepreneurs, bankers, managers, accountants, insurance agents, students, teachers etc, over the past five years, I can say with great confidence that one factor that differentiates the successful from the less successful is their level of aspiration, motivation and desire. Without this core building block value-adding contribution and advancement is unlikely to occur.

So what is profiling, what benefit can be achieved from understanding profiles and how can this understanding help us to move our businesses on. At this point I would like to call upon the words of Dr Seuss, the well-known author of children’s books1.

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to great places!
You’re off and away!

This is your opportunity to start looking at the world through a new set of lenses. For anyone, (child, adolescent, adult) seeking the impetus to change, you could look no further than ‘Oh the places you’ll go’. Parents of young children soon realise which books kids appreciate and which they find boring. When read with enthusiasm, ‘Oh the places you’ll go’, hooks children of all ages. Why, because it is a story of life, aspiration, opportunity and reality, and it contains key messages for anyone seeking to improve the value they create and the satisfaction they experience. What are those key messages?

* There’s a whole world out there waiting for you
* Aspiration leads to success
* If you want to be successful its down to you!
* At times the going gets tough, but it’s the achievers who bounce back, persevere and move on

If you go no further reading this article I would certainly recommend you read ‘Oh the places you’ll go’.

Organisations should be looking for individuals who accept the above. They are the ones who will take your business forward! Although some advocates would disagree, competence and competency approaches to personal development, by definition lead to mediocrity and the maintenance of the status quo, aspiration sows the seeds of greatness and facilitates change. I must admit I personally refuse to use the word competence in my work with business owners and managers and executives in organisations of all sizes.

Over the past fifteen years I have been involved in the creation of four businesses; I was the founding director of the Barclays Centre for Entrepreneurship at the University of Durham, I have worked for and with some of the major global corporations including Cargill, HSBC and 3M; I have worked for both the British Government and the European Commission promoting entrepreneurship and innovation and throughout that time I have seen one pattern that can account for personal, business and organisational success and it is captured in the words of Dr. Seuss. I would summarise the message of Dr. Seuss as follows:

‘Success lies in your hands and if you don’t go for it and aspire to improve and grow you rule yourself out of the Achieving Society. If and when you do go for it you open the door to great success, but remember that the going may get tough and you will need to be resilient in the face of adversity’.

If we accept this basic statement it enables us to move forward and do something about it. Not only can we identify individuals who with that profile we can also create an environment to stimulate it. A brief resume of great British businesses of the recent past confirms this. Charles Dunstone and David Ross had aspiration and created a culture within Carphone Warehouse that underpins their continued success. In the face of adversity and lack of immediate buy in, James Dyson continued to chase his dream with admirable robustness and persistence, and kept on going. A quick glance at others such as Julian Richer and Richard Branson confirms this further. However, we are not just referring to the icons of British industry, but also to the individuals who create and build successful businesses around the regions of the UK. Seeing the opportunity, aspiring to achieve and dealing with difficulties along the way are regular experiences for the successful enterprising individual. We can also look to financial services for examples of the relationship between individual aspirations, personalities and behaviours to understand success. The Barclays University has been acknowledged as an exemplar of successful corporate learning. This was conceived by Matt Barrett and taken forward by Paul Rudd. Progress wasn’t always easy and setbacks inevitably occurred, but it was individuals who saw it through. Moreover, the bank sought to create a culture within which this initiative could succeed. Other examples include Virgin Direct and Charles Schwab.

However, these are some of the better-known examples of success but the challenge to the UK is that we have some of the poorest business start up, growth and survival rates in the developed world. Moreover, many of our established organisations are stagnating. We need to create more success stories. Why are these rates so low? In a global economy we cannot say it is because there is no market, or that our products have no inherent value as there are gaps and niches everywhere. Nor that there are insufficient funds available to make it happen. No, in order to grasp one of the major causes of poor start up rates and poor survival and growth rates we need to look at the individuals and teams who run those businesses and the individuals who get close to considering start up. This is where Dr. Seuss gives us a useful starting point as he communicates very clearly that we can only achieve what we aspire to, and whatever we achieve is the result of our efforts, energy, resilience, willingness to listen etc. Businesses succeed because of the behaviour of individuals and teams and businesses fail because of the behaviour of individuals and teams. Whilst this may seem somewhat harsh to the entrepreneurs who are battling away in global markets in the face of barriers, obstacles and competition the only people who will see a way through such barriers and overcome the competition is the individual and team at the helm of these businesses. As an entrepreneur and business owner myself I would gladly blame cheaper foreign imports, saturation on the Internet, the lack of funding and unnecessary red tape but the only person who is going to work through those barriers is me! If as a human resource manager or organisation development manager you are charged with enhancing the performance of individuals there is no better starting place than seeking to create the ‘can do’ culture whilst at the same time dismantling the ‘dependency’ culture found in many large organisations.

The essence of this brief paper is to identify some of the personal qualities and behaviours that lead to success for businesses of all sizes; to enable you the reader to consider where and when you display these behaviours and to gain an insight into how to develop a culture that will facilitate the emergence of such behaviours. The implications of this for all who work in financial services is critical whether you are advising businesses, running your own business or seeking to be successful as an individual.

If we consider the profiles of individuals who run their own businesses and the profiles of individuals who offer advice to those businesses a number of interesting anomalies emerge. The banking fraternity is in essence risk averse, as in many ways is the venture capital sector. This is understandable as no one wants to lose money, particularly when shareholders are seeking a significant dividend. As a consequence the profiles of individuals who succeed in the world of banking tend to be risk averse with an emphasis upon the allocation and management of resources. Contrary to popular opinion, the mindset of the banking fraternity is actually consistent with the majority of British business owners. ‘Safety’, ‘caution’ and ‘risk aversion’ are three terms that capture, the bulk of Britain’s businesses and as such banking is in line. However, the needs of the British economy at present crystallise around a demand for innovation, exploration and growth and this does not come from a risk-averse culture. As such there are many entrepreneurs across the UK who are seeking to either create or expand businesses and to do this they need to take the risk. This creates a fundamental dilemma for the relationship between aspirational and high growth entrepreneurs and many representatives of the financial services community, who from a strategic and longer-term perspective, need each other, but at present they see the world through different lenses.

Recent research by the author confirms that entrepreneurs at the helm of successful high growth businesses focus upon the big picture and do not allow their dream and aspiration to be constrained by paying too much attention to the detail. They engage with the marketplace, think strategically and see what could be rather than focussing upon the detail, which in their words often emphasises why it cant be. This is the ‘can do-cant do’ paradox which has a crippling effect on the British economy. This creates a further fundamental dilemma that manifests between those involved in supporting businesses and those creating and building them. In a desire to play the game to access funding, entrepreneurs compromise their beliefs and spend hours putting together business plans that they are not really committed to, lose sight of the reason they started in the first place, and eventually kill off their motivation to create a high growth business. Such an emphasis on business planning is a catastrophe for the UK economy’s attempts to stimulate greater levels of business start up, innovation and more growth businesses.

In a similar way the focus upon competencies and skills crushes individuals who have aspiration and a desire to take things forward within large organisations. We must create cultures and structures that are flexible enough to allow people to express themselves within the context of the aims and aspirations of the organisation. This does not mean we need to create Enron look-alikes, but we must capture the energy and aspiration of individuals who at present are not adding the value they are capable of. We need to be objective about the real performance of our organisations and not hide behind the gloss of apparent success. Let us follow the suggestion of Jim Collins and go from good to great.

I remember speaking to a partner in one of the major UK based V.C companies. His comment to me (he knew I was a psychologist) was that he based a great deal of his decisions to invest upon the quality of the management team. ‘It is the people who will make the business tick. I look in their eyes and if I see the right person/people then I tend to say yes’. However, he acknowledged that he, and many of his peers, were not very good psychologists and that many of their decisions were flawed. The number of ventures they were currently involved in that were not performing any where near the rate that was expected, or indeed had been promised confirmed this. The value that an investor could gain through active assessment of the riskyness of the individual or key team has been understood for many years. However, there is so much more that can be achieved if the individual is assessed in terms of his capacity to see opportunities, manage the business, build effective relationships etc. The solution is to be found by addressing the people issues, as poor business performance data are only the symptom of the underlying cause.

This is where a formal understanding and use of business psychology becomes useful. If you know what your working style and preference is and you can understand some of the major patterns and preferences of clients it sows the seeds for a significantly improved relationship. However, of equal interest is the value derived from knowing and understanding the implications of the attitudes, personality and behaviours of individuals and teams who are at the helm of organisations. What follows may sound like a rather asinine truism but people are human beings (usually!) and every human being has failings. They may seek to overcome these failings but at times we all make mistakes. If we understand the profiles of people who run organisations we can recognise the types of mistakes they are likely to make and we can intervene to avoid that happening.

At this point it may be useful to say a little more about the qualities of successful partners and business owners.

Some business owners are excellent at networking and it is the breadth of their contact list that provides them with customers, clients, supplier’s advisors etc. However, many have more contacts than they know what to do with. This is often the warning sign (Red Flag) of an emerging difficulty as it could also indicate a lack of direction, the consequence of which is that the business moves off in a number of incompatible directions and ends up being unable to deliver quality in any direction. Alternatively the individual may be more interested in meeting people than focussing upon creating a value-adding relationship. I have given up counting the number of occasions I have worked with worked with individuals who have extensive contact lists but are unable to reap advantage from their contacts because they are not sure what it is they are really seeking to achieve. And yet the intervention to change this can be very simple.

Many entrepreneurial business owners and partners pride themselves upon being able to see new opportunities. In times of global competition and chronically reduced margins the next opportunity could be the life-blood of the business. However, the overly opportunistic individual may have filing cabinets, note books, and computer files full to the brim with ‘the next opportunity’. Whilst this can be a great strength in fostering innovation and diversification, if the current requirement of the business is to focus attention upon the product/client at hand, such an opportunistic way of looking at the world can be highly counter-productive. The solution to this issue usually takes the form of bringing another ‘manager’ on board.

One of the reasons individuals leave employment to form their own businesses is that they become unemployable. They develop such a sense of, and desire for, independence that they are unable to listen to the dictates of managers and executives they no longer respect. Whilst this is at the heart of successful entrepreneurship, it can be a major source of hardship if the entrepreneur’s independence gets in the way of listening to customers, clients and colleagues. Moreover, within larger organisations the critical skill of the human resource manager is to create an environment within which individual’s are able to express their aspiration and motivation to the benefit of the host organisation. And yet, I wonder how many employees are disgruntled to the extent that they are no longer ‘good’ employees, but they remain! Along with a number of colleagues we recently coined the term ‘Questocracy’, to describe an organisation within which the aspirations of the individuals and the strategic objectives of the organisation were mutually reinforcing. To achieve this should be an aspiration of all organisations large and small, public and private.

There is a further paradox within the small business. As businesses grow the personal qualities required in the early days of energy, enthusiasm and exploration when everyone seems to do everything become inappropriate. Systems and procedures are required to manage the business as it grows. It is no longer appropriate for the lead entrepreneur to do all the design work, chase all sales, manage the books, recruit new staff etc. A growing business requires management as much as it requires entrepreneurship and it is sadly the case that many entrepreneurs do not warm to the need to instil management. This is the point at which knowledge of profiling can enhance the offer from the financial services industry. In the words of Dr Seuss, this is when the entrepreneur may be in a ’slump’, and this is the time at which skilled awareness of the different mind-sets of bankers, accountants, managers and entrepreneurs can be critical. It is even more dangerous if the entrepreneur is not aware of these emerging dilemmas and continues to believe that he or she can, and should, do everything. Another significant finding of our recent research confirms that individuals who recognise the need for, and potential contribution of others, lead businesses that grow. Those who are too independent and seek to do it all themselves lead businesses that stagnate. Invariably when an individual views his or herself as the major force within the business, this limits the capacity of the business to grow. It is not of necessity an indicator of business failure but it is a strong indicator of limitations to growth. A skilled intermediary can help the entrepreneur to work through this difficult phase by displaying empathy, by facilitating increased awareness and enabling the entrepreneur to implement systems that are facilitative rather than restrictive. Teams lead growing businesses, and leadership is cascaded throughout the business. In many ways this is the same as the fate that befalls executives who adopt an autocratic style within larger organisations. The team (delivery team) do not feel involved and do not buy into the strategy and as a consequence whilst success may be achieved, it will never achieve the levels of sustainable success achieved by an integrated and engaged team.

The intention of this paper has been to argue that in the same way as customers and clients seek ‘delight’ from their suppliers our capacity to deliver is determined largely by our level of aspiration, in many ways our aspiration to delight those we serve. However, our individual profiles are also at the heart of our capacity to succeed or fail, or at best underachieve. Personal development is all about raising an individual’s self-awareness and giving him or her the tools to enhance areas in need of development. Returning to the four questions at the start of this paper if you want to get to yes, you need to aspire, learn about yourself and develop. To conclude with a summary from Dr Seuss who in hindsight comes across as one of the most motivational of authors…

And will you succeed?
Yes! You will indeed!
(98 and 3/4 per cent guaranteed.)

The end,
Or maybe the beginning!

1 Oh the places you’ll go. By Dr. Seuss. Published by Dr. Seuss Enterprises.L.P.1957