Every business is looking for that edge over their competition and that edge always starts with talent. The savvy business leaders out there are looking for that positive disrupter who can see around the corner, stomach risk, and make the bold moves their more entrenched counterparts are hesitant to make. In essence, they are looking for burgeoning entrepreneurs or at the very least, those who possess somewhat of a similar profile to an entrepreneur.
Like many of the more noteworthy entrepreneurs we all love to follow, these individuals are the disruptive forces constantly challenging the status quo and pushing us to question our assumptions. At any one time you can find thousands of articles, blogs, and profiles attempting to breakdown the backgrounds, traits, and habits of these unique disruptors of society. Unfortunately, these profiles tend to be superficial and minimally informative. One group of authors is looking to change that. The newly released book Daring to Compete takes a stab at cracking that elusive entrepreneurial code by taking a deeper dive into data collected from thousands of interviews over the course of the more than thirty-year span of the acclaimed EY Entrepreneur of The Year program. Through their research, the authors uncovered some fascinating similarities among the world’s elite entrepreneurs that are applicable to the kind of young leadership talent progressive companies are looking for. Although these similarities appear quite simple at first glance, there is a lot that goes on below the surface. I had the opportunity to speak with Bryan Pearce, one of the co-authors of the book and EY Global Leader for Entrepreneurship.
Any conversation about talent and leadership typically involves the age-old nature vs. nurture debate. Pearce believes it is a bit of both. He shared that entrepreneurs are born with a spark (or some natural attribute), but also fan (or nurture) that spark as they grow. In the book the authors outline eight nurtured attributes, three of which I discussed with Pearce: drive, resilience, and agility.
The Drive to Succeed: A lot of people have drive, it’s what they do with that drive that matters. In the book the authors point out that drive comes from many places and some harness their drive more effectively than others. “I think if you look at the stories of the entrepreneurs we interviewed” notes Pearce, “drive - in part - comes from the confidence of building on ‘small successes’ and the desire to then tackle bigger opportunities - whether it was Jim Nixon and Lonnie Moulder successfully disassembling motor bikes and successfully putting them back together or Murad Al-Katib selling bubble gum before selling hundreds of millions in pulse crops.”
Drive is clearly something that is rooted in your personality and manifests early on. The challenge is effectively nurturing that drive through the pursuit of small and progressive wins. A common mistake many make is seeing drive as that ability to catapult oneself from obscurity to success with one bold move. Drive that can’t be sustained really isn’t drive because achieving success is about the long game. Fits and starts won’t get you anywhere. On the flip side, Pearce points out that, “there are also lots of people that really don't have drive and they will not, and should not, become entrepreneurs!”
The Resilience to Fail Forward: In most societies, and certainly in the U.S., failure is a negative term. However, these entrepreneurs seem to approach getting past failure differently. They have a certain resilience that appears to inoculate them from the emotional turmoil of failure. Pearce points out that in his experiences, “the people who get past failure effectively are those that see it as a learning experience and truly learn from it - I think one of the favorite quotes we included in the book is ‘Sometimes you win - sometimes you learn!’” The entrepreneurs Pearce and his co-authors interviewed had clearly learned from their failures and were determined not to make the same mistake again. He points out that, “they were not paralyzed by failure - in some cases they viewed it as an environmental factor beyond their control that led to the failure.” As examples he points to the downfall of DanPer founder Rosario Bazan's first business due to the poor economic conditions at the time in Peru and a product recall Manny Stul of Moose Toys faced. They had major setbacks, but they learned from them and found ways to make sure they wouldn’t find themselves in those situations again.
Setbacks are part of the learning process. The difference between success and failure is understanding how to take your failures forward. Suffering a setback is one thing, but allowing that setback to perpetuate your suffering is entirely another. More simply put, it’s one thing to take a hit and entirely another to let it keep you down.
The Agility to Rapidly Adapt: Pearce believes that "agility and hunger for learning are closely related.” He shared that the entrepreneurs they interviewed were agile because they are curious and are able to quickly come up with unique alternatives to problems others have struggled to solve. They rarely get fixated on one way of doing things, but rather focus on options and continue to pivot until they find another way. “As I have often said, put a wall in front of a true entrepreneur and they will find a way to go through, over, under or around it - they won't be paralyzed by the fact that there appears to be a wall in front of them.”
Curiosity can be difficult to train and most of us have a psychological bias towards using objects for what they are primarily designed for as opposed to what they could alternatively be used for. In other words, I see a hammer and my first thought is to pound a nail. This phenomenon is referred to as functional fixedness. Due to their curious nature entrepreneurs tend to see a wide variety of options where the rest of us see limitations. Although not easy, challenging our functional fixedness to foster open-mindedness is one thing that many of us have within our power to nurture, but it will take drive and resilience.
Check out one of the many sessions at the 2019 SHRM Annual Conference and Exposition (#SHRM19) to learn about the latest in talent aquisition and recruitment!
Note: This was adapted from an article Dr. Woody originally published in Psychology Today on May 7, 2019.
Michael “Dr. Woody” Woodward, Ph.D. is a New York University (NYU) Clinical Faculty Member and Program Lead for the MS in Executive Coaching and Organizational Consulting program at the NYU School of Professional Studies. Dr. Woodward is the author of the Amazon top-selling bookThe YOU Plan and also writes for Psychology Today. Dr. Woodward has appeared on camera over 350 times including The TODAY Show, LIVE with Kelly, Fox & and Friends, and CNN among many others. He has been quoted as a work-life expert in The Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Forbes and Entrepreneur.
As an executive coach and consultant Dr. Woodward focuses on developing leadership capacity and has worked with senior leaders from Bacardi, SAP, VMWare, and The Miami Herald. Since 2013 Dr. Woodward has been leading executive education programs across the country where he has trained managers from Bose, Verizon, McDonald’s, and the NBA among others.
Prior to joining the faculty at NYU, Dr. Woodward served as an advisory board member and founding faculty member with the award-winning Florida International University (FIU) Center for Leadership. Dr. Woodward also taught as an adjunct at both the FIU Department of Psychology and NYU School of Professional Studies.
Before founding his own firm in 2005, Dr. Woodward served as an HR consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting (PwC) and as a project manager for IBM Business Consulting Services. He has also been an advisor to the Ernst & Young (EY) Entrepreneur of the Year and Entrepreneurial Winning Women programs as well as a thought leader in the IBM Smarter Workforce Futurist program.
Dr. Woodward received a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Miami, a master’s in industrial and organizational psychology from Springfield College, and a Ph.D. in industrial and organizational psychology from Florida International University. While at FIU Dr. Woody published award-winning research on teamwork titled Cooperation and Competition: The Effects of Team Entrainment and Reward Structure, which earned him an appointment as a Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) Scholar.
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