Entrepreneurial leadership

Entrepreneurial leadership is organizing a group of people to achieve a common goal using proactive entrepreneurial behavior by optimising risk, innovating to take advantage of opportunities, taking personal responsibility and managing change within a dynamic environment for the benefit of an organisation.

Its aim is to cultivate entrepreneurial individuals and teams that fully leverage their creative potential in creating value for the organisation. Entrepreneurial leadership does this by employing leadership practices that "develop the ability in employees to self-generate, self-reflect, and self-correct in their workplace".

Entrepreneurial leadership is effectively using the skills associated with successful individual entrepreneurs and applying those within the environment of a larger organisation. This especially means within an organisation where those skills have been lost and replaced with a "corporate" mindset that focuses on process, systems and risk minimisation rather than on entrepreneurial behaviour.

Other definitions of entrepreneurial leadership have also emerged:

The entrepreneurial leader executes through inspiration and aligns relationships to achieve common goals.

An entrepreneurial leader will proactively identify opportunities to gain advantage through creativity, innovation and market understanding and then hold themselves responsible for delivering what customers need via the effective management of risk to optimise outcomes for both the organization and the customer.

The entrepreneurial leader will work within a formalised organisational structure, but use the approaches normally expected of an entrepreneur to identify opportunities. Once an opportunity has been identified, they work towards creating a value proposition which will enable a rapid testing of their key assumptions. Next to an effective management of risk (rather than the minimisation of risk often sought within corporate environments), they are required to operate with contextual awareness in order to create a value proposition that delivers value to the customer while taking into account the organisational requirements and strategic aims. The entrepreneurial leader must have the ability to learn fast and within environments of ambiguity and change, while providing clarity and coherence for those around them.

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Wikipedia