Conquer the Chaos, 2nd Edition

9Leadership

The sixth and final key to business and personal success for entrepreneurs is Leadership. The topic is quite broad, so we will focus on a certain brand of Leadership that is specific to the work of entrepreneurs.

When I talk about Leadership as a key to success, I'm referring to the entrepreneur's ability to lead the company to achieve its shared goals while growing people in the process. That might seem like an obvious definition, but trust me, it will help us stay focused on what really matters when it comes to Leadership for entrepreneurs: leading the company to achieve its goals and growing people in the process.

The smaller the business, the less Leadership skill is required. And because it can be challenging to develop and flex these Leadership muscles, many entrepreneurs settle for a business with limited impact. Worse yet, when entrepreneurs start growing their businesses but they don't grow their Leadership skills, they get buried by the business. The weight of it all becomes too much. It wears them down. Burns them out. And tragically, it causes them to scale back, sell out, or shut down.

And those are just the tragic business consequences. That doesn't even touch on the chaos it causes in entrepreneurs' personal lives when they don't build their Leadership skills. The fact is, entrepreneurs' underinvestment in their own Leadership development is the single greatest contributor to the Dark Side of Entrepreneurship, with all of its nasty symptoms.

That's ...