research Archives - Welcome to the Emerging Enterprise Center

Written by Cheryl Beth Kuchler, CEO Think Tank

Why do people follow? More importantly, why would people follow you?

With the end of the first half of the year looming, if you haven’t asked yourself this question recently, it’s a good time to do so as you work on refining your plans.

Great leadership involves many factors but one of the most important, discovered by the folks at Gallup and written about in “Strengths-based Leadership”, is giving your followers what they need so that they can feel confident and inspired to follow.

“A leader charging forward without followers is just out for a walk,” write Tom Rath and Barry Conshie.

So what do effective leaders give their teams to get them to follow? More importantly, what do followers want from their leaders?

Here’s the four basic needs of followers that Gallup found in their research.

(HINT – Turn this into a self-development exercise for your team by sending this article to them and ask them the same tough question – why should people follow them?)

Click here to link to original article and to read more.

Written by Frank DeSantis, Certified Growth Wheel Trainer, Former Emerging Enterprise Center Program Director

The link below is to a great article in HBR on Passion vs. Preparedness, and reflects what I believe is the approach the Emerging Enterprise Center tries to take with their Incubator companies.

An entrepreneur has to have passion. It’s entirely too hard to start and run a business if you don’t absolutely love what you are doing! Apparently, according to this research, passion is a key ingredient to attracting attention of investors, especially novice investors, those typically found on crowdfunding sites.

Long term success, however, depends upon your ability to be prepared to scale the business. For that you need to have a vision (what do you want to be when you grow up), a game plan (strategy or business plan), and the processes and procedures to replicate what you do and how you sell. For more experienced investors, the passion and the concept may attract them initially, but they move quickly to determining how prepared they are for success; what is the experience of the management team; have they started a business before; is there a market; have they proved the concept?

At the Emerging Enterprise Center, they try to help you focus first on DRIVING YOUR BUSINESS (sales), while in parallel, developing the business skills and the policies/procedures to enable you to take advantage of opportunities that help you achieve your vision.

I believe you can have and, in fact, need both: PASSION AND PREPAREDNESS!

https://hbr.org/2015/07/for-founders-preparation-trumps-passion

Tag: research

4 Reasons People Follow

Why Do Passionate Entrepreneurs Fail?