Making a Personal Leadership Strategy (PLS)
This blog leads through steps to create a powerful PLS. This is your personal strategy and not the strategy of your startup. We will help you with that in a subsequent sprint.
The objective of your PLS
Your PLS is YOUR strategy for being a good person and a successful entrepreneur. A PLS is valuable because it helps focus your efforts on leveraging your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses to achieve your entrepreneurial ambitions.
There is no “right” or “best” strategy for you, but there are personal strategies that measurably improve the chances of achieving your entrepreneurial ambitions. Creating strategy is a sensitive and complicated task because there are so many variables and unknowns involved; everyone’s PLS is a unique creation.
It should feel a bit scary to put this strategy together because it makes you realize how many things need to go right for you to have a chance of prospering despite all the things that will go wrong—and never knowing what will go wrong next. But many people succeed, and most of those people thought about what was ahead and by doing so created their strategy, whether they realized it or not.
Getting started
To start, synthesize what you know about yourself and what you may have learned about yourself in previous sprint, in conversations with others, or perhaps from journaling.
1. Think about, and write down your answers to:
What are your motivations for being an entrepreneur?
Take that further by describing:
What are your most fundamental desires and fears?
What makes you feel good?
What makes you so angry that you lose control?
Understand that these fundamental desires and fears and the intrinsic drive to feel good may conflict with what you need to do to achieve your entrepreneurial ambitions.
We suggest you show your answers to people that know you and may have mentored you and ask them to reflect on your answered. They will likely add some insights that you may have missed because we can never see ourselves as accurately as our closest friends and family. We are not therapists, and we don’t expect to get this perfectly right, but we want you to think about these things and note that you may have some conflicting motivations. Perhaps none of the things that make you feel good will happen to you as you create your startup. Perhaps you realize that what you may need to do might make you angry and lose control. Nothing is wrong with having conflicting motivations, it is just important to realize it. These conflicting motivations are starting points for understanding your entrepreneurial weaknesses.
2. Write down your traits that you identified in sprint 7.
For each trait, write down how it could help you towards achieving your entrepreneurial ambition.
For each trait write down how it could make it more difficult to achieve your entrepreneurial ambition.
It is important to realize that every trait has strengths and weaknesses relative to what you will need to accomplish. For example, you may have a high IQ, but that means you are prone to overcomplicate things you describe or design. You can even ask AI to identify weaknesses associated with any of your traits that pertain to the enterprise you want to start.
3. You now need to inventory the skills required to create, lead and administrate an enterprise that delivers your product or service idea to all the customers that desire it. We helped you create a partial list in sprint 7, but we introduced you to four other skill sets you need in sprints 8 – 14.
What are all the critical skills required to successfully create the enterprise you want?
What are the critical skills you already have mastered that you personally expect to contribute towards making the enterprise a success in Stages 1 and 2?
If applicable, what are the critical skills you expect your co-founder(s) to contribute towards making the enterprise a success in Stages 1 and 2?
What critical skills sets will you be required to get others to provide?
Some important analysis
Break these lists of motivations, traits, and skills into two sets. On the left of a page, list all those motivations and traits that help you towards achieving your entrepreneurial objectives. On the same side also list the skills you and your founder(s) will be contributing.
On the right side, list those things you are motivated to do and feel that direct you to do things not related to achieving your entrepreneurial ambitions. Add the weaknesses associated with your traits and then list all those skills you are missing and need to find and attract to your enterprise.
Summarize these findings as a description of who you are as an entrepreneur and the most important strengths you feel will distinguish your enterprise and the product or service it delivers from all the alternatives customers can choose from. Now describe the one or two weaknesses that could cause you to fail. Keep this entire summary to just one paragraph.
The Big Picture
We all have strengths that ‘can’ help us achieve our objectives. For the first part of your journey, you want to use your strengths to establish credibility by getting out of Stage 1 and into Stage 2. How will these strengths help you find and get a real customer and then figure out how to get more customers. Do you, or someone your strengths will help you find and engage, have the motivation, traits and skills to figure out how to deliver your product or service reliably? Write down your answers as these are very important insights.
Relative to your weaknesses, at this point, you want to invest the minimum amount of effort to mitigate or backstop those weaknesses that could seriously delay or prevent you from getting into and out of Stage 2. If you have skills to find and motivate people with the skills you lack then those skill gaps are not weaknesses. The weaknesses that most likely would derail you are competing motivations and traits that make it difficult to build relationships, like strong introversion or feeling a need to be always the best or always right.
Creating a personal strategy
Strategy is as much about deciding what NOT to do as it is deciding about what is best to do. In entrepreneuring this is an even more important strategic principle because your time and resources are so limited. Strategy is about prioritizing those few actions that propel you the furthest towards your goals and leverage multiple strengths at once, while keeping you away from having to do things to succeed that others that you get get to help you could do better.
Here are some examples of personal strategies. This is far from an exhaustive list, but it could get your creative juices flowing…
Partnership between a person with sales skills and someone with technical or operational skills is a classic. In hospitality this is equivalent to a good chef teaming with somebody good at making guests feel happy and special, in spaces that are comfortable and inviting. If you have money set aside to help you kickstart your startup then perhaps you hire people with complementary skills.
Some people focus on building confidence and evidence of their mastery of a skill that sets them apart from competition by entering competitions or offering their services in spaces where the public congregates, like fairs or on Instagram, which also builds public awareness. This strategy requires the entrepreneur to push extra hard to distinguish him or herself in crowded markets and “work up a ladder of recognition.” This strategy is common for individuals who want to sell their service and can raise their price according to how well the public perceives they have performed. Think trainers, chefs, comics, other entertainers and influencers. If your skills are already top notch, then this strategy produces results pretty quickly, although it ALWAYS starts out a bit rocky until you find the recognition tactics best suited for you.
Apprenticing or working for a firm that offers products or services that you aspire to offer is a classic. A large fraction of all successful startups are founded by people with significant relevant work experience. Seeing up close how value is created spurs you to think how things could work better. It focuses the aspiring entrepreneur on which improvements are most important to customers. An aspiring entrepreneur using this strategy needs to gain understanding or seek counsel on how to act to not inadvertently use or copy someone else’s intellectual property or trade secrets.
Finding a mentor is a common strategy as it gets you access to experienced advice and counseling from somebody who has already done something similar. And some mentors have relationships with other people who could help you succeed. The sprint 10 blog titled, “How to spot and create shared objectives” has a section on how to meet potential mentors who you do not know.
For some people, asking them to find the place and activities that make them their “best self” helps them visualize these types of strategies.
These are just a few classic personal strategies. You can even mix and match some of them. It is important to realize is that must concentrate on doing a few things over the course of a year of more of effort to create leverage with your strengths and avoid your most dangerous weaknesses.
Ultimately, you need to write a paragraph that describes your strategy for leveraging your strengths and mitigating your weaknesses. All these inventories, analyses, summaries and strategies should only take up a few pages. Show these pages to people you respect and trust to give you personal feedback. Remember, you are not asking for comments or ideas about your startup strategy, this strategy is all about how you will leverage your strengths to be a successful startup leader, while not letting your weaknesses get in the way.