Oil and Water
November 7, 2007 9:32 AM
Have you ever wondered why it is that the further up the slippery pole senior executives get, the more irrational they become with their decision-making and the more frustrated they seem to get with their apparent inability to back their own judgement?
Now, what we're talking about here are successful, intelligent and well-educated Men and Women questioning what they know to be true, and what's even more disconcerting, when I analyse them, is that they are all very different, come from totally different backgrounds and on the face of it, have nothing at all in common with each other.
And yet, they are all smitten by the same uncertainty. You could well argue that that this uncertainty is driven by fear. Fear of failure or fear of success; it makes no difference really, as they are both sides of the same coin.
I assumed for many years that it could only be fear which fuelled this irrational behaviour - but now I'm not so sure. After all, what would these successful, well-educated and intelligent people have to fear from anybody? If they're not already captains of industry, then they are all pretty close to it.
No, the real issue here is the fundamental difference between being successful as a business manager and successful as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs tend to be single-minded loners by nature, whereas business managers tend to be (or aspire to be) more collaborative, cautious and consensual - they're the oil and water of professional personalities if you like.
But what happens during a particular phase of an executive's development is that they need to experiment with the entrepreneurial side of their personality, in order to demonstrate to their organisations that they have the wherewithal to make it to next level of executive management.
And this is where the problems begin to occur, because while behaving like an entrepreneur might be exciting it's also fraught with risk - and risk is not something senior executives do particularly well.
So as a result, many find themselves caught in a continuous loop, cycling and recycling backwards and forwards between the two, unsure of which course of action is best.
And the outcome? Well, they eventually end up doing up neither - and that's what drives even more paranoia, uncertainty and irrational behaviour. It's just like oil and water; the two do not mix well, and so it is with the personalities of the entrepreneur and the professional manager.
So, can it work the other way around? Well yes, there are some examples of semi-successful transitions from entrepreneur to manager, ( Stelios Haji-Ioannou and Richard Branson spring to mind), but I can think of many more examples of entrepreneurs who just can't make the successful transformation into business managers, with the smarter ones realising the error of their ways and hiring professional managers to look after the businesses they started.
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