Today I'm going to talk to you about how you can become a more entrepreneurial
version of yourself. That's what we do at the Entrepreneurship Institute at King's
College and we do that through a framework called the Seven Skills of an
Entrepreneurial Mindset. The first skill is to compel, which is to have
communication skills that provoke behavior and mindset change in other
people and give you credibility as a leader and become somebody that
other people want to follow. Communication skills have always been
really really important for finance professionals, but now there's a new step
further than communication skills and that's the skill to compel the people
that you're talking to. Entrepreneurs are really compelling people because they're
always presenting ideas and projects that are completely new that people have
never heard of before. It's really important for finance professionals to
take that step forward in their communication skills and to learn how to
compel the audiences that they're talking to. The second skill is to
disrupt. When we think about that as startups it's about the people that
create revolutionary new products and services, but it's about having a
mentality that helps you challenge the status quo and be the person that
champions better ways of doing things.
To disrupt sounds like something really
dangerous and daring for finance professionals, but really it's about
having ideas and innovating and challenging and learning how to do
things differently. And that's so important for finance directors and for
finance professionals who are leading organisations from a finance point of
view. They need to support people to learn how to bring forward ideas in a
managed and planned fashion and how to innovate in their businesses so that
their businesses can step forward and succeed.
The third skill is think lean
this is about having a dedication to continue and rapid learning where you
test things in a really economical way that means you can get results quicker.
Entrepreneurs are really brilliant at bringing forward new ideas and new
projects in a lean fashion and that means that they don't over expose their
organisation to new resource needs, to new financial needs, and that should be
music to the ears of finance professionals. Supporting people in your organisation
and yourself to bring forward changes and new ideas in a lean and agile
fashion I think is a really really fundamental skill to learn for the future.
The fourth skill is to validate which
means to prove that your ideas are really going to work, it's about taking
an objective distance from the thing that you're testing so that you know
that your ideas are really worth following through on.
The skills to validate I think is something that finance professionals are particularly
brilliant at because validation really is something you learn throughout your
studies to become a finance professional. I think finance professionals are really
well placed to bring forward their validation skills in support of their
teams and the organisations that they work for and help people to learn those
methodologies around validating, analysing the risk associated with new
projects, with the competitive aspects to it etc.
Skill five is be resilient and we
mean that quite specifically in an entrepreneurial context that we don't
mean you against the world, we mean your approach to learning and that
you take a growth mindset with everything that you do, so that you're
used to operating in your stretch zone and that you use the support network
around you to mean that you can go further and be stronger whilst you do it.
The skill to be resilient is something that's much talked about at the moment
and I think it's an especially important point for finance professionals to learn
to support themselves to be resilient by looking at the support networks that are
around them. But especially as leaders and people who have a duty of care over
others in organisations to support others to learn how to be more resilient
and being more resilient can often involve the use of really useful tools
so that people can understand how to manage risk in their organisation how to
analyse risk, and also how to deal with no in your organisation if you are a
resilient person you will learn how to deal with no in your organisation and
how to turn that into a positive in the future.
Skill six is build teams.
Entrepreneurial teams understand that diversity is the ingredient
to success and that a team that feels valued and celebrated and included will
get you better results.
I think the more and more finance professionals build
diverse teams in their organisations, the more they will discover how much the
output of their projects and new products and services will improve and
increase as you bring together people who have diverse ideas and approaches to
problems in organisations, the more you will discover that the outputs improve
and increase and the impact gets better and better.
Skill seven is get it done and
that in an entrepreneurial context means doing the things that are going to take
you further towards your goal first. It's about understanding the ways that you
work as an individual to make sure that you're minimising procrastination and
getting the results that you want quickest. Finance professionals I think
have always been really really brilliant at getting stuff done in their
organisations, and the more they can learn about evaluating the risk involved
in making changes and stepping forward in organisations, the more they will be
able to do that and get stuff done with agility. The combination of these seven
skills are going to have you be a more entrepreneurial person whatever your
future might hold. They are skills that in the workplace
are going to become useful regardless of what career is ahead of you and that is
what we're building: entrepreneurial people for the future.
If you would like to find out more you can follow us on LinkedIn at Kings Entrepreneurship Institute