Social Entrepreneurship

Posted on before, this type of leader is becoming more common, but still rare, and this article from the Foundation Center remarks on their attributes.

An excerpt.

“One of the remarkable traits about social entrepreneurs is their ability to play many roles. They care deeply about how their vision is implemented and feel personally invested in the outcome. Social entrepreneurs are often so involved in all aspects of the organization that they end up holding up decision making, losing talent, and creating bottlenecks. At some point, grumblings of dissatisfaction from employees or frustrating inefficiencies emerge and need solutions. To avoid getting to this detrimental stage, the entrepreneur must recognize that he can no longer do everything himself and preemptively prepare to let go. Before hiring any high-level managers, he needs to assess his own strengths and weaknesses honestly. Social entrepreneurs must ask themselves questions such as, What do I enjoy doing? What am I really good at doing? What am I not good at doing? What kind of people do I need around me?

“Board members play a particularly important role at this stage of the process. They should instigate conversations with the social entrepreneur about building strong, talented management teams, and preparing for leadership succession. To ensure that this happens, entrepreneurs should fill their board with opinionated members who bring skills, networks, and experience to the organization. Entrepreneurs must use the start-up stage as an opportunity to build trust with board members and ensure that board members are invested in the vision and long-term sustainability of the organization. This trust enables entrepreneurs to heed advice that can often feel personal or be difficult to hear. Strong boards help entrepreneurs grow comfortable with dissenting voices, challenged ideas, and evolving roles.

“Entrepreneurs should map out their senior management hires ahead of time. Too often, they see an oncoming cash flow crisis and hire someone with an accounting background, or decide they are overwhelmed with direct reports and hire a COO. “Social entrepreneurs are often encouraged or forced to get a person or a skill set in immediately,” says Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation. They “often go into it feeling cornered.” Kevin Flynn, director of client services at Commongood Careers, sees this behavior frequently. “We hear, ‘I need someone who is an entrepreneurial CFO and can do technology and fundraising and also code in Java,'” says Flynn.

“The Leadership Team

“Once the social entrepreneur has spent time in honest self-reflection and frank board discussions, it's time to create a new leadership team. The entrepreneur must approach leadership team development with the same thoughtfulness and determination that he applies to creating his vision or he risks making the wrong hires. Our research indicates that there are five essential leadership roles in an organization that is ready to scale up. These roles may or may not be filled by five separate people; in some cases multiple roles can be filled by one person.

“Evangelist

“The most important member of the leadership team is the evangelist — the person who is deeply passionate about the organization's mission and convinces others to help fulfill it. When the founder is still at the organization, he is the person who fills the role of the evangelist. If the founder has been replaced, it is the entrepreneur who is running the organization (often with the title of CEO, president, or executive director) who becomes the evangelist.

“The evangelist has a number of responsibilities. First, he is the organization's visionary, continually refining its mission and strategy and making sure that priorities are established and met. He needs to share his vision with people inside and outside of the organization, especially with the leadership team. Willy Foote, president and founder of Root Capital, explains that the evangelist is going to see new opportunities that may not fit with the current organization's strategy, and his role is to “get the team to believe in the value of disruption, while being very cautious to court disruption, not destruction.”

“The evangelist also maintains the organization's culture. For example, when Mike Feinberg, co-founder of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), served as CEO of the KIPP Foundation, he ensured that each conference room held the name of a children's book that held significance on the KIPP school campuses. All new hires learned the symbolism of these books and embraced the metaphors associated with them. For example, The Polar Express represented the message that all “KIPPsters” (students who attend a KIPP school) can “hear the bells” even when naysaying communities, peers, or adults try in vain to convince them that college is not an option. Each evangelist will choose a different way to keep the organization's culture alive, but he needs to be the person who constantly reminds others of the importance, characteristics, and values of the organization's culture.

“The evangelist is also the external face of the organization. People want to understand the evangelist's underlying motivations for leading the organization and be captivated by the organization's founding story and long-term vision. The evangelist can skillfully weave together the organization's mission and programs with stories that express it in personal terms in order to truly “evangelize” and convert non-believers.”