In order to discuss traits of a successful entrepreneur that are needed to mitigate an enormous stress of running a business, let’s illustrate by picturing a typical day of Monique.
Monique is a small business owner. She owns a small gift shop which employs 4 people. Monique gets up early in the morning, and she immediately starts preparing for work as soon as she gets up. While she’s having her breakfast, Monique usually checks her e-mail and messages, in case her clients contacted her while she was sleeping. Immediately after, she rushes to attend a meeting at the Chamber of Commerce. After the meeting, our young entrepreneur checks the bills that need to be paid. Monique also checks the available cash and everything concerning cash flow. For this, she has to contact accounting service and authorize all the checks. Then, she gathers all employees for a routine morning briefing. During these meetings, the most urgent problems are discussed. At the end of the week, Monique usually discusses the upcoming tasks with her employees.
While having lunch, she reads catalogs and considers new ideas for the upcoming months. Bear in mind that this isn’t the same as reading newspapers while grabbing a bite- Monique has to plan a few months ahead and order the most important commodities in advance. Needless to say, there’s much speculation going on here, as she doesn’t know if the current cash flow will be enough to compensate for the future investments. In the worst case, Monique will have to increase her credit. Apart from questioning her business’ profitability, this will make her busier as all credit increases have to be arranged with a banker, and sometimes this takes time. A lot of stuff to think about while having lunch!
After lunch, the real work starts. This is when Monique checks the merchandise and goes around the shop considering new styles of display, etc. For a few hours, she acts as an “all-rounder” in the shop- she helps her employees (of course, while monitoring them), talks with customers, and works at the cash register. This may not look that stressful, at least not when you separate these tasks. But if you do what Monique does every day, you will see that doing all these activities together takes a lot of multitasking skill. Oh, by the way, while doing all this, she calls her family to see how they are doing. Just imagine how she feels when her babysitter tells her that one of her kids doesn’t feel well, or when her husband decides to argue.
When all the employees go home, Monique stays to total the cash, and takes all checks and puts them in her bank’s deposit box.
While having lunch, she reads catalogs and considers new ideas for the upcoming months. Bear in mind that this isn’t the same as reading newspapers while grabbing a bite- Monique has to plan a few months ahead and order the most important commodities in advance. Needless to say, there’s much speculation going on here, as she doesn’t know if the current cash flow will be enough to compensate for the future investments. In the worst case, Monique will have to increase her credit. Apart from questioning her business’ profitability, this will make her busier as all credit increases have to be arranged with a banker, and sometimes this takes time. A lot of stuff to think about while having lunch!
After lunch, the real work starts. This is when Monique checks the merchandise and goes around the shop considering new styles of display, etc. For a few hours, she acts as an “all-rounder” in the shop- she helps her employees (of course, while monitoring them), talks with customers, and works at the cash register. This may not look that stressful, at least not when you separate these tasks. But if you do what Monique does every day, you will see that doing all these activities together takes a lot of multitasking skill. Oh, by the way, while doing all this, she calls her family to see how they are doing. Just imagine how she feels when her babysitter tells her that one of her kids doesn’t feel well, or when her husband decides to argue.
When all the employees go home, Monique stays to total the cash, and takes all checks and puts them in her bank’s deposit box.
Traits of successful entrepreneurs
People who want to start a business without experiencing any kind of stress should stop reading this text immediately.
Running a business, any kind of business, is a big source of stress. There are ways you can cope with entrepreneur stress, but it’s impossible to completely mitigate it. In this text, we describe the most important ways you can battle a special kind of stress: entrepreneur stress.
Small business owners have to make important decisions on a daily basis. Risk, uncertainty, likelihoods of success or complete failure are “trademarks” of these decisions. Thus it isn’t surprising to see countless entrepreneurs having to battle with numerous stress symptoms. Entrepreneurs have to face failure, shame, and even debt each day, which sometimes just becomes too much for some people who break under pressure. Those who endure oftentimes become extremely successful in the later parts of their business careers. Hence there are some personality traits that are super important for a wannabe entrepreneur.
Personal traits of an entrepreneur
Let’s now summarize the most important personality traits a successful business owner needs to possess.
Qualities of a successful businessman could be grouped as follows:
- Autonomy
- Perseverance
- Readiness for change
- Persuasiveness
- Resilience
- Need for support
- Conformity
You can find some of these qualities of a good entrepreneur in Monique’s behavior. For example, she’s resilient (having to deal with all that stress), ready to initiate change (exemplified in her planning of future credit), and perseverant. Perhaps she exhibits all the other characteristics of a successful woman entrepreneur we’ve mentioned, but we’ve taken such a small sample of her everyday activities that it’s hard to identify them.
Professional qualities of an entrepreneur
One doesn’t need to possess all these character traits to become a successful business owner. Having a few of these characteristics will do if their “intensity” is enough to compensate for the lack of others.
For instance, you may not be so ready to change (trait 3), but you can be extremely resilient (trait 5), thus compensating for your lack of tolerance to change.
Though these are very important qualities of an entrepreneur.
Startup environment is especially demanding for autonomy and perseverance as these skills and character traits are paramount for a successful entrepreneur.
Small Business Owner Anxiety
So far, we have only tried to briefly describe the way most small business owners feel. In this section, we’ll mention the most pertinent studies that pertained to this topic. Wincent and Ortqvist (2006), found that stress related to entrepreneurial activities is a threefold “construct”. In social sciences, and especially in psychology, a “construct” is an object of inquiry whose nature we only begin to fathom. As a result, psychologist refer to traits and other psychological phenomena as “constructs” as it is presumed that we construct them in order to better investigate the nature of the mental universe.
Entrepreneur stress is comprised of:
- Role conflict
- Role ambiguity
- Role overload
We think that these findings are important as they show us that entrepreneur stress is a complex variable with many facets. People are often inclined to think that the stress of running a business is caused by overwork (or role overload). If you remember Monique’s story, you’d see that we also mentioned an entrepreneur who seemed to suffer a lot mainly due to her busy workday. While this is often true, there are other facets of anxiety and stress small business owners face- namely the role conflict and role ambiguity.
Role conflict stress is caused by discrepant, conflicting expectations and requirements. The person receiving these kinds of instructions is always subject to a lot of pressure and stress, as what is considered as a success by one set of standards can be deemed as a complete failure by another set. To be frank, authors mostly downplay the importance of this facet of entrepreneur stress. Indeed, entrepreneurs tend to give instructions and rarely receive them.
Role ambiguity is perhaps the most important dimension of stress in the context of small businesses. Role ambiguity refers to all the vagueness, risks, and ambiguity that a worker faces. Wincent and Ortqvist astutely noticed: “Risk and uncertainty pervade entrepreneurial activities.” (2009). In other words, all entrepreneurs, especially in the initial parts of their careers, have to face risk and ambiguity. What yesterday seemed like a good idea today becomes your most unprofitable action. Therefore, tolerance to ambiguity can be regarded as one of the most important abilities for young entrepreneurs. In the last section, we will mention some efficient coping strategies that mitigate stress by improving your tolerance to ambiguity.
The importance of this dimension cannot be emphasized enough. In some of our texts, we’ve talked about burnout and all the symptoms that go with it. Role ambiguity is what separates entrepreneur stress from the “classic” burnout syndrome (Maaslach & Jackson, 1981; Maaslach & Goldberg, 1998). This is why it is useful to focus our attention on role ambiguity- because this might lead us towards coping strategies that are tailored specifically for young entrepreneurs. Needless to say, all the standard techniques and methods for relieving burnout symptoms can help, but won’t be as efficient as techniques that increase tolerance to ambiguity.
Role overload is, simply put, overwork. If overwork is an isolated issue, it’s quite easy to solve it. Unfortunately, in the entrepreneurial context, overwork is seldom an isolated problem. Much more often it is the consequence of role ambiguity. Let’s re-take Monique’s example. As we’ve seen, she deals with uncertainty, risks, and ambiguity daily. This inevitably makes her think: “Wait a minute. What will happen if I am wrong if my predictions are wrong? I will become a complete failure!”. And what happens next? Monique tries to avoid this by working more and more. Sometimes this kind of strategy can help. But much more often this leads to pointless overwork that only perpetuates the problem.
In other words, even when entrepreneurs do have symptoms of overwork (exhaustion, lack of motivation, etc.) they will be much better off if they increased their tolerance to ambiguity. Attenuating symptoms of overwork would be, in this context at least, like trying to cure tuberculosis with throat tablets. This leads to our next theme.
Small Business Owners Face More Stress Than Managers
Buttner, writing for the Journal of Managerial Issues, mentions a plethora of studies that found significant differences between entrepreneurs and managers. Not only do these professions face different sorts of challenges and risks, but entrepreneurs face more stressful situations more frequently, as these studies have unambiguously shown.
Let’s see more specifically what these people have to face:
- Investing their savings, and risking to lose these assets
- Boundary spanning activities
- Interacting with external constituencies
Managers, at the end of the day, always have someone above them, which structures their work and puts it into perspective. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, have to make sense of everything that happens to their business, which, let’s emphasize this point once again, takes a lot of tolerance to ambiguity and risk.