Entrepreneurial Qualities survey results
Survey says???
First of all, let me give a hearty “Thank You” for everyone that took the time to participate in this survey. I got some great input, validated some thoughts while having others challenged, and had some fun in the process. What more could you ask for?
So I’ll quickly run through the nature of the responses and my thought process on making sense of them. Then we’ll talk about some obvious conclusions, some not so obvious conclusions and comments left by the respondents. Lastly, my personal comments and where to go from here.
The responses
Posting a comment in the “I love Startups” LinkedIn group generated some international responses. You can see the breakdown in the graphic. While the majority of the responses were from The States (58%), the remaining votes were from other countries. It’s fun to see social networking in action, and I like mixing in responses from countries other than our own. It feels like it makes the overall results stand on a better foundation.
We also had a nice breakdown around how respondents categorized themselves. Again, the majority were in the target group we were looking for (entrepreneurs), but we did have a few other respondents.
As you remember, the survey listed a number of personality traits or qualities, and I asked you to rate each as “necessary”, “supporting”, or “not an entrepreneurial quality”. There were some very clear breakdowns in the results.
The obvious results
There are certainly some very obvious results from the survey. Any quality that received a majority of votes one way or another is the first cut at the responses I took. With 19 votes, I took majority to be 15 votes or more (80%). Given that threshold, our necessary entrepreneurial traits are:
- Commitment
- Communication
- Competence
- Courage
- Focus
- Hard working
- Initiative
- Passion
- Positive attitude
- Vision
Interestingly, there were no qualities that were clearly supporting entrepreneurial qualities, meaning not a single quality received fifteen or more votes indicating it as a supporting quality. The traits then that received a split of responses over necessary and supporting are:
- Character
- Charisma
- Coachability
- Curiosity
- Creativity
- Discernment / Objectivity
- Discipline
- Faith
- Flexibility
- Independence
- Resilience
- Security
Of these qualities, Discipline and Resilience came very close to the fifteen vote threshold to be considered necessary traits.
Your input
Probably the best part of the survey and maybe the biggest surprise, was the number of comments that got left. In no particular order, here are the basics of comments left:
- Risk-taker
- Innovation, Self-starter, Self-motivator
- Honesty, integrity and ethics for long term success
- Leadership and a customer-centric culture
- Trust-building
- “Hallucenogenically optimistic”
- Eye for detail yet systemic viewpoint, stubborn yet helpful, logical
- Able to seek advice and make decisions, out of the box thinker, able to prioritize and manage schedules
- Perseverance, humor, enjoys change and challenge, self efficacy
- Educated, experienced and personable
- Connected
Some great comments in here. Thank you everybody.
Next Steps
A few things came through crystal clear on this short survey. First, some clear consensus developed around a core group of qualities being “necessary” for entrepreneurship. Not that you must possess all of them to be a successful entrepreneur, but certainly possessing a good majority of them should raise your chances of success.
Next, we identified another group of qualities that respondents were split on. My tendency is to think this supports them being considered supporting qualities, but I want to think on this a bit.
Lastly, I got some great comments identifying other qualities to consider. In some cases they were simply different names for qualities already in the survey, in other cases they were definitely qualities that should be added.
So it’s not back to the drawing board, but I do want to give some thought to the next step for this little project. As I think through the results over the next week or so, I’ll be posting my observations, comments and insights. Much of what was submitted via the survey matches what I observe when working with entrepreneurs, but there were some differences also. So I’ll involve you in my thought process on how to move this forward and I look forward to your comments also.
Comments?
Now over to you. Do the results make sense to you? Anything that jumps out as surprising or out of whack? What is your suggestion for moving this forward?
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