How you behave trumps the skills you offer in business: Pandora's Jane Huxley - Women's Agenda

How you behave trumps the skills you offer in business: Pandora’s Jane Huxley

I was recently called on to deliver a short keynote address to a group of college students who were about to embark on various creative careers. Specifically, the other speakers and I were asked to relate tales of our own entrepreneurial journeys, in a bid to inspire these thirsty young minds.

I hit a blank. Having spent most of my career working for large organisations, I struggled to find the “starving in a tower” tale or “rags to riches by 26” analogy that I thought they were looking for. And then, it came to me. It’s true I am not an entrepreneur by definition; but I am in fact, an Intrepreneur.

An intrepreneur is someone who has worked as an employee of a larger organisation, with the freedom and financial support to build new products and services without having to follow the usual protocols. I’ve been lucky enough to build a career working as an intrepreneur inside other people’s businesses. While the journeys may be different, what binds together the entrepreneur and the intrepreneur are the behaviours exhibited by the individuals. As social media and sites such as LinkedIn and RecruitLoop completely disrupt the traditional hiring techniques such as CV’s, references and interviews, employers are turning now to behaviours rather than skills to determine a great fitting employee for their organisation. And it is here that the behaviours of the entre/intrepreneur will help to sort the great from the good.

I believe there are many specific behaviours that make up the skill set required to be successful inside a large company or in your own start up, but let’s start with these four:

  1. Can you work with ambiguity?

    Working with ambiguity is difficult. It’s where there are no answers to your questions, no blueprint, no direction and nobody there to tell you what to do as you start your day. The ability to work with ambiguity is probably the most critical skill an entrepreneur or intrepreneur can develop.

    Envisioning where you want to be in three years’ time is one thing, but how you’ll get there can be anybody’s guess. The ability to see that as an exciting challenge is critical. It can be enormously empowering, but not everyone feels that way. Before embarking on your entrepreneurial quest, it’s imperative you assess your ability to work with ambiguity, because there’s going to be a lot of it. Questions with no answers, except those you create.

  2. Are you self motivated?

    There’s no one getting you out of bed in the morning except you, but it’s still a business, and everything in business is measured. For this reason, it’s critical that you are able to self-motivate. If you’re easily distracted, it’s crucial to develop a system that will help keep you on track. For me, it’s creating lists of everything that needs to be done and literally ticking off each item and holding myself accountable to each day’s tasks.

  3. Do you understand resilience?

    It’s really tough being an entrepreneur or intrepreneur. There are days you feel like everyone is attacking you, you are not getting the job done, you’re not making the progress you think you should be. In most respects resilience is related to the competitors you find in the market. They get out of bed every day wanting you to starve. They might have deep pockets, a great idea or great connections, so you need to be resilient enough to get back up and keep fighting.

    When you get knocked down, there is nobody there with a hand out to pull you back up, so you need the capacity to do it yourself.

  4. Playing the long game

    This is what keeps me going every single day in my current job. Keeping your eye on the long-term prize will help you feel a lot less frustrated with the small decisions you need to make daily. If you focus your energy on the ultimate goal, you’ll find it significantly easier to continue taking the small steps it takes to achieve it. Understanding what milestones look like is essential to meeting them in your plan.

There are many more I could add to this list – agility, flexibility, self-awareness; confidence …the list goes on. What is critical is to understand that to the next generation of entrepreneurs or intrepreneurs it’s not going to be about what you do, as much as it will be about how you do it.

And this is the essence of why, as we move forward, behaviours will begin to trump skills, every time.

Huxley spoke about these behaviours at Macleay College’s inaugural Entrepreneurs Forum last week.

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