Entrepreneurial leadership: Putting the “U” in team

Entrepreneurial firms, due to their size and limited resources, are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent. These challenges place the firm’s survival and success in jeopardy, as they waste resources on talent management and operate amid talent shortfalls. Simply put, in the scale-up phase, managing talent could be the most important activity entrepreneurs pursue. While entrepreneurs cannot eliminate their strategic shortcomings (e.g., prestige, the ability to pay top salaries), they can take advantage of their unique strengths (e.g., a more intimate environment, job flexibility, and greater opportunities for growth, advancement, and leadership) to make themselves more competitive among candidates not necesarily destined for large corporations. In this article, drawing upon the lessons of best practice and theory, we make three recommendations for entrepreneurial hiring managers: (1) treat all prospective employees as transformative organizational members, (2) recognize and embrace the contributions of all, and (3) make new and established employees consistently feel valued. While these lessons allow all managers to display their organizational strengths, they provide the best return on investment for those with the greatest hiring challenges: entrepreneurs.