It takes courage to become an entrepreneur and even more heroic to become an entrepreneur and a leader. While entrepreneurship relies on a brilliant idea and infinite enthusiasm and motivation to get your idea off the ground, leadership is a different game of cards.
No one has accomplished something great on their own. If you’re only just starting, that may seem hard to believe. You might not realize it initially, but your business idea will eventually become too big for you to handle yourself. Once you’ve made your first sale, then your second, and your third, you may reach a place (if you are lucky) where the workload threatens to outpace you.
It’s time to rise to the challenge. It would help if you transitioned from being an entrepreneur to being a leader — and it’s not going to be easy. Take some time to set both emotional and practical boundaries. As an entrepreneur, you were your company; now, your team will become your company. Don’t try to hold all of the power and responsibility, as that will only lead to you burning out.
But who teaches leadership? To answer the question: Comparing leadership educators across both curricular and co-curricular contexts allows a snapshot of the diverse perspectives of leadership educators. It informs a set of critical questions and challenges for the field.
Without going into the academic details, we found the answer to the question of who teaches leadership by simply looking around ourselves. People who have knowledge about something and want others to utilize it by giving it away to those who could use that knowledge in a better way to bring better change in the world are called teaching.
Teachers who know the impact of first doing what they are teaching others is what we call leading; hence leaders are considered the best teachers. One of the leaders we admire the most is the inspiration for our write-up today; he is Daniel Marcos.
Marcos is the co-founder and CEO of Growth Institute, the leading online executive education company for C-level executives at fast-growing firms. He is a keynote speaker and a CEO Coach with a mission to help 1 million entrepreneurs.
Additionally, Daniel is the CEO of ExO Education in partnership with Salim Ismail and serves as the Ambassador of Singularity University in Austin, TX. He is a member of YPO and EO. As a serial entrepreneur, Marcos quickly realized that CEOs are often the company’s bottleneck. In the same way, you can’t solve a problem without first elevating your mindset, and a business can’t evolve beyond what the CEO can handle. So it is the responsibility of the business leaders to be constantly educated with the best worldwide tools and be in a community of peers to be the leaders their companies need.
Marcos is on a mission to give executives the support and methodologies he wishes he had in his entrepreneurial journey—being a good leader, successfully scaling companies, and maintaining a high quality of life. Being a leading figure in the business world, Marcos has always made sure that he teaches people around him about all the lessons he has learned in this journey to success.