Built for Growth Helps You Find Your Entrepreneurial Personality

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win explores the link between personality and business growth. The book claims that most entrepreneurs fit into one of four “Builder Personality” profiles. These four profiles serve as a psychological roadmap that entrepreneurs can use to leverage their personality traits into growing their business at a level they never expected.

What is Built for Growth About?

Most of people might expect entrepreneurs, especially of startups, to be pretty much the same psychologically. They expect them to be bold, aggressive and driven. They envision them working 16-hour days shaping their business idea into reality.

The reality is a bit different. There are successful entrepreneurs who are introverts. There are successful entrepreneurs who aren’t charismatic speakers but inspire their audience in the same way as an extroverted leader can.

Built for Growth explores these different types of entrepreneurial personalities. It seperates the key characteristics of most entrepreneurs, like any good psychological profile would, into four major ”Builder Personality” profiles. The primary purpose of these profiles is to help business owners understand how they interact and how they can leverage that insight to help their businesses grow.

As Built for Growth points out, business leaders develop businesses that reflect their personality. If you are a “Driver” type (one of the Builder Personality profiles in the book, your business will not look the same as another Builder Personality, like a “Captain” or a “Crusader.”

The irony is that most promising entrepreneurs believe they need to copy the personality of a successful leader to achieve success. They assume they need to be as demanding as Steve Jobs or as technically skilled as Bill Gates.

Built for Growth explains why leaders fail in this approach. By imitating the personality of other business leaders, they rob themselves of the opportunity to leverage their own personalities. Every personality has strengths that can be leveraged to make a great business. By tapping into those strengths, entrepreneurs can better use their time and energy. By understanding and leveraging the strengths of other people in the business (workers, investors, etc.), entrepreneurs can learn to scale their success to an even higher level.

Built for Growth is the work of two thought leaders in the worlds of entrepreneurship and leadership.

Chris Kuenne is the founder and managing director of Rosemark Smart Capital, a private equity firm he created after selling his previous digital marketing agency, Rosetta for $575 million to Publicis Groupe. Kuenne is also a lecturer at Princeton University on technology and entrepreneurship.

John Danner is an advisor, innovation strategist, professor and keynote speaker with expertise in leadership, entrepreneurship and strategic innovation.

What Was Best About Built for Growth?

Built for Growth makes a compelling argument for bringing more psychological awareness to the discussion of leadership. Leaders assume that their personality has to fit a certain narrowly defined mold. This book challenges that assumption. It argues that every personality type has strengths that can be leveraged for business success. On top of that, it argues that every personality type can be leveraged to grow a business.

What Could Have Been Done Differently?

Whenever you make a book based on personality “types” you immediately run into a problem. People and situations don’t fit so neatly into categories. Some readers might find that they don’t fit into the book’s categories or might fit into more than one category. The book attempts to address this with some discussion on people who fit into two categories. This may not go far enough because some readers might find they have featured in three or four categories. How should readers in those situations proceed?

Why Read Built for Growth?

Built for Growth is a book that challenges the belief that you need to be an extroverted, hard-driving, numbers-focused person to be a successful entrepreneur. Instead, you only need to leverage the personality that you already have to build and grow your business. It doesn’t matter if you are an introvert, focused more on the mission part of your business (versus your finances), or have a very technical-oriented background, you have strengths to leverage to take charge of your business.

The book analyzes the major features of four personality types. Through these “Builder Personality” profiles, entrepreneurs learn how to leverage the strengths of their personalities into greater business results. Built for Growth helps leaders learn how to leverage their personality types for their own personal success, but also for the success of their internal and external customers. Using the book’s insights, readers can transform personality traits into profitable and long-lasting results.

This article, "Built for Growth Helps You Find Your Entrepreneurial Personality" was first published on Small Business Trends