Why Great Founders Aren’t Always Good CEOs.

There’s something thrilling about choosing entrepreneurship. The possibilities seem endless; the risks, motivating. Every small success and heartbreaking setback constitutes another step on the path towards self-sufficiency and fulfillment. For a young person, building a business from nothing but the bare seed of an idea means achieving a long-held dream of independence and proving once and for all that they can pave their own path in life.

But what happens after the dream comes true and the entrepreneurial happy ending sets in? What comes to pass after the all-nighters end, the incubators close, and a journey that was once one entrepreneur against the world turns into a team effort? What happens when an idea becomes a business?

Some ventures thrive. But too often, they fizzle out like sparks on wet pavement.

You see, the problem with the way we view entrepreneurship is that we see it as a finite journey; a Zuckerberg-esque tale that begins with a scrappy young visionary and ends with a flourishing business. But in reality, getting a business off the ground is only the first and – in some ways – the easiest step. The tricky part lies in scaling those underdog entrepreneurial efforts into a fully-fledged venture. And ironically, the very qualities that make a young hopeful so successful as an aspiring founder – passion, vision, independence, and single-mindedness – can be what holds them back from achieving success as a CEO.

This seemingly counterintuitive disconnect between successful founders and CEOs is not just an issue for individual entrepreneurs, but for the MENA region as a whole. In the space of a few years, we have seen a veritable explosion of entrepreneurial activity, particularly among the youth. In 2015, a report from the employment platform Bayt.com on entrepreneurship in the Middle East found that a full 64% of respondents would prefer running their own business to working for someone else. Findings from a study published in a 2016 report on the subject honed in specifically on the generational data and found that: “Based on a study of 2,834 respondents from mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK, Germany, France, the US, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, the Middle East has the highest proportion of millennial entrepreneurs (63 per cent).” These statistics are significant not only for what they mean for the business landscape now, but for how they could impact it in the future. Moving forward, we stand to see a shift away from traditional career paths up corporate ladders and toward more creative ventures. This influx of entrepreneurship could very well redefine how we navigate the business world in the next decade, and launch the MENA region into a new age of creative productivity. However, this push towards an entrepreneurship renaissance comes with a caveat: unprepared founders inevitably fail as CEOs.

All of the entrepreneurial passion in the world can’t transform an ill-equipped founder into a capable CEO; and once the venture sinks, its potential to make a positive impact is lost. If we intend to make the most out of our Millennials’ efforts, we need to reframe the narrative around the entrepreneurial journey itself by looking beyond the product or pitch to the human-centered business beyond.

In my work as a business consultant and mentor, I’ve done quite a bit of work with incubators and seen some truly incredible ideas take root. But I’ve also seen some of those same creative projects wither outside of incubation as a result of a founder’s inability to scale. You see, incubators can teach an aspiring entrepreneur the skills they need to launch the business: how to take a venture from concept to creation, build a strategy, or analyze a target market. But once launched, these ventures need more than a strong product to thrive. At their most basic foundations, businesses are human-centered organizations that require emotionally-intelligent leadership and direction.

This is where founders falter. To initiate a business, a founder needs to be the one in control; to know the product inside and out and maintain a vision for the future. That single-minded passion for the project is what inspires investors and gathers team members. But once the business gets off the ground, the very qualities that made an entrepreneur a phenomenal founder can bring the venture crashing down. A good CEO is resilient, courageous, flexible, and able to delegate. Unlike founders, they can’t hold their ideas to their chest, assume all tasks themselves, or ignore team advice; being inflexible and holding onto a failing vision is the surest way to sink a business’s potential. An effective founder-turned-CEO learns how to let go and focus on bigger-picture goals rather than day-to-day minutiae. As investor and leadership coach John Hamm so aptly puts it in an article on the subject: “Working in isolation is fine for the brilliant scientist focused on an ingenious idea. But it’s disastrous for a leader whose burgeoning organization must rely on the kindness of customers, investors, analysts, reporters, and other strangers.”

As it stands now, we can give our young entrepreneurs the skills they need to draft a business plan or prepare a pitch. But what good will our aid do in the long run if the business crashes because its founder lacks the leadership skills he needs to guide it? We need to start reframing entrepreneurship as the human-centered endeavor it is, and give more thought to how we can prepare our founders to be emotionally intelligent leaders. If we do so, we won’t just help individual businesses achieve their potential, but also set entrepreneurs on a path towards success beyond the venture at hand. Entrepreneurship may be most often perceived as a project-based job, but it’s also a philosophy: the choice to determine one’s own career path. Once they possess a CEO’s leadership skills, entrepreneurs’ options truly are boundless. They have the capacity to leave one independent project for the sake of furthering a public program, or even try their hands in the corporate sphere. By giving our young founders the leadership tools they need to thrive as CEOs, we offer them something far more valuable than any one project: the freedom and means to determine their own futures. And isn’t that, at its heart, what entrepreneurship is all about?