Moving from entrepreneur to leader — Edexcel A-Level Business
Test yourself on Moving from entrepreneur to leader with PEARSON EDEXCEL A-Level practice questions.
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Moving from entrepreneur to leader explained
Founding a business rewards one set of behaviours and running a larger one rewards almost the opposite, which is why so many founders stall at the point their firm outgrows them.
Read the full explanation
The doing has to become delegating, and a founder who checks every invoice becomes the bottleneck as the span of control widens. Instinct has to give way to systems, budgets, appraisal and recruitment policy. Greiner's growth model calls this the crisis of leadership, resolved by hiring professional managers, followed by a crisis of autonomy when those managers resent being overruled. Tannenbaum and Schmidt describe the same journey as a slide from telling towards delegating, and Kotter and Schlesinger explain why longstanding staff resist the formality that arrives with it. Greiner is blind to firms that never grow, to industry differences and to founders who simply sell up or step aside.
Your focus
- a) The difficulties in developing from an entrepreneur to a leader
Moving from entrepreneur to leader exam tips
Marking Points
- Contrast the skills that built the business, risk taking, selling and improvisation, with those a larger organisation needs, delegation, planning, communication and people management.
- Apply a named model such as Greiner, Tannenbaum and Schmidt, or Handy's culture types, and use it to explain the specific pressure the case founder is under.
- Identify the practical symptoms in the extract, for example slower decisions, rising labour turnover, quality complaints or a founder still approving every order.
- Evaluate the options, such as recruiting an experienced managing director, restructuring into departments or the founder retraining, and weigh cost, speed and the founder's own objectives.
Examiner Tips
- 💡This is a favourite twenty mark question at the end of Theme One, usually phrased around whether the founder should step back or bring in professional management.
- 💡Show what your chosen model cannot see; saying that Greiner assumes steady growth and ignores an external shock is exactly the evaluation the top band asks for.
- 💡Use the human resources evidence in the extract, such as labour turnover or absence, as proof the transition is failing rather than as a separate point.
Common Mistakes
- Describing the traits of an entrepreneur and the traits of a leader as two lists, with no account of why moving between them is hard for this particular founder.
- Assuming the founder must always hand over control, when in many owner managed firms the personal style is the source of competitive advantage and customer loyalty.
- Naming Greiner without using it, so the phases are recited and never linked to the evidence in the extract.