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Dear colleagues,

I am looking for research on leadership challenges that social entrepreneurs face when trying to balance their ideal and the reality they operate in.

I am a practitioner, currently in the process of co-founding a leadership training company, and we are interviewing social entrepreneurs to test our hypothesis regarding the needs of our potential customers. Below I am providing a sample story we captured to give you an idea of what we are looking for.

Is there any rigorous research, especially focusing on US social entrepreneurs, that would help us as practitioners better understand how important the issue of balancing ideal and reality is for social entrepreneurs, how this issue manifests in their practice, and what strategies they use to address related challenges? I would appreciate your referrals, and could also consider ideas for scholar-practitioner collaboration in this area.

Cordially,

Fedor Ovchinnikov

Co-Founder, Institute for Evolutionary Leadership

Director of Practitioner Empowerment, Academy of Management Practice Theme Committee

Past Chair of the Communications Committee, Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division

P.S. Interview Response Sample (name and type of business removed for confidentiality reasons)

We talk to local businesses about how our collaboration could benefit them, meaning that they could have more profits. And then we also say that they could get a community and other non-monetary benefits for free. We have to speak language that they understand. If you start asking people to make a monetary sacrifice for the ideal, the response rate would be very low. If our clients have to give up some of their profits in order to stay in collaboration with us, we would probably have zero (or at least no more than five) businesses who would do it.

Internal struggle though is even more important for us than external. We are self-funded, so we are trying to reach a very big objective with very little cash flow (we don’t want to take angel/VC money or money from anyone else focusing on maximizing financial return, but we are looking for grants and thinking about a crowdfunding campaign). Therefore it is very difficult to demand time commitment from team members who are basically not paid for what they do. Since they are not paid, they are only willing to do the easy and sexy work, and nobody wants to do the nitty-gritty hard work that must be done, so I usually end up doing this work myself.

Balancing ideal with reality is always an issue. The ideal is something that excites people, but you cannot start with the ideal, you have to start with where you are. When I try to demand something from my team members, I face a lot of push back, so I don’t have the level of accountability in the team that I need. I am now the only one holding an overall strategic vision, but I still have to do most of the nitty-gritty work myself, which is a real challenge.

I also need a larger team, up to 80 people for the Bay Area. If I get more money, I would hire folks. I would still want them to be aligned with my vision, but the level of this alignment could be lower that I demand from the core team.