Babson Profs Unveil First Model For Entrepreneurial Leadership

Before Alex Stoddard was a music producer and filmmaker, he was a college basketball player. His coach, he says, modeled a kind of leadership that stuck with him: “Communication, reflection, and building meaningful relationships that extended beyond the court.”

It’s a similar philosophy he encountered through Babson College’s Entrepreneurial Leadership model, which is embedded across several Babson courses and lessons and is the subject of a new research paper from three Babson professors.

The first-of-its-kind conceptual model redefines leadership by focusing on neuroscience, emotional intelligence, and relationships instead of the traditional “hero” leader approach. It’s the first to distinguish entrepreneurial leadership from other theories, showing that effective leaders succeed through collaboration and strong relationships, not just individual drive.

A NEW LEADERSHIP MODEL

“It has deepened my understanding of entrepreneurial leadership by highlighting the importance of thinking outside the box and not being limited by traditional solutions,” says Stoddard, a Class of 2025 Master of Science in Management in Entrepreneurial Leadership candidate at Babson. “I now more clearly recognize how critical emotional intelligence, conflict management, and deep connection are in driving team effectiveness and authentic leadership.”

In January, six Babson professors – including Scott Taylor, Danna Greenberg, and Andrew Corbett – published “A Conceptual Model of Entrepreneurial Leadership” in The International Entrepreneurship and Management Journal. The model explains how leaders and their teams can work together by tapping into motivation to pursue entrepreneurial goals. Co-authors Wendy Murphy, Keith Rollag, and Jeffrey Shay also contributed.

It builds upon research in entrepreneurial leadership since 2011.

“It starts from a deep understanding of who you are and an awareness of your team and having your own entrepreneurial mindset,” says Danna Greenberg, the Walter H. Carpenter Professor of Organizational Behavior at Babson. “And if you do that, you’re able to work with your team in a way that motivates them and engages them. It excites them to also be entrepreneurial and, together, you can pursue that opportunity.”

The research project really started with Taylor, who spent his sabbatical year combing through everything written on entrepreneurial leadership – across disciplines, theories, and schools of thought. He realized first that most of the existing definitions were focused on the leader – the entrepreneur acting as hero – with little scholarship exploring the relational aspects of leaders and follower. He also noticed glaring omissions.

“There’s a lot that’s happened in the study of human performance and behavior that integrates neuroscience, psychology, and social psychology that really had not been brought into entrepreneurial leadership research or writing,” says Taylor, an organizational behavior professor and Babson’s Arthur M. Blank Endowed Chair for Values-Based Leadership.

A MODEL BUILT ON THE BRAIN

Entrepreneurial leadership as a concept isn’t necessarily new. But it’s often an afterthought, something tacked onto traditional theories of leadership or entrepreneurship, depending on who was doing the writing or the teaching, the authors say. Babson’s model aims to fully integrate the two.

“We definitely think about it as a collaborative effort,” says Greenberg. “An entrepreneurial leader, one of the key ways they differ from a traditional view of an entrepreneur, is they’re bringing a team along.”

According to the model, entrepreneurial leadership happens when someone with a high degree of emotional and social competence – empathy, self-awareness, adaptability – combines that with an entrepreneurial mindset and uses the relationship with their team to unleash intrinsic motivation. That motivation, in turn, fuels creativity, innovation, and shared risk-taking.

The model also incorporates neurological research from Anthony Jack, an experimental psychologist at Case Western Reserve University. Jack’s research shows that the two brain networks responsible for analytical problem solving and empathetic thinking can’t activate at the same time. When one turns on, the other switches off.

“When you are being analytical, solving problems, focusing your attention, you’re activating what’s called the task positive network. And when you do that, you’re actually suppressing the empathetic cognition, or what’s often referred to as the default mode network,” Taylor says. “That network is critical to self-awareness, moral reasoning, pro-social behavior, openness to others, creativity and innovation.”

Entrepreneurial leaders, he argues, have to be skilled at toggling between these two networks.

BUT CAN YOU TEACH IT?

A cornerstone of Babson’s approach is the belief that these abilities – emotional intelligence, toggling between brain networks, relational awareness – can be taught, not just theorized.

“I don’t think we’d come up with any model if we didn’t believe it can be learned,” Greenberg says.

Babson has launched four new courses using the model. It has also retooled five existing courses such as its signature undergrad Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship (FME). The college is further developing asynchronous modules and building out its master’s program in entrepreneurial leadership.

The key, Greenberg says, is giving students repeated opportunities to practice moving between the creative and analytical mindsets, and to do so in messy, real-world situations. That includes moments of failure, discomfort, and conflict.

“You have to create real situations where they have to work together over longer periods of time, where they actually make mistakes, and where they have to learn from that mistake,” she says. “As faculty, we know how to teach them through that. Because you’re not going to learn any of this just by reading about it.”

EMPATHETIC LEADERS

Taylor and Greenberg see their new model as not only a Babson signature, but one that other schools use, built upon, and test its results. The complex problems the world faces – the climate crisis, human inequity, geopolitical clashes – require collaborative leadership.

“We don’t think the issue is an inability to solve complex problems. We think it’s an issue that the leadership models being operationalized aren’t sufficient,” Taylor says.

Greenberg agrees. “If it’s us teaching it, or if it’s other people teaching it, we just need more people out there doing it.”

Before Babson, Shenaya “Nay” Martin Johnson saw leadership as bold action: being brave, taking initiative, and creating change. That mindset drove her to move across the country after college, serve in AmeriCorps, and eventually found her own nonprofit. But it wasn’t until Professor Scott Taylor’s Entrepreneurial Leadership course that her perspective evolved.

“I realized that effective leadership does not stem solely from bravery or individual action, but from the positive relationships we cultivate and the feedback we receive from others,” says Johnson, a student in the one-year MBA at Babson with a concentration in entrepreneurship. She is also founder of Zooming Moms, Inc., a global nonprofit support club for mothers, and Moms@Babson, a student organization she launched to build community on campus. As a mother, MBA student, and social worker living with multiple sclerosis, she brings a deeply personal lens to the idea of resilience and relational leadership.

‘ROLLING THE BALL & WATCHING WHERE IT GOES’

The Entrepreneurial Leadership model gives her a framework for rebuilding how she leads teams and projects. She has resigned from jobs where leadership lacked empathy, especially during the traumatic loss of her twins in premature labor. As a leader, she wants to create space for her and her team to grow together.

Johnson now applies EL principles across her ventures, including Moms@Babson. Her leadership style emphasizes adaptability, experimentation, and what she calls “rolling the ball and watching where it goes.” She leads by trusting her instincts, building relationships, and learning along the way.

“You do not have to concentrate on entrepreneurship to become an entrepreneurial leader. Being an entrepreneurial leader is valuable in any industry and position, especially if you have to manage teams,” she says.

“Being an entrepreneurial leader means being open to where the journey or project might lead, even if it isn’t exactly what you expected or planned for. Take the risk to make the change and strive to become the leader you wish you had when you needed leadership.”

Read the full paper: “A Conceptual Model of Entrepreneurial Leadership: How Entrepreneurial Leaders Enable Entrepreneurial Opportunity” 

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