Claire Koryczan, the Founder and Director of Imagine Beyond, has extensive expertise in creative consultancies, technology, innovation, and HR and brings this into transformative experiences for leaders across the globe. With over two and a half decades of experience, Claire’s unique approach to leadership and management development underpinned by coaching is rooted in her diverse background, which brings insights that catalyse profound, lasting change. Claire’s contributions have resulted in accolades, including nominations as Entrepreneur of the Year in SohoWorks’ Future50, Top Team Leadership Voice by LinkedIn, recognition as one of The Dots Top 100 Rising Stars, a place among Grant Thornton’s Faces of a Vibrant Economy, and nomination as a The Dots Female Trailblazer. Claire Koryczan continues to inspire and empower, leading by example and fostering a culture of limitless potential and creative leadership.
We’ve all met one: a boss, a leader, or a colleague who made us feel motivated, energised, and ready to take on anything. It is likely many of us will have fond memories of thriving under their leadership or working alongside them in collaboration. This type of person walks into a room, turns a seemingly insurmountable situation into an exciting challenge, and takes you with them on that journey. What makes these individuals special? And where does this inspiring energy come from? At Imagine Beyond, this is what we call entrepreneurial leadership. And embracing this leadership style alongside staying open-minded to utilising developments in AI will help future-proof your business.
The Entrepreneurial Leader
Over the course of my career spanning 25 years in people-focused environments, and having spent five building my own business, I’ve taken a lot of time to explore what goes into the making of an entrepreneurial leader. This managerial style and leadership trait is something that we can all tap into in one respect or another – everyone has some of the qualities needed to become a great entrepreneurial leader. You also don’t have to be a business founder or CEO to embody these values; they are very much nestled in your approach to problem-solving and harnessing an innovative mindset. It is, therefore about leaning into where your strengths are, leading with authenticity, and shifting your mindset to view challenges as possible opportunities that help you to gather insight or learn something new that will add value.
Entrepreneurial leadership extends beyond driving revenue, having great ambition, and pioneering ideas; it is about broadening your focus beyond the day-to-day business side of things. These leaders find new ways to add value to both their organisation and their people and have the ability to take a problem and turn it into a chance for positive change. This would be demonstrated, for example, in introducing AI to optimise your business or adopting new ways of working.
Of course, there are many traits that make up an entrepreneurial leadership style. How an individual generates business value while making an impact that drives employee motivation and engagement upward is key.
At Imagine Beyond, we often reference 12 key characteristics that should be considered. These include agility, creativity, curiosity, and tenacity. Leaders who embrace and embody these galvanise their people in the process and truly lead with purpose. This is now more vital than ever in a consistently evolving AI-driven landscape and equally important within the hybrid working set-up that many of us have become familiar with.
The Age of AI
We’ve already seen the impact of technological advancements altering how we work. The integration of AI features to collaborative work management platforms that optimise workload, personalised AI-generated sales content, and over 200 billion AI-powered predictions daily means AI is already immersed within many industries. As artificial intelligence continues to accelerate exponentially, an entrepreneurial mindset will help businesses to naturally find ways of capitalising on and discovering new opportunities rather than becoming paralysed by the fear of the unknown. Entrepreneurial leaders are excited by change and thrive in uncertainty because they find drive in optimism and know they can always figure things out.
In the next decade, it is expected that AI training may grow by upwards of 100 million times faster than Moore’s Law. With the vast rate of innovation we are seeing in AI, even the next five years will look very different. The introduction of leadership and AI coaches is transforming the way businesses seek advice and guidance. AI is truly revolutionising the modern-day workplace and we are just at the very beginning of this journey with chat gpt5 already due out at the end of this year. These developments, when embraced, drive efficiencies that we have never seen before and enable teams and businesses to prosper.
The rapid pace of automation in daily tasks paired with less face-to-face workplace interaction is leaving leaders and their team members feeling more separated than ever before. Leaders have a real opportunity to bring people together and create more connections in the workplace. This can be done by creating environments that are less transactional. It is about strengthening human bonds through interactions and opportunities to get together in person for collaborative learning experiences.
AI is evolving at a pace none of us could have preempted, but it cannot and will not replace human imagination – a superpower we can all harness, especially entrepreneurial leaders. Motivated by variety, this leadership mindset sees individuals curious about a wide range of topics and industries, and this breadth means that they can connect the dots, find new insights, and seek opportunities that others might not.
Entrepreneurial leaders have a higher propensity to risk than the average leader, and because of their openness and depth of perspective, they gather information that helps them to make leaps into new ideas and opportunities. By embracing technological advancements, entrepreneurial leaders can harness the power of AI to add value to their businesses. The benefits of the adoption of such technologies can take varying forms. An example of this could include using AI to optimise energy use in operations and reduce waste, leading to better sustainable practices that reduce the environmental footprint to help businesses meet their targets. Another example could be implementing AI to help provide a more tailored client and customer experience. Some systems can easily identify consumer behaviour and map preferences, allowing for a more customised and targeted approach. Integrating AI into business analytics could also help organisations distil data faster and, therefore, map actions as a result with more pace – the opportunities are truly endless.
This famous quote from Charles Darwin has never been so true as it is relevant now: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, not the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”
By nature, these leaders are able to adapt, adjust, and stay relevant. This, in turn, enables them to move with unplanned and unexpected changes in the environment at an economic, social, and environmental level. This particular style of driving teams forward will undoubtedly, in my view, help to future-proof and sustain businesses in an ever-changing and technologically evolving society.
There has never been a better time to tap into our most creative, innovative, and open-minded leadership traits as our professional and personal worlds become integrated with technology. Efficiencies will be made, and synergies will be uncovered, but one thing that AI cannot deliver yet is the use of imagination in a human capacity.