How Social Ventures Can Leverage Leaders’ Inner Development
As social entrepreneurs develop their businesses, the Inner Development Guide is a useful ally in the development of community-based and social ventures—and the leaders who run them.
Partner and CEO of Junxion, Mike has spent more than 20 years working to catalyse social responsibility and sustainability.
I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of time supporting entrepreneurs. Through my work at Junxion Strategy, Social Venture Institute, as a B Corp Ambassador, and as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, I’ve observed time and again that the path of entrepreneurship is one of both venture and personal development.
Many entrepreneurs are surprised by the personal growth and development their entrepreneurship requires. Particularly for first-time entrepreneurs, the venture is so often an extension of the founder’s psyche, which means it’s a fundamentally personal expression. This can be both a profound source of passion and a hindrance to sustainable growth. Separating them is neither instinctive nor easy.
The Inner Development Goals (IDGs) are often presented as a leadership framework for “big systems change.” But I’ve come to see them as something more grounded and practical: a useful support to founders who are building purposeful, community-based social enterprises and social ventures.
What are the IDGs?
The IDGs grew out of a simple but profound insight: we will not achieve the Sustainable Development Goals with the same inner capacities that created today’s crises. The IDGs translate a vast body of leadership and psychological research into 25 skills across five dimensions: Being, Thinking, Relating, Collaborating, and Acting.
The skills connect personal growth with organizational and community leadership, and systemic change.
For social enterprises, these five dimensions offer an inner operating system for strategy, leadership and culture.
Leverage the IDGs for Enterprise Performance
Each IDG pillar names specific inner skills that social entrepreneurs can intentionally cultivate and then translate into governance, community engagement, and organizational development and growth.
Being
Being is about our relationship to self—the inner compass, self-awareness, presence, and integrity. For social entrepreneurs, this means staying rooted in the values and lived experiences that gave rise to the venture in the first place, even as funding pressures, growth opportunities, or political shifts pull in other directions. In practice, ‘Being’ requires regular reflection time, using coaching or peer circles to surface triggers and blind spots, and monitoring outer activities for their alignment with deeply held values.
Thinking
Thinking in the IDG Guide is about cognitive skills—critical thinking, perspective-taking, systems and complexity awareness. For social entrepreneurs, this is the capacity to see how issues like housing policy, local wages, climate impacts, and cultural norms all intersect in the lives of the people they serve, and to design business models and contemplate decisions accordingly. When leaders strengthen their Thinking capacities, they move beyond “project mentality” and start to spot leverage points—policy changes, partnerships, or ownership structures—that can shift whole local systems, not just deliver isolated programs.
Relating
Relating emphasizes empathy and compassion, humility, and appreciation—qualities that are foundational for listening deeply to local voices and recognizing lived experience as expertise. For the social entrepreneur, this is inner work: it means learning to quiet the impulse to ‘fix,’ to notice one’s own assumptions and biases, and to cultivate a genuine curiosity about how neighbours understand both the problems and the possibilities in their community.
Strategically, this reshapes how the enterprise defines value, designs programs or products, and evaluates success, shifting from ‘for the community’ to ‘with the community’ as a non-negotiable standard. In turn, community impact becomes more authentic and durable, because people can see their own stories, priorities, and wisdom reflected in the decisions the enterprise makes and the outcomes it pursues.
Collaborating
Collaborating highlights communication, inclusive decision-making, and communication skills, all of which are essential for a social entrepreneur bringing together community members, staff, volunteers, funders, and partners around the same table. On the inside, the entrepreneur is called to develop patience, transparency, and the ability to hold tension without rushing to easy consensus—learning to share power, invite dissent, and stay in relationships when things get hard.
At the enterprise level, this translates into governance and operational structures that make room for many voices: community advisory groups, participatory budgeting, co-design processes, and clear, accessible channels for feedback and accountability. The result is community impact that is co-owned rather than delivered—initiatives that people will defend, adapt, and sustain over time because they helped to shape them.
Acting
The Acting dimension is where inner work becomes visible—courage, perseverance, optimism, and a bias toward meaningful action. For a social entrepreneur, this shows up in decisions like piloting a community ownership model before it’s “proven,” standing firm on fair pricing even when competitors undercut, or publicly reporting impact—including the uncomfortable gaps.
Acting often involves setting explicit ‘courage commitments’ with colleagues—specific, time-bound moves that align to the organization’s purpose, such as shifting a percentage of contracts to local suppliers or adding community seats to a board of directors. Leaders who cultivate this dimension are more likely to take bold, values-aligned risks and to persist when experiments don’t work the first time, treating setbacks as learning loops rather than signs to retreat.
From ‘Why’ to ‘How’
In the context of social entrepreneurship, the IDGs are an invaluable guide to implementing the organization’s purpose—it’s ‘why.’ Purpose pulls businesses from shareholder-centricity, past stakeholder-centricity, to a centering of collective wellbeing. Profit becomes a means and a consequence, not the primary aim. This has always been the essence of social entrepreneurship; it is now coming into mainstream business discourse, particularly in light of an upcoming ISO standard for purpose-driven organizations.
For community-based social enterprises, purpose maps closely onto community economic development: using business tools to advance economic, social, ecological, and cultural wellbeing in a specific place. Or put another way, using a market-based mechanism to help solve for a societal shortfall.
Purpose clarifies to whom the enterprise is accountable; the IDGs help clarify how that accountability is lived day-to-day, in governance, partnerships, hiring, capital decisions, and in defining metrics of success. A founder who can name both their social purpose and the inner capacities they must cultivate to bring about that purpose is far more likely to make aligned decisions about strategy, structure, and scale.
IDGs as Mirror, Map, and Bridge
As a mirror, the IDGs help founders, staff, and boards see where their current habits support or undermine the community’s stated aspirations—how they listen, who gets a voice, how conflict is handled, and whose wellbeing is prioritized.
As a map, they point to specific practices that build the leadership needed for community wealth building: shared ownership, anchor partnerships, inclusive governance, and durable cross-sector collaboration.
As a bridge, they connect individual practices—reflection, coaching, peer circles, etc.—back to the broader project of transforming local economies to be more democratic, equitable, and regenerative.
There are, of course, cautions. Any attempt to list skills of leadership can be misused as a checklist or a badge—something to signal virtue rather than to guide deep, often uncomfortable, personal work. The opportunity is to hold the IDGs lightly but seriously—as a living guide to enterprise development, priority refinement, and for embedding practices in the rhythms of the venture.
Anchored in clear social purpose, and nurtured through communities like Social Venture Institute, Greater Purpose, and the global network of B Corps, the Inner Development Goals can help founders grow enterprises that are not only resilient and innovative, but genuinely in service to shared flourishing in the places they call home. As the IDG Foundation likes to say, this is ‘inner work for outer change.’
Ready to embrace a new model of leadership? Get in touch to learn more about leveraging the Inner Development Goals for enterprise development and growth.
