Small and medium-sized business (SMB) as a special type of economic activity and one of the levers of the national economy functioning is being recognized by leading economies as a key form of business. However, in most cases, the development of SMB depends on the features of government support and tax preferences. At the same time, human resources are considered to be the most valuable assets in meeting the economic challenges. Therefore, the current study dwells on the ways for SMB to overcome the challenges utilizing human resources leadership potential development since human resources determine either integral or inconsistent nature of any business activity. The current paper presents the research results on the leadership potential development and its impact on the performance of SMB. On top of that the authors have determined some indicators to measure leadership potential of the country's economy and establish the correlation between the SMB development index, the ease of doing business index, and the human development index. The methodological foundation of the research is a system of general scientific and special methods applied to investigate the impact of leadership potential phenomenon on the performance of small and medium-sized enterprises. The following methods have particularly been applied: the general method of comparing followed by generalization-to specify and formalize the essence of the concept; correlation and regression analysis-to build multifactorial regression models, to calculate the predictable characteristics of leadership potential integral indicators for each subsystem, to determine the degree of leadership potential influence on the performance of SMB; the graphical-analytical method-to provide visual clarity of the material and schematic representation of some theoretical and practical provisions of the current study. In order to perform the complex analysis of the research results, the computer-aided data processing methods have been applied, performed via Microsoft Excel, STATISTICA software. The statistical materials of the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, official publications of international organizations, expert evaluations of rating agencies, monographs, fundamental scientific developments of Ukrainian and foreign authors, materials of scientific conferences, national and foreign publications, electronic resources on the Internet have been the information database of the current study [7-10].

It is argued that the educational process in elementary school in this period was innovative, namely: in the organization (transition to the semester education system, reducing the school year and increasing the length of the holidays; restructuring the school week, reducing the lesson’s duration to 40 minutes, the opportunity to receive primary education in the individual form of education); in teaching methods (improvement and adaptation of traditional methods to new goals and content of primary education, distribution of the game, testing the method of art projects); in the forms of educating organization (a variety of lessons on the content, structure and methods of activity, the distribution of non-standard lessons, as well as excursions and competitions, the introduction of integrated lessons; the elimination of homework in the 1st class); in monitoring and evaluation (introduction of tests; introduction of final certification at the end of the year and since 2000 - state final certification for pupils of 3 (4) classes; transition to verbal evaluation in 1st class; transfer of all students to the next class regardless of the grades, which made it possible to eliminate the phenomenon of “repetition”; since 2001 - the introduction of a 12-point assessment system; the conclusion of the assessment for the behavior of the category of "mandatory").

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