Have you heard the quote ‘the fish rots from the head?’ This is a descriptive way of explaining that if an organization’s leadership is rotten, their attitude will affect everyone else in the organization. 

To thrive as an entrepreneur, you will have to collaborate with others, whether it’s external vendors or a team you hire. This blog is all about what kind of environment you are creating for other people to thrive in.

Great Workplaces Don’t Happen by Accident

As women thriving in business, we know the basics an organization needs: mission statements, leadership initiatives, organizational training, accounting, and budgeting. As your business grows, you’ll add team-building or employee appreciation days, make operational changes as your team scales, and find ways to ensure your team knows they are appreciated. 

But starting now, even if your business is a party of one (just you!), you must understand that culture is created every day. How you respond to yourself when you have a deadline, or whether you keep promises to yourself to delegate more or attend more training, will become the foundation of your business. 

Similarly, how you, as the leader, respond when someone makes a mistake matters. The relationships coworkers build matter. How disagreements are repaired within the organization matters. Whether people feel celebrated matters. Even how leaders manage their own stress and emotions affects the people around them.

This is more than whether some people are gossiping. We are not looking to see who shows up late and whether they are prepared (although that is important too). Great leaders do not simply manage people; they intentionally create environments where people can contribute, grow, and thrive. 

The best part is that, as a successful Woman Thriving in Business, you can learn how to create a great workplace. 

Start with Yourself

Great leadership requires women thriving in business to know their boundaries. 

Deciding that you want to create a business is the first step of leadership. You have decided to start a new path, to create something that did not exist before, and this path will not be traveled lightly. You will have to confront yourself often and aggressively, and challenge yourself to see whether you really want to impact the world or whether you will let this business go. 

Plenty of entrepreneurs decide to go back and get jobs working as an employee for another entrepreneur, and there is no shame in that. One of the best ways to set yourself up for success as a woman thriving in business is to know your boundaries. 

In the episode called Collaborative Leadership for Workplace Well-Being, Melba Nicholson Sullivan, Ph.D., explains that “Just because I could do something doesn’t mean I want to do something.” This is so fitting for entrepreneurs, who often believe they have to do everything themselves because they’re the least expensive and most readily available labor. 

• However, why spend 10 hours learning how to update a website when you could pay someone to do it in 45 minutes?
• Why have 40 hours a month bogged down with double your productivity by allowing you to focus on revenue-generating tasks?

Melba’s episode is deeply personal, discussing the challenges of being a clinical community leader and how human rights workers often work in extreme conditions and hours because of the severe importance of their work. 

“Becoming an imperfectionist set me free,” shared Melba Nicholson Sullivan.

Melba enjoys completing work well and doing a good job. Her military background encouraged this, and her clients embrace her precision. However, learning that a job could be done well enough was the lesson that set her free to embrace her high, commanding work ethic. When she decided a task was done, it would far exceed others’ standards, and she had to begin delegating to find peace in entrepreneurship. 

Let’s explore how perfectionism can masquerade as good leadership. A leader might think: I have high standards, but perfectionism can become:

• Difficulty delegating.
• Fear of making decisions.
• Unreasonable expectations.
• An inability to tolerate other people’s approaches.
• Constant stress.
• A workplace where employees become afraid to make mistakes.

Everyone is impacted by perfectionism. Some when it becomes procrastination. Others when it sets impossible standards that no team member (or you) would meet.

A leader’s internal experience will not remain internal because stress travels. Fear travels. Frustration travels. 

And fortunately, calm, trust, curiosity, and compassion can travel too.

Because everyone in a business is impacted by the actions of the leaders, women must be aware that leadership often comes with increased possibilities (also known as increased pressure to say yes. However, capability is not an obligation. No is a complete sentence. Rest is not earned. It is embraced. 

To ensure that you are not overextending yourself, first you need to establish boundaries. What matters to you: eating lunch every day? Having 15 minutes to review your emails in the afternoon? Declining the new project until these five current projects are completed? Do I want to continue working 85 hours a week? Is my micromanagement creating a bottleneck that is slowing progress on these projects? 

Additionally, a woman thriving in business can ask herself:

• Am I the right person to do this?
• Do I actually want this responsibility?
• Does this align with what I’m trying to build?
• What am I willing (and unwilling) to do?
• Would someone else be better positioned to own this?

Again, if you are the only person working in your business right now, you will wear multiple hats for a while. But keep in mind this will not always be the case, and when it is time to hire someone to assist you, you will need to consider these questions when deciding who that first hire will be. 

If you have never considered these questions, don’t worry. You are not the first entrepreneur to start a business without any boundaries and struggle to establish them long after they have burned out. To eliminate burnout so that you can work within your established boundaries, let’s look at ways to build your company culture and respect your boundaries. In the full episode, Collaborative Leadership for Workplace Well-Being and From Awareness to Action: Cultivating an Inclusive Workplace for additional tips and stories about the value of establishing boundaries. 

You Cannot Build Culture Overnight

Culture is cumulative. “Every moment matters. The day-to-day is as important as the big days,” shared Malika Jacobs in the Culture of Success – Focus on Your Team episode of Women Thriving in Business. 

Organizations often want culture to be something they can implement: create the values, announce the initiative, hold the meeting, and expect people to adopt it. Bringing in the DEIB expert, the engagement specialist, or the employee retreat and watching the organization change. This is incorrect and unfair to the people holding those roles. 

Remember: leadership begins with the entrepreneur. Consider how these experiences:

• Hiring and investing in great people is only the beginning of creating a great business culture.
• People need time to develop trust in your organization and its leadership.
• Leaders establish culture through repeated behaviors. Judgment may occur after specific events, but repeated behaviors affect employees as well.
• Employees pay attention to what leaders consistently do—not only what the organization says it values. Daily actions and activities compound for employees.
• Small interactions eventually become expectations about “how we do things here.”
  • There is no denying this. Every employee can mention a thing or two that is standard in the organization’s culture, often outside the company mission statement or code of conduct. This should not be ignored.  

Alow me to challenge you further because all of these examples apply to the solo entrepreneur too. 

• Believing that you are the best person to create and lead this company is the beginning of creating a great business culture.
• You need time to develop trust in yourself and your leadership as a woman thriving in business.
• You will establish your company culture through repeated behaviors. You may have an off day or five, but your repeated behaviors affect how you show up.
• You will pay attention to what you consistently do, not only what you say you do. Daily actions and activities compound as you build self-trust.
• Small interactions eventually become expectations about “how you do things here.”

Ask yourself: What does an ordinary Tuesday in your organization communicate about your culture? Consider whether you would feel comfortable bringing in 400 people to see this culture and how your team would engage or proceed after following your example. This is how entrepreneurs must look at building their business culture, and it all starts with you. 

Thinking about this ordinary Tuesday in your organization may tell you more than the company values displayed on the wall. Listen to Cultivating a Workplace Culture that Works, Culture of Success, and From Awareness to Action: Cultivating an Inclusive Workplace for more details. 

Success Requires Collaboration, Not Just Intelligence

Now that you have established your boundaries and are being intentional about building your business culture, let’s look at other ways leaders can establish success.

Being intelligent, talented, experienced, or technically excellent can get you far as a leader, and these qualities alone won’t make you an effective leader, as Clarice Anderson shares on the Woman Thriving in Business podcast. 

Success requires collaboration, not simply willpower and book knowledge. 

Great leaders need enough emotional intelligence to:

• Recognize their own emotions,
• Understand the emotions and perspectives of others,
• Tolerate uncomfortable conversations,
• Become increasingly intentional about their decisions, and
• Know when a decision needs to happen now and when it can happen later.

Thrivers, how do emotions and collaboration impact your entrepreneurial journey? Because you will interact with external vendors, cross-functional teams, interns, virtual assistants, investors, clients, mentors, and sponsors, you need to consider their emotions. Considering others’ emotional states does not mean you will be ruled by your emotions and unable to lead effectively. On the contrary, displaying and utilizing your emotional intelligence will make you a better leader.

To thrive in the workplace, Clarice explains the value of getting over your own discomfort so you can recognize and understand other people’s emotions. When she was faced with the opportunity to move to South Africa, it was both thrilling and terrifying, and Melba had to consider how it would affect her career and personal life. 

It is both comical and sincerely honest when Clarice explains that “I thought it would be easier to get another job than to get another husband,” as the reason why she chose to move to South Africa, a few years after marrying her husband.  As the leader of her business, Melba had to appreciate that leadership isn’t about eliminating discomfort; sometimes the discomfort contains information.

You could pose questions such as:

• Is this person resisting change, or do they see something I don’t?
• Am I avoiding this conversation because it isn’t necessary, or because it makes me uncomfortable?
• Am I listening to understand this person’s perspective, or am I waiting to explain mine?

Life will be uncomfortable at times. Entrepreneurship will be uncomfortable at times. Running from that will not make you a better leader; it will make you a dysfunctional leader who isn’t collaborative. 

That makes emotional intelligence a practical building block, not a theoretical one. Want to know more about how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable as a female leader? Listen to Intelligence Isn’t Enough: Thriving in the Workplace and How to Lead with Mindfulness. 

Awareness Encourages Mindful Leadership

Organizations can say they value inclusion, collaboration, employee well-being, or belonging, but leaders eventually have to ask: What obligations and actions actually fulfill those goals?

That means turning values into behaviors, policies, measurements, expectations, and accountability. How are we showing new team members that they are valuable? Why does it matter that we acknowledge work anniversaries and tenure? What’s the point of celebrating the completion of that major project? Why does this matter?

Leadership requires noticing before acting. Mindfulness can help leaders create a little more space between what happens and how they respond. Keren Tsuk, a speaker, consultant, and author of the book Mindfully Wise Leadership. 

Keren explains how awareness by itself isn’t sufficient and can become performative if the leader’s actions don’t support it. 

As your business grows, organizational initiatives should not be positioned as leadership versus the employer. The goal is to find approaches that respect the organization while creating a win for the people within it.

Awareness → intention → action → measurement. Listen to Culture of Success – Focus on Your Team and How to Lead With Mindfulness to understand more about mindful leadership.

Thrivers, we must understand that every moment matters as a leader.

Great leadership isn’t demonstrated only during a crisis, annual meeting, promotion, or major organizational transformation. It’s demonstrated in the ordinary moments:

• How did you respond?
• Did you listen?
• Did you celebrate someone’s contribution?
• Did you repair the relationship?
• Did you respect your boundary?
• Did you allow someone else to contribute instead of doing everything yourself?
• Did your actions match the values you say matter?

Establish your boundaries, use emotional intelligence to collaborate with others, and appreciate that effective leaders are not reactive, but mindful. 

Leadership isn’t something you achieve, but something you continually practice.

And because culture is cumulative, those seemingly small choices become something much larger over time.

Keep Thriving!