Interview with Founder + CEO Lara Holliday
Learn about our Founder’s journey in this interview by CanvasRebel.
We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Lara Holliday. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Lara below.
Lara, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.
A number of years ago I started noticing a pattern in my coaching practice: a number of my female clients were coming to me with very similar issues, and feeling completely isolated within those issues — like they were the only one this thing was happening to.
They were wanting to make a change to enable them to live a more fulfilling life, but they were unsure how to shift direction or make meaningful plans for their future. They were experiencing a lack of mentorship, sponsorship, and inspirational leadership. They were feeling that their professional and personal networks were too limited, but frustrated by the networking opportunities open to them.
They were feeling stuck. And that feeling of being stuck was creeping into every aspect of their lives.
I sat there day after day listening to the women sitting on my couch share remarkably similar stories. I couldn’t stop thinking about the power that could come from enabling these women to find what they were looking for in collaboration with one another, rather than picking away at these challenges alone.
To do that, however, they would each need to reclaim their agency. That would require a process of deep introspective reflection on who they were, where their strengths lie, what was holding them back, and what skills they needed to build in order to advance. I was pretty sure that was something I could create for them.
Here’s why:
I was raised by strong feminists to believe that as a woman I could do anything, and that’s been a huge advantage for me. What happened over time, however, was the notion I internalized that ‘I can do anything’ somehow transformed into ‘I should do everything’. So I had this huge work ethic, and between work, volunteering, and family, I would take on way more than I should. I would go through periods of huge stress and productivity, and then as soon as I had delivered on something, I would collapse and be ill for days. This obviously wasn’t sustainable, but it took me some time and some deep reflection to understand why I couldn’t break out of that pattern.
I came to realize I was working within a framework that I hadn’t designed for myself or consciously agreed to.
That framework of ‘I should do everything’ had become a part of my identity and my operating practices, and I wasn’t even fully aware it was there.
You see, I hadn’t actually created intentions for how I wanted to BE in this world; I was simply following what I felt I should DO in this world. I didn’t have a framework to help make decisions to proactively design my life. So I began to imagine what that framework might look like and how to deliver it. The end result is my thriving business, Tide Risers, which now includes over 350 powerful women leaders across the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I am a coach, creator, and community-builder. I am also the proud Founder + CEO of Tide Risers, a deliberate community for female-identifying leaders. My thought leadership challenges perceptions about how we work, re-orients the work/life balance conversation, and offers a framework to help professionals establish their own, authentic profile of leadership and success.
As a coach, I serve as an informed and dedicated thought partner. I specialize in helping professionals own their roles as leaders and I am known for my ability to help people uncover hidden barriers, get unstuck, and improve their lives professionally and personally. I integrate Equine-Facilitated Learning into my coaching practice, providing my clients with unique experiences working with horses to attain self-realization and professional growth.
As a group facilitator, I offer a framework to help teams build relationships that foster authenticity, courageous conversations, and an abundance mindset. I specialize in facilitation of strategic planning and visioning for executive teams, enabling businesses to meet their goals while enabling their employees to thrive.
After a 20+ year career spanning corporate, government, and non-profit leadership roles, I founded Tide Risers in 2017. Tide Risers is a deliberate community for women that proudly reimagines success and redefines leadership. Our innovative methodology disrupts typical coaching, professional development, and networking practices by creating a powerful learning environment of trust, accountability, and sisterhood that enables us to learn and grow with efficiency.
I founded Tide Risers with this truth in mind: when we as women work together, we all rise. To that end, we are committed to seeking advancement opportunities not just for ourselves, but for one another. Tide Risers now connects hundreds of women across North America, the United Kingdom, and the EU who benefit from the personal and professional advancement of the Tide Risers coaching curriculum.
The Tide Risers learning and development methodology is fueled by the powerful dynamics that emerge from the foundation of a strong, deliberate, diverse community. We learn and grow best when we are exposed to a variety of different perspectives and life experiences, and the trust, curiosity, and confidentiality we create through our relationship-building practices give women the confidence to push themselves outside their comfort zones to meet new challenges.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
I launched Tide Risers in New York City in 2017 thinking I’d have to twist the arms of my five closest friends to participate so we could pilot our newly designed curriculum. To my utter surprise, we received 47 applications in our first recruitment cycle. Clearly we had struck a nerve.
In 2018 I started to plan for a 2020 launch in the U.K. As you may imagine, the pandemic threw our plans for a loop.
At that time, all of our programming involved highly curated in-person events, and I didn’t know if our members would stick with us if we weren’t able to provide that. In March 2020, facing lockdowns, job losses, and a sense of global uncertainty, I was concerned that my business would collapse.
But our members started telling us that they needed Tide Risers at that time more than ever. So we overhauled our curriculum to translate it to online platforms, launched lower-cost programmatic offerings, and worked hard to figure out what our members needed. We learned a lot about how to nurture community within online spaces, and developed new skills out of necessity.
As it turns out, there are quite a number of advantages to transitioning the bulk of our program online, including reduced costs, streamlined management, and the ability to access customers anywhere in the world. As a result we’ve completely redesigned how we deliver Tide Risers, which gives us the potential for much greater scalability going forward.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
The real challenge so many managers are facing right now is that the way we work isn’t working. The workplace as we know it has evolved over time from its initial roots in agrarian societies through the Industrial Revolution into the digital age. We’re facing a changed landscape and new expectations from professionals who have very different needs than we had when traditional workplace dynamics and habits were formed. With the pressures of global instability and a greater awareness of entrenched power dynamics, managers are having to work harder than ever to retain high-performing employees.
My advice is to think about management not as team building, but as community building. We want to give our employees a sense of belonging to inspire commitment, build morale, and to attract top talent. Developing a community of trust and creativity will enable everyone to be at their most capable when it comes to innovating to keep up with the changing times.
Creating a community within a workplace takes time and intentionality, but here are a few steps:
1. Develop shared values, and commit to living and breathing them every day.
2. Create rituals to celebrate big and small wins. Rituals build trust and give people a sense of belonging, and even the simplest rituals play a major role in building community.
3. Be trustworthy to enable a trusting community. Transparent decision-making and clear, consistent communication are key.
4. Model the behavior you want to see. Leaders must demonstrate that they’re living the values of the community.
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