Latest / The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson / How to Run a Business Without Fear with Lorraine Marchand

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How to Run a Business Without Fear with Lorraine Marchand · The SmallBizChat with Melinda Emerson

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  Three, two, one, zero.
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  Ignition.
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  Lift off.
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  Ending small business failure.
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  Welcome to the Small Biz Chat podcast with the number one small business expert, Melinda
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  Emerson.
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  Melinda's goal is to end small business failure, and she'll give you the information
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  you need to succeed and live the life you dream of.
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  Now here's your host, the small biz chat lady herself, Melinda Emerson.
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  Have you subscribed to the small biz chat podcast?
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  Well, it's time.
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  Every Wednesday, we offer listeners bite sized actionable tips to start and grow a successful
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  small business.
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  In just twenty minutes or so a week, you can get a ton of insight and resources to propel
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  your business forward.
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  Be sure to subscribe to the Small Bitch Chat podcast today.
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  Hi, everybody.
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  Welcome to the small biz chat podcast.
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  I'm Melinda Emerson, your host, America's number one small business expert.
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  And if you love the small biz chat podcast, we wanna invite you to please leave us a positive
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  review.
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  Let people know about us and certainly share this link with another business owner who could
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  really benefit from all of the generous information that my guests share.
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  Now I would like to introduce my guest.
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  Her name is Lorraine Marshawn, and she is a seasoned executive leadership expert and the
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  author of the new book, No Fear, Five Principles for Maintaining Growth Through
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  Innovation.
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  And she has decades of experience leading high performance teams, driving innovation in
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  complex organizations, and she's known for helping leaders embrace change.
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  Lorraine's work blends practical leadership strategies with real world experience,
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  empowering professionals to make bold decisions, build resilient teams, and achieve
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  meaningful results in today's fast changing business environment.
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  For more information, visit lorrainemarshawn.com.
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  Lorraine, welcome to the Small Biz Chat podcast.
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  Oh, Melinda, it's my pleasure to be here.
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  Thank you.
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  All right, so let's get into it.
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  I had the opportunity to get a preview copy of your book and I really found the insight in it
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  extremely valuable, which is why I invited you to be on my podcast.
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  So talk to us about this book, No Fear, No Failure.
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  I mean, that's a really bold statement and I know that this is an inspired message from you.
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  So tell me what you wanted readers to really take away.
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  Like what was the point of this?
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  Well, thanks for that question, Melinda.
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  When I wrote my first book, The Eight Steps to Transform Any Industry, it was with more of an
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  individual in mind.
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  So when people have great ideas, they would come to me and say, I don't think I can be an
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  innovator.
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  I don't think I can be an entrepreneur.
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  I'm not going be able to move this forward.
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  So I took the eight steps that I had followed throughout my career and that I had taught and
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  created that first book.
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  And as I was out talking with people about the book, I was repeatedly getting the same
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  question.
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  And that is, I think I'm pretty innovative.
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  I think I'm pretty creative.
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  What's blocking me is this.
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  And so often this was the environment or the organizations that people were finding
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  themselves in.
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  So before you can start a business, sometimes you have to get a job and you have to work in
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  an environment and you start slowly with creative ideas and innovative ideas.
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  And people would say to me, how am I ever going to make change in this behemoth of an
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  organization because it's resistant to change, it's over regulated.
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  One person who was in a pharmaceutical company told me that there were more attorneys than
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  drug developers.
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  And so I decided that was a good challenge to take on.
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  And I interviewed 120 managers and executives around the world and in different types of
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  industries to help really understand this question.
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  And it turned out that it is fear, fear of making the wrong decision, fear of being wrong,
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  fear of not knowing what the result is going to be that so often holds people back from taking
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  calculated risks that can help them grow and just also being inspired just to try new
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  things.
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  So that's really what I want to encourage people to do is to reframe this fear of
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  failing.
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  Think about it in terms of learning.
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  And if you set a learning objective up in anything that you're going to undertake, it's
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  going to naturally eliminate some of that fear.
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  And you're going to have a lot more fun because you're going to be focused on what it is you
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  can learn from the experience as opposed to thinking about this binary outcome of whether I
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  was successful or whether I failed.
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  I like that.
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  So I know that you've had an incredible leadership journey yourself.
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  Can you talk about one moment where fear stopped you?
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  Yes, yes, thank you for that question too.
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  So, mid career, I did a startup with a physician from Johns Hopkins, and we were
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  working on an eye diagnostic tool.
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  And during the course of the situation, some really unfortunate things happened, and my co
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  founder was in a terrible accident.
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  And we just got to a situation where we just couldn't continue to raise capital.
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  I couldn't continue to move the business forward.
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  And I had to make some tough decisions about closing the business down.
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  I had moved from Philadelphia to Baltimore with my family.
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  And didn't know really what to do next.
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  Should I go back into a corporate job?
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  Should I go find a job?
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  What should I do next?
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  And I decided, no, I'm not going to go back and find a corporate job.
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  I've learned a lot over the year and a half that I've been out here.
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  And I'm going to take all of those learnings and I'm going to parlay them into my next
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  startup.
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  And so, that's what I did.
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  And that really launched my own business career and becoming a serial investor and also a
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  serial startup founder.
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  So let's talk about this concept of fearlessness, right?
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  Because I feel like it's one of these words that gets thrown around a lot.
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  Know, I wanna be fearless or I'm fearless, you know.
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  However, I think that fear shows up in decision making all the time, especially in business.
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  And so I wanna understand from your perspective, how do you think leaders need to
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  think about fear differently?
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  Because we know, I teach marketing at Community College of Philadelphia and I tell my students
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  all the time, fear is the number one reason why people buy, right?
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  So it's like FOMO, but it's fear laden, if you will.
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  And so I wanna understand from your perspective, how do you see fear showing up in
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  decision making for people and what should they do about it?
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  Well, thank you for that question, Melinda.
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  And you're absolutely right.
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  There is certainly a healthy dose of fear that enables us as humans to calculate risks and
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  make good decisions.
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  So we don't want it just to abandon healthy fear.
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  The kind of fear that I'm talking about is strategic versus operational.
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  We don't want to take a lot of uncalculated risks and abandon fear when it comes to
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  operating the business.
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  If you're having a service failure, if your team's not delivering, this isn't the time to
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  say, Oh, let's set up a learning objective and pivot.
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  You know, those are real issues and they shouldn't cause fear about your business.
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  And you have to address them immediately.
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  I'm really talking more about strategic fear, The kind of fear that's holding leaders back
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  from trying a new partnership, looking at a product extension, going out and talking to a
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  new customer group, you know, making some bold decisions about where to invest.
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  So those kinds of strategic decisions that will help move the business forward, help them grow,
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  be innovative, try new things where they're being held back because they have a fear of
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  failure and it's really impeding their ability strategically to grow and develop.
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  So how do they get over it?
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  Like, you know, okay, so we've defined the problem, professor.
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  So how do we define the solution?
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  Like, how do we get people to resiliency versus fear?
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  Yes.
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  Well, so in my book, I lay out the five Cs, and the five Cs for helping to diagnose as well as
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  overcome the failure are culture, investing in chance or risk, customer first, absolutely
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  critical, collaboration, and change.
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  And of course, we don't have time to review all of them.
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  But let's start with culture, right?
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  Because everything starts with culture.
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  And whether we're the leader of an organization where we have to lead the culture, or if we're
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  middle management, we've got to be sharing and be a river guide for the culture.
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  Or if we have our own business, we've got to be focused on the culture.
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  And what we need to do is reframe this fear of learning and create an environment where it's
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  okay to experiment.
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  It's okay to try new things and you're not going to be penalized.
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  You're not going to lose your job.
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  You're not going to be called out and ostracized.
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  You're not going to not get a bonus, right?
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  So we have to take away some of those operational and systemic incentives that make
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  it risky to fail and replace them with a healthy dose of let's experiment, let's debrief
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  what went wrong.
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  Real quick example.
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  Now, this was when I was at IBM Watson Health.
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  There was definitely a fear of failure in that organization.
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  It's huge.
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  I started something really simple every Friday with my team.
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  I called it Failure Free Friday.
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  We got together for thirty minutes and we just talked about what wasn't working.
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  What problems are you experiencing?
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  What's not going well?
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  We didn't try to diagnose things.
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  We didn't try to fix everything.
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  All I wanted to do was bring my team together and create a safe environment for them to talk
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  about what wasn't working.
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  And by modeling that behavior to them, they then were better able to model it to their
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  teams.
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  So it can be very simple things that you do once you're aware that this is something that
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  you want to start to break down.
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  Not all overnight.
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  It all takes time.
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  It takes a long time for cultures to build up this failure.
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  But there are tactical and tip ways that you can start to break it down.
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  I love it.
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  I love it.
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  So when you talk about actionable insights, right?
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  What would you say are like one or two practical strategies?
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  Because I feel like listening to you, the issue becomes creating psychological safety for
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  people, right?
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  Because it's like, I think there's a whole bunch of fear in corporate environments, but I
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  think there's a lot of fear in small business environments too, depending on the founder and
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  whether or not the founder's willing to listen to anybody else's opinion but their own, right?
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  So can you talk to me about one or two practical strategies that you think people
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  could do, small business owners could do today to overcome this fear paralysis analysis,
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  whatever we wanna call it, of how they're running their business?
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  Yes, and I think, and I've been in small business as well and also worked with small
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  business leaders.
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  I think a couple things happen there.
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  First of all, there is a belief that I'm the head of this business, I built it, and I need
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  to have all the answers.
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  You don't need to have all the answers.
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  In fact, don't have all the answers, that's a problem.
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  It means that you're probably not listening and you're probably not asking good questions.
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  The best leaders that I've ever had an opportunity to work with have recognized the
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  importance of asking the right questions, surrounding themselves with really smart people
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  who are expert in their particular domain and letting them bring those ideas forward.
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  So get out of the echo chamber of your own head.
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  Get out of believing that you have to have all the right answers.
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  Get the right questions teed up.
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  Surround yourself with really smart people.
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  Let them do their job and get the heck out of their way.
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  Love it, love it.
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  All right.
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  Lorraine, what is the best business advice anyone has ever given you?
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  Well, you know, mid my career, I was a corporate setting and I was very focused on
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  accomplishing my goals hitting my metrics, getting to that next promotion, getting to the
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  bonus, getting the project finished.
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  And I had a leadership coach who pulled me aside and he said, You know Lorraine, actually
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  what's most important as you advance as a leader is how you do things and bringing people
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  along with you and putting people first and doing what's the best for people.
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  And once I reframe that and I started being more of a servant leader and doing what was
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  right for my team and my people, not only did our results improve, I definitely developed
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  wonderful relationships with people.
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  And I just felt a lot better in terms of how I personally developed as a leader.
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  So I'm a little embarrassed to have to admit that I was a little hard headed that way, but
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  I'm really glad that person gave me that piece of advice.
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  People matter.
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  Focus on the people and do the best that you possibly can for your team, for your customers,
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  for everyone around you, and good things will follow.
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  Well, Lorraine, I can honestly tell you that none of us are the leaders that we used to be,
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  right?
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  We have all evolved and changed and hopefully we all lead better for it.
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  So I appreciate your transparency around your personal evolution because I think that
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  sometimes people who are really successful sort of like give this 50,000 foot view of
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  leadership and success and don't talk about what it is in the trenches.
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  So thank you so much for being here.
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  Your book, No Fear, No Failure is a great guide that any business leader could grow from.
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  So I advise everyone to check it
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  podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and join us next Wednesday for more fantastic
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  information and interviews.
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  You can find more sources and small business success strategies by visiting Melinda's
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  website, succeedasyourownboss.com.
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  Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.