"Community is the secret to keeping employees happy."
Lara Holliday Tweet
Meet Lara Holliday, a dynamic entrepreneur, coach, and community builder who is inspiring and empowering women professionals to reach their full potential. With a 25-year background in New York City and a passion for transforming the lives of others, Lara founded Tide Risers in 2017, a deliberate community for women leaders that challenges traditional perceptions about leadership and success.
As a seasoned speaker and TedX presenter, Lara is dedicated to fostering a supportive learning environment of trust, accountability, and sisterhood through her innovative approach to coaching and professional development. Her commitment to advancing opportunities for women has earned her recognition as a leading voice in the industry, and her community has grown to over 350 members globally, representing a diverse mix of backgrounds and perspectives.
With her unwavering determination and passion for empowering women, Lara is leading the charge towards a brighter future for women in the workforce. Join us as we learn more about her inspiring story and the impact of Tide Risers in this exclusive interview.
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Table of Contents
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Lara Holliday: I am the proud Founder + CEO of Tide Risers. I am also a coach, creator, and community builder. I offer speaking engagements, workshops, and coaching focused on issues that impact female-identifying professionals. My work challenges perceptions about leadership, re-orients the work/life balance conversation, and leads women through a framework to establish their own, authentic definition of success.
I grew up in Washington DC, and now live in the United Kingdom, but having spent 25 years living in Manhattan and Brooklyn I mostly identify as a recovering New Yorker.
I am an avid gardener, TedX speaker, cocktail mixologist, and rescue dog enthusiast. I’m married to an amazing partner and we have two daughters who, if you know me, you might be able to guess are very empowered little ladies with a LOT to say.
I always have a jigsaw puzzle on the go to assist me when I’m thinking through problems or trying to come up with creative solutions. I would at all times rather be outdoors than in, and I deeply believe in the healing powers of a good walk.
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 in my office 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.
So I launched Tide Risers in 2017 to harness that power.
Tide Risers is a deliberate community of women leaders. We offer coaching and learning opportunities that challenge women to reimagine success and redefine traditional conceptualizations of 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.
Designed by women for women, Tide Risers enables women to uncover and amplify strengths, build skills to overcome obstacles, and play a leadership role in our own lives, personally and professionally.
To provide the flexible learning and advancement opportunities required by by women professionals, we offer live, online courses, independent pre-recorded training workshops, private and small group coaching, and in-person events and retreats.
Our community has grown quickly to over 350 women across the United Kingdom, Europe, and North America, representing a diverse mix of industry background, life experience, and global perspective.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffett, how would you describe your company, services, or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Lara Holliday: 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.
Our community is grounded in a set of leadership principles that orient us to the highest standards of relating to one another as women and as professionals. They enable us to create and sustain a culture that is supportive of the Tide Risers mission and our vision for the spirit of collaboration we want to model. Our leadership principles of Abundance, Authenticity, Courage, and Ownership make Tide Risers an experience unlike any other. They set the stage for a rich and potent learning environment that sets Tide Risers apart from any other training, leadership development, or networking opportunity on the market.
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.
Quiet quitting, The Great Resignation, are an ongoing trend causing many businesses to struggle keeping talent engaged and motivated. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued and misunderstood in the workplace. In your experience, what keeps employees happy? And how are adapting to the current shift we see?
Lara Holliday: Community is the secret to keeping employees happy. Building a community within a work environment, however, takes much more deliberate action than most employers expect. It’s not just about team-building exercises and corporate retreats; it’s about creating an environment where every individual can bring their authentic self to the table and trust in their ability to show vulnerability.
When a work culture is truly supportive of the humanity of each individual, everyone has the opportunity to fulfill their greatest professional potential.
Creating this environment is quite challenging right now, as much of this culture must be demonstrated by senior leadership, and it’s much easier for leaders to do that in person. Companies are struggling to find the best solution to the hybrid and remote work scenarios that so many employees are rightfully expecting.
The solution is to rethink the way we gather our teams together so that we get the greatest impact out of every in-person event. That requires intentionality and discipline to ensure that both work goals and culture-building goals are met, and that people feel that their time has been well spent.
Online business keeps on surging higher than ever, B2B, B2C, online shopping, virtual meetings, remote work, Zoom medical consultations, what are your expectations for the year to come and how are you capitalizing on the tidal wave?
Lara Holliday: Prior to the pandemic, all Tide Risers programming involved highly curated in-person events. In March 2020, facing lockdowns, job losses, and a sense of global uncertainty, I honestly didn’t think we could continue the business.
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.
There is now a tremendous amount of competition in the online community and professional development space. Tide Risers, however, has one major advantage over our peers: we provide a culture that is so strong it carries through in online formats and across the nine time zones within which our members are located. We will continue to focus on delivering that experience of being within a community grounded in principles offering a culture that most people aren’t getting anywhere else.
Our members are able to come to our sessions as their true, authentic selves in a remarkably vulnerable way. What this creates is an environment that enables learning, growth, and true relationship-building.
This year we will also expand our in-person offerings, including highly curated and exceptional experiences that get people out of their comfort zones and into a space of productivity, creativity, and lateral thinking. This is what is required for to enable employees to be the innovators their employers need them to be. We will be offering retreats in both the US and the UK, which you can learn more about here: https://tiderisers.podia.com/inpersonretreats
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Lara Holliday: The real challenge 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.
With the pressures of global instability and a greater awareness of entrenched power dynamics, businesses are having to work harder than ever to convince their employees to stay with them. We need to completely reimagine the way we work, and the right solution will likely look nothing like the workplace of our parents’ generation.
2020, 2021, 2022 threw a lot of curve balls into businesses on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past years, how can businesses thrive in 2023? What lessons have you learned and what advice would you share?
Lara Holliday: The past few years have shown us that businesses need to be nimble and adaptable to changing global dynamics. The only way to do that is to have employees who are motivated, dedicated, and empowered to bring their best thinking to the table.
My advice would be to invest in creating a culture that helps employees thrive so that they are at their most capable when it comes to innovating to keep up with the changing times.
On a lighter note, if you had the ability to pick any business superpower, what would it be and how would you put it into practice?
Lara Holliday: I would learn how to be in two places at once. But more practically, I would create a quicker process to teach people a skill that comes naturally to me, and that is to bring teams together in a way that is truly supportive of each individual while creating better outcomes for the team.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Lara Holliday for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Lara Holliday or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
Disclaimer: The ValiantCEO Community welcomes voices from many spheres on our open platform. We publish pieces as written by outside contributors with a wide range of opinions, which don’t necessarily reflect our own. Community stories are not commissioned by our editorial team and must meet our guidelines prior to being published.