27 | BWIB: Tatiana O'Hara on Building an Inclusive & Diverse Team
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Black Women In Business: Tatiana O’Hara
Welcome to the Black Women in Business series. Each week, I’m handing the mic over to some incredibly talented entrepreneurs and giving them the space to share their stories and what they've learned throughout their business journey.
Through this series, our intention is to highlight and amplify more Black voices and celebrate the powerful female CEOs, leaders and innovators we have in this space.
Meet Tatiana O’Hara
Hi, everybody, my name is Tatiana O'Hara. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and I'm a Team Operations Coach. This means that I help entrepreneurs who are ready to go from doing things by themselves, to leveraging the support of a team.
I help you not only hire your team, but learn how to lead them properly, how to delegate, and really just how to run your day-to-day operations with your team so that you can truly stay in your role as the CEO.
So a little bit of background on me: I started out in corporate as a District Manager for a popular food chain, and I was in charge of managing five high-sales volume stores. I was managing the store managers and helping them to better lead their team, stop micromanaging, hit their KPIs etc.
Over the course of about four and a half years, we went from being one of the lowest-performing districts to one of the highest! As I wrapped up my time there and wanted to move on to entrepreneurship, I realised that there was a really big gap with entrepreneurs as it pertains to teams.
There's so much education out there on how to sell how to market how to create content, but very little support around how to actually hire the manager and delegate to a team. So that's how I transitioned into what I do now as a Team Operations Coach helping successful, yet overwhelmed online business owners create the structure needed for their team & daily operations, so they can focus on scaling sustainably.
How being a Black Woman has impacted Tatiana’s business
Do I believe that having a black woman has had an impact on my business? Absolutely.
I think that being a black woman, and entrepreneurship, is amazing for a lot of different reasons. It has put me in connection with a lot of different people and allowed me to work with a very diverse group of clients from areas all around the world. So this has allowed me to offer a different perspective on things and being able to cultivate a diverse community within my clients.
But then also, my team is very diverse as well. I think it just helps me to better understand how different business owners work and function because I'm not limiting myself to one specific group of people.
And for a lot of my clients, I'm the first woman of colour that they've ever worked with. And so it's really awesome to be able to represent for such a huge group of women that are often underrepresented in the entrepreneurship community.
Why & how to show diversity when building your team.
It is so important that business owners are showing diversity when they're building their team for a lot of different reasons - and not just because we want to check off a box and say that “diversity and inclusion is important to us”.
When you have diversity on your team, that opens you up to diverse ideas and skill sets. When you have people that come from different backgrounds on your team, you’re able to gain different understandings, and it can really diversify the way that your company works and put you in the position to be able to do things that you likely would have never been able to do.
It's almost like do you want to have a team of 10 people who think the exact same way? Or do you want to have a group of people that can challenge each other's thoughts, questions and ideas to really drive the company forward?
So if building an inclusive business is important for you, here are a couple of steps that you can take to ensure that you're doing that:
Look outside of where you usually hire - try different websites & search engines
Create a job description that would appeal to a wider group of people
If inclusivity is a core value of yours, highlight that in your job description and within your onboarding and hiring process.
Nobody wants to work for a company that just says we value inclusivity because a lot of people say that now and don't necessarily mean it. So it's important that you could show people how you actually practice it in your day to day
Connect with Tatiana
If you would like to connect with Tatiana, you’ll find her over on Instagram @_tatianaohara.
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Hey! I’m Tish!
I'm a marketing mentor for ambitious entrepreneurs who want to create more time, freedom & profit in their online business, in a way that feels good to them!
If you’re ready to build your business on your own terms, so that you can live the life you desire… grab a cuppa, get comfy & stay for a while ☕️ ✨
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