Female Entrepreneurship with Dr Hayley Lewis

TWO HAYLEY

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[00:00:06] Hayley: So my interview, semi-structured framework was based around the core things that I needed to find. So, my research was specifically looking at how do women define success as business owners and then, , what are the psychological factors that have enabled them?

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[00:00:50] Ross: P-SOUPERS, In our last episode, I introduced you to Dr. Haley Lewis. Haley is the founder of Halo Psychology and as an occupational psychologist, she provides expert and evidence-based support for individuals, teams, and organizations going through transition.

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[00:01:20] Ross: if you've ever wondered about the qualitative research process, thematic analysis, and what exactly is a systematic literature review.

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[00:01:45] Ross: people. [00:02:00] Soup is an award-winning podcast where we share evidence-based behavioral science in a way that's practical, accessible, and fun to help you GLOW TO WORK a bit more often. Let's just scoot over to the news desk because reviews are in for part one of my chat with Hailey Sandra Murray on Instagram said, I love the Bewitched analogy As an ACT therapist, I think I will use that if you don't mind, basically to look at moments where you wish you could wiggle your nose and change a situation. That's awareness of non-acceptance. Then go from there into the hexagon. I do this with clients, but I love the idea of putting some witchcraft behind it.

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[00:03:04] Ross: Reviewed the podcast because with your support, we can reach more people with useful and thought-provoking resources. This episode was recorded on a remarkable day in UK politics, and you'll find out why right at the end. And this introduction is being recorded at my sister-in-law's house in Granada, and I'm currently under the duvet in the guest bedroom to give you the best possible acoustic experience.

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[00:03:39] Hayley: Yeah, well first of all, if listeners haven't listened to part one, how dare you. Now I'm joking. Uh, but go and listen to part one, uh, Ross and I have a really good chat. So, yeah, before we kind of dig into to kind of my main hypotheses in my research, which was about female entrepreneurship in particular women business owners in the early phase of, [00:04:00] starting a business and the psychological factors that enabled that success, and I also looked at how women define success, found some really interesting stuff Ross.

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[00:04:26] Unfair challenges put in the way of women

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[00:05:18] Not even lemonade

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[00:05:44] Hayley: Just nonsense, non-evidence

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[00:05:47] Ross: Are, sort of ones that pop up on my LinkedIn, my Facebook saying,

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[00:06:04] Hayley: month, you know, let alone a year. And just that. That kind of dominant narrative. And it was just, it was really getting my goat quite frankly, and I'd fallen into that trap myself in the first few months of moving from corporate life to, to being a business owner.

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[00:06:48] Hayley: Delivering courses and so on and so forth. And that still happens now, even after the pandemic. And so I thought actually, I want to help women. I've always been passionate about helping women, and I want to help women who want to set up their own businesses. So I had this idea of a second, almost like offshoot of Halo, which purely focused on women, but I wanted it to be an evidenced based. Support that I gave, you know, as a psychologist, as an evidence-based practitioner, that's really important to me. and the final reason why I did the doctorate rather than the specific subject, is I wanted to push myself. We know it's getting harder and harder to. discern oneself.

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[00:07:54] Hayley: And I set myself the challenge of getting my doctorate before I was 50. and so yeah, those are the, those are kind of the main,[00:08:00] kind of motivations and that's what kept me going.

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[00:08:03] Hayley: if any of your listeners are doing their doctorate or thinking about that doctorate, there will be those inevitable, long, dark nights of the soul as Shakespeare talked about, where you think, oh, I'm not gonna do it.

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[00:08:27] Hayley: I can't do this. It's too hard. And so being really clear on your motivations and what drives you is, is what will get you through that long dark night of the soul.

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[00:08:43] My passion has been helping women

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[00:09:18] Hayley: my passion has been helping women. and so that desire to want to help and being really clear on trying to make the world, albeit my little bit of the world, a better place for, for other women

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[00:09:38] How do you disconnect from work?

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[00:09:56] Hayley: I do do a lot. I also teach, I've now taken [00:10:00] over running part one of the doctoral program at Birkbeck you know that's two half days a week.

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[00:10:04] Hayley: So I've always had a lot on. Throughout my whole career and I've always been an organized person with, and somehow, and I dunno, I think it's an innate thing, very good at setting boundaries. Ever since I was young, when I first went into the workplace, very good at setting boundaries and that's just stayed with me ever since. So I manage my diary ruthlessly. I use things like task blocking and time blocking. So I don't allow my diary to just be about meetings, So when I worked in as an employee, I always protected space in my diary, which meant being brave in saying NO. including no to very powerful people who wanted to meet with me at the last minute, unless it was an emergency or there was a crisis, like a riot. I would say no. because. , the priority for me was to do this important thing, this report or this strategy or whatever.

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[00:11:14] Hayley: I didn't do any work on my doctorate or any kind of halo work. It was quality time with my mum. I might do a little bit of work on the weekend, but also that was time with my husband and after Mum died, I just kept that Friday free and, I, it's interesting,

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[00:11:29] Hayley: I've been having a few conversations like this recently on podcasts and also with some of the practitioners in training that I'm working with around Dr. Mee-Yan Cheung Judge's brilliant article. She wrote it more than 20 years ago. and it's still relevant now called The Self As an Instrument and as a practitioner psychologist, whether you are working inside an organization or you are working for yourself, you are the instrument. of change and how you show up impacts those around you.

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[00:12:22] Ross: Wow.

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[00:12:24] Ross: I love it.

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[00:12:46] Hayley: research, Ross.

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[00:12:50] Ross: point?

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[00:13:37] Hayley: You know, you look in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, for example, and, and that's the dominant kind of research base and, and that's understandable. I hadn't. Based on my own kind of little dive into the research, really found any occupational psychologist who'd researched entrepreneurship or female entrepreneurship.

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[00:14:06] The Systematic Literature Review

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[00:14:20] Hayley: So you have inclusion and exclusion criteria. You base it on a framework, you know, what population are you looking at, and and so on. So it is really rigorous and it has to be signed off. and you have to adhere

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[00:14:33] Hayley: So, basically you go through a search a number of times and it's reviewed by a co-researcher. and then there's a third person who mediates if there's a disagreement. So your first run, you put in your criteria in. search engines, you've decided to. So you have to again, agree that upfront you can't randomly go off and just search anywhere. So I had my criteria. And so what came back . So the first search that came back with all my criteria applied was 2000 articles. And I nearly cried. But actually, and I remember Rachel saying to me, trust the process.

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[00:15:21] Hayley: So you do what we, what's called a title sift. So that then got it down. I think that got it down to about 500

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[00:15:28] Ross: a little bit better, but still crikey.

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[00:15:42] Hayley: So then you include the, you look in detail at each of those 60 papers abstracts. And so then I was able to kind of take out quite a number and got it down to 17 papers that would be relevant. and myself and my co-researcher were in agreement. And then you read in detail [00:16:00] each of those papers and you have criteria that you. assessing again. So you summarized the, the research, what did they find? But then you do a quality review of each paper. Um, so there's a framework that you decide to use. So I had a framework that I agreed, and so I loved it. . and if anybody who knows me, if any of my fellow doctoral pals who are on the program with me or Rachel or Joe are listening, they'll, they'll laugh because I loved systematic reviews.

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[00:16:46] Hayley: that then led me to really hone down where the gaps are in the research for the last 20 years. Really hone my questions, my hypotheses, then it was running the gamut of the ethics committee, which at doctoral level is a whole different ballgame. Lord love me. yeah, just the stuff you have to fill out and defend and, and rightly so.

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[00:17:08] Hayley: so that got approved and I was off and, and so my empirical study was original research. I did a qualitative study because I love hearing people's stories and one of the things I found from the systematic review is a. there was no occupational psychology related studies.

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[00:17:43] Hayley: So I wanted to turn that on its head and look at it from a strengths perspective. and so yeah, it just, it just really helped me identify on where to go with my research. and so, yeah. only a couple of the, the studies were qualitative. Other than that, they were quantitative. So [00:18:00] whilst there are strengths to quantitative research, what it can end up doing is homogenizing the results.

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[00:18:23] Hayley: as quantitative.

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[00:18:32] Ross: a, an analysis that's, that's really rich and informative.

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[00:18:54] Hayley: And so that's why qualitative and feminist researchers do tend to use qualitative cuz it is about the lived experience, which can't always be distilled down into a nice. Little P score, or T score actually, it's about what, what are the, what are the things that, that these women are saying? So, so that kind of validated my desire to, to do a qualitative study.

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[00:19:39] Hayley: I thought I was gonna have an absolute nightmare, like lots of us do. I remember doing my masters and just struggling.

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[00:19:45] Hayley: I thought it was gonna take me months to get my participants, and in a week I was oversubscribed three times the number. and actually quite a few of them couldn't do this stuff cuz they didn't meet my criteria.

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[00:19:59] Ross: [00:20:00] Mm.

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[00:20:12] Ross: Wow. Thanks for taking us through the process. Cause I think, sometimes from the outside we can just assume that, that you just have a look, you pick a topic and then you go and ask people questions. But it's so much more structured and un rigorous than that.

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[00:20:30] Ross: so you were oversubscribed, you whittled them down to a number.

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[00:20:36] Ross: you probably already had a kind of, sort of framework structure for the interviews. How, how were the interviews? Describe how you arrived at that structure. maybe.

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[00:21:02] Hayley: So not having things so structured that it stifles the conversation, but having some kind of framework. within which to position people's responses.

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[00:21:11] Hayley: So my interview, semi-structured framework was based around the core things that I needed to find. So, my research was specifically looking at how do women define success as business owners and then, , what are the psychological factors that have enabled them?

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[00:21:54] Hayley: It can take a good two years to, to get published, but that's the thing that I'm gonna emphasize. So, so, yeah. So [00:22:00] my, my questions were very loosely framed within those areas. I wanted to know how women define success. And then ask them questions about how they went about their days, what strengths they drew upon asking them, about specific incidents they could remember, as they started their business.

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[00:23:38] Ross: tell us about your coding and the, and the methodology you

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[00:23:41] Hayley: I just, I must people listen to this guy and she needs to get out more. at that point we couldn't get out, so I had nothing else to do.

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[00:24:14] Hayley: So I had these 300 pages across my 15 interviews, and you go through line by line. So I use the Braun Clark thematic analysis approach, and I have to say, I mean, I said this to my examiners, what I thought had been thematic analysis as a practitioner, I realized had not been thematic analysis in its purest sense, and I learnt loads.

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[00:24:56] Hayley: You're not putting your bias on those themes. That's, that's like a really high level overview. that took me a good couple of months, to do, as I say, with just all the crazy picture. My husband would come in and he'd just like, look at the war and walk back out

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[00:25:18] Hayley: love that.

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[00:25:23] Hayley: I love that. that. is yet that's us

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[00:25:31] Hayley: Yeah. Yeah, Been there. and that didn't come down even it didn't come down for months because, I needed it in front of me all the time, even after I'd written up that study, which became another chapter in my thesis, and then writing my full thesis, which is five chapters, and then waiting for the edits to come back. And then I had it in front of me all the time to keep me true. And it goes back to my point about I wanted to honor the women's stories.

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[00:26:17] Hayley: It was. 220 pages. It's like 55,000 words, . I've written that much in my life and never will again, Rita. I loved it. I just, I love finding themes. I love interrogating data. particularly qualitative data. I'm just, yeah,

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[00:26:36] Ross: think the time is ripe. Now, let's, dive into your themes. Tell us what, tell us what you found.

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[00:27:02] Hayley: So, in terms of success, which was the, the starting premise, how do women define success? So from the systematic review, no one had looked at that. No one had asked that. and no one had asked that question of women business owners. and so the women that I was interviewing in my own study were women who were, running coaching and or training businesses, so kind of micro businesses in the uk.

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[00:27:48] Hayley: So, being seen as top of your field. , being seen as credible in your practice, having a really good, well-known reputation as someone who delivers that was seen as a [00:28:00] mark of success, freedom, and autonomy. So freedom and autonomy did come up across. a couple of the systematic review studies, but not in any real.

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[00:28:45] Hayley: so there's some really powerful stories. The third theme around success was most of the women talked about making a tangible difference. This is where the evidence base comes in. All of these women talked about having hard, tangible evidence for how they were making impact with the, the people that they were working with and the organizations they were working with.

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[00:29:45] Hayley: So here you had women who weren't corporate employees, or not all corporate employees who were running their own businesses, who were actually exhibiting all the factors that suggest we thrive, that Gretchen talked about in in her research. And so there's two [00:30:00] things we look for. When people are thriving in a work context, they get a sense of energy.

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[00:30:19] Hayley: She talked about it in in terms of love. , she was, she was in her first year of business, which she said, I am in love, completely utter love with my business.

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[00:30:44] Hayley: none of them talked about wanting to be millionaires or to grow their business so that they had thousands of employees. They all talked about wanting to earn a comfortable living where they didn't have to worry about money. They could pay the mortgage, they could go on holiday with their families.

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[00:31:26] Hayley: And so my empirical research kind of flew in the face, of that you could be and feel successful. and there were other things and are other things that seemed to be more important. So that was success.

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[00:31:43] Ross: I'm on the edge of my seat.

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[00:32:17] Hayley: didn't expect that, did you?

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[00:32:30] Ross: Yay.

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[00:33:00] Hayley: So it's very easy when you go from being a, an employee to setting up your own business. I did it a little bit myself in the first two months, like, get up late cuz you can, and letting things slide. And so lots of the women talked about the importance of having routine and structure even when you didn't necessarily have work.

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[00:33:39] Hayley: So in terms of pcap, obviously there's, there's the four hero elements of psychological capital. For those listeners who aren't familiar, it's hope, optimism, resilience, and self-efficacy. across the studies that had touched on this? not explicitly, but I drew out from those studies and in my own research with the women, [00:34:00] there were two aspects of the psych.

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[00:34:14] Hayley: There's all sorts of things we can draw on and that helps our self-belief and self-belief and resilience. , absolutely were strong threads throughout all the stories, of the women I spoke to. So, particularly you think about when I was doing the interviews, Ross, you know, we were, we had our, we were in the middle of our, in London.

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[00:34:54] Hayley: And, it's a really weird thing to set, but it felt like a real privilege to be able to do research. One of the u most unique

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[00:35:02] Ross: did, did you ever find that the conscientiousness tipped over into, because you talked earlier about yourself and boundary setting and, and saying,

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[00:35:15] Hayley: No, not in any discernible. Not in any discernible. Way that I can, I can remember, I think there were other things that the women drew upon to help navigate that very difficult time, which we're gonna touch on now when

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[00:35:38] Hayley: So this was really interesting because in the, in the systematic literature review, what came out was women basically got a really bad rap in these 17 studies. So, in particular, many of the researchers across these studies, We're saying women tend to be weak at the, the more technical stuff.

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[00:36:41] Nurturing networks

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[00:36:59] Hayley: So how open women were to sharing their client contacts, to connecting new women business owners with other kind of women and men. and it was Just such feel good vibes from the conversations. Um, so generosity within relationships, not just taking, really came through the second soft competency is what I call self-directed learning.

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[00:37:43] Hayley: They, they were reflecting. there was one woman who talked about quarterly, she would reflect on how she felt she'd done with her business. So there was, there was this kind of real self-directed learning, which is incredible. Now, here's the interesting thing. As I say, women got criticized, got a bad rap in the [00:38:00] systematic review across the 17 studies around technical competencies in my. interviews, it came through as a strength. So every woman I spoke to talked about how the fact she put in place a business plan was highly organized, so had a strategy, had set themselves goals, had set themselves financial goals. Basically had done really good business planning, so I've created a free template, an evidence-based template on the back of my research to help women and men, any men listening, develop their first business plan.

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[00:38:51] Hayley: they thought about all that in detail and. The third technical competency was what I called market sector awareness. So again, all the women I spoke to were really clear on the kind of sectors they wanted to work with, organizations they wanted to work with, and then they diligently were paying attention to trade press.

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[00:39:27] Hayley: And then the final bit was values. which I, I loved kind of asking the women about. And again, as I say, my study is the first to specifically and explicitly look at values in relation to business ownership. And there were three that came out time and time again. So I used, I primarily used the Swartz values inventory.

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[00:40:02] Hayley: And now being their own boss and, and running their own business, they could decide what their business stood for and they could bring themselves into their business. So, because many of them are micro-business owners, And I know this myself as a micro business owner, you, you are your business. Your brand is your business' brand. so authenticity came through. The second was around helping and caring for others. every single woman I spoke to, Talked about this in detail about that's what drove them. it was behind the decisions that they made, the, the things that they did, the things that they didn't do, the clients they worked with, the clients that didn't quite fit with their values.

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[00:41:00] Hayley: there is more than enough work to go round and we don't need to be fighting each other. So yeah, so that is, my thesis and my findings in a nutshell. I did find a couple of barriers whilst I wasn't explicitly looking for them. They did come up in the stories and my supervisors rightly said, Hailey, you need to include these.

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[00:41:36] Ross: not on me. I can tell you that

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[00:41:40] Hayley: I just delete. Sometimes it depends on what kind of mood I'm in. I might send a, a terse reply. but all of the women said, I don't like selling, but when I dug into it, They don't have to sell. because of the credibility and reputation. They put the effort on giving stuff away for free. On social media, it's word of mouth.

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[00:42:19] Hayley: So lots of them talked openly about that, but they'd all put in place. Things to help them, whether it was getting an accountant, whether it was booking in time once a month, to really go through, and get comfortable with your financial data going on a course to understand financial terminology. So again, whilst lots of them talked about it as a potential barrier, they'd all proactively put things in place to mitigate that. And now I'm gonna breathe. And if anybody's still listening to. I love you. the one person who's left.

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[00:43:12] Ross: And I think everything you've just told us is an absolute diamond mine of a takeaway. But is there anything specific you would, you would draw attention to or, or,

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[00:43:55] Hayley: It is why I've created a free. Evidence-based template called my [00:44:00] First Business Plan, which is geared all around the, the things that we've touched on here from my research. So I can, send you a copy to share

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[00:44:30] Ross: Peer reviewed journal article coming out at some point in the future. I know what a journey that is in my work with, Paul Flaxman, our colleague at City. know how long that can take with reviewer two and

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[00:44:46] Hayley: dun.

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[00:44:49] Ross: and for bringing this to life so openly and authentically and beautifully.

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[00:44:56] Hayley: Thank you. And thank you ever so much for, for asking me back again. It's, it's a real honor. Thank you.

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[00:45:00] Ross: That's it, part two in the bag. Thanks so much to Hailey for bringing her groundbreaking research to life on people's soup. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. Let us know what you think on the socials, or drop me an email.

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[00:45:36] Ross: And number three, share the heck out of it on the socials. This will all help us reach more people with stuff that could be. I'd love to hear from you and you can get in touch at people soup dot pod gmail.com. On Twitter, we are at People Soup Pod on Instagram at People dot Soup.

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[00:46:08] Ross: Well, shall we go back to just checking the news? It's, it's been a whole hot, hot hour,

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[00:46:16] Hayley: gosh. She stepped down. she's live. Liz Truss steps down as prime minister and conservative party leader after 44