SIFTED: THE FUTURE OF WORK

Louise Nicolson quoted in Sifted Report on the Future of Work

“Wellbeing isn’t just something we talk about, it’s something we practice all day everyday.” Even on the busiest days, Power says, he’ll encourage his team to “take a mindful moment” or perhaps “start a meeting with a meditation”.

But entrepreneur, coach and author Louise Nicolson says that real change must run much deeper than this. It’s not something we should learn to live with, as Power says; instead, we need to shift expectations and attitudes.

In her book, The Entrepreneurial Myth, she examines the dangers of mythologising founders and how that’s had a substantial and detrimental impact on not only their health, but on the entire economy.

“We’ve created unrealistic ideals and aspirations for entrepreneurs through which we’re setting ourselves and our employees up for failure,” Nicolson says. “Startups and small businesses represent the backbone of the economy in much of Europe and further afield. Getting this right is absolutely vital to creating an effective business ecosystem that’s sustainable in every sense.”

But she also acknowledges that we can’t put the responsibility for changing entrepreneurship solely on entrepreneurs’ shoulders. “There has to be a holistic system approach from enterprise policy downwards,” she says. “At the moment, we are skewed — we accept the jobs and taxes and wealth when entrepreneurs succeed; but they end up shouldering the burden of failure and the material and mental health cost of that failure alone. So this is also about a form of entrepreneurial justice.”

Nicolson says that it’s “great that we’re talking about health and wellbeing and responsible attitudes to management and leadership”, but that “it really runs so much deeper than this... We need to move on from glorifying the all-nighter and equating all-out exertion to success.”

She adds: “We need to wake up and actually understand what we’re doing here.”