Katherine Olson

I attribute my success to learning how to lead people where they are, rather than expecting everyone to perform exactly as I would. Early in my career, I realized that strong leadership is less about directing from a single perspective and more about understanding individual strengths, communication styles, and motivators. By meeting people at their level, building trust, and creating space for accountability and growth, I’ve been able to develop stronger teams, improve performance, and foster a culture where people feel supported while still being challenged to excel.

The best career advice I ever received was to have standards for yourself, but understand that you lead a team of people who are not you. In order to successfully do that, your standards should remain high. However, you need to understand your team's experiences and expertise to be able to successfully lead them, and you cannot put the pressure of where you would put yourself on them. Not everyone works at that caliber, and the most important part about being a successful leader is understanding and learning your team, and not assuming everyone is you.

This is a really good question, mostly because it's a heavily male-dominated field. As cliche as it sounds, one of my favorite trainings that I do is about being your authentic self. I think it's really easy to find yourself conforming to the workplace, and it is so important to remember what makes you different as a female, and the characteristics and the attributes that you bring to a team because of that. So I would say just staying true to you and authentically showing up to work every day.

In our industry, some of the challenges we face, especially being a highly male-dominated industry, is retention of female leaders, and opportunities for them to grow. One of my favorite things and sayings would be, you know, I can provide the opportunities and you create your stories. How do you continue to motivate and lead and influence leaders, and that even goes outside of females as well, to continue to build and grow and have confidence in their journey? I think that's one thing that in this industry we struggle with a little bit. Continuing to make confident leaders is something that we work hard and train on daily.

My greatest values are earning trust. I think in every aspect of life, to have trust and respect with any relationship is the greatest way to have real results. So professionally and personally, I think building a trustful and honest relationship is how I lead most of the time through life. Especially as a mother, it's really important to instill honesty, trust, and respect in every relationship.