Women Who Lead: Leadership Lessons for Women in Home Care

Women Who Lead: Leadership Lessons for Women in Home Care

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Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the CareSmartz360 podcast, where we bring you conversations with the people shaping the future of home care. I’m your host, Erin,and today we’re talking about a topic that’s especially meaningful in our industry, women in leadership. Home care is powered by compassionate professionals, and many of those leaders are women who are building businesses, inspiring teams, and making a lasting impact on the lives of families and caregivers every single day.

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Joining us today is someone who embodies exactly that.Joanna Lafleur, a dementia care expert,keynote speaker, author, serial entrepreneur, and leadership coach,who has spent more than two decades building businesses, leading teams, and helping others navigate the realities of leadership and entrepreneurship. Through her work, she empowers women leaders to trust themselves, find their voice, and build careers and businesses rooted in confidence, clarity, and purpose.

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Joanna, welcome to the CareSmarz360 podcast. It’s wonderful to have you with us. Thank you so much for having me, I’m happy to be here.Great, so we’ll jump right in. My first question for you, your journey spans entrepreneurship, leadership, and building successful career organizations,care organizations. Looking back, what experiences shaped you into the leader you are today? Honestly, I think starting before I was ready was probably the best leadership lesson I could ever say.

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Like a lot of times I think we think we need to make sure all of our ducks are in a row and we can do all of these things and then we can start. But for me, it started really with a passion and what I call the bulldog method, which is like, hold on and don’t let go, you know? So originally when I started my company, I pretty much Googled everything. Back in the day, there was Google, and I learned a lot of things by doing it wrong and then fixing it. Right, so just learn by doing. Yes.And home care is a women-led industry, yet many women hesitate to step into these leadership roles.

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In your experience, what’s holding them back and how can they overcome those barriers? I think a lot of women have imposter syndrome and they think that if they need a certain degree or they need a certain amount of hours in this or that, and we think, you know, maybe I’m not made to. For me, I mean, I have zero business experience and zero financial, like literacy experience, really. But one of my coaches early on, she said, you can pay people to do the things that you’re not good at.

You don’t have to be good at everything. You can’t be good at everything, right? And so I think that’s one thing. And I think women need to trust themselves more.

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Women are incredibly powerful. You know, people who, you know, juggle a lot of things and still get them done with excellence. And I’ve seen women just like, people that have worked for me and people in the industry too, that they’re just powerhouses and we just don’t know it all the time.And we need to be able to, you know, confidence comes from showing up daily and doing what you’re supposed to do.That’s how you become confident in it. Not one day overnight, you’re just all of a sudden confident.

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Right, absolutely.And you’ve often spoken about leading with integrity, boundaries, and consistency. How have those principles helped you build successful businesses while staying true to your values? One thing I always said in my company is, it’s always the right thing to do the right thing. And for me, integrity has always been number one.And it’s incredibly challenging to run a company these days with integrity. And so, but every single time it’s always gotten me the result that I want.

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And I’ll give you an example. We had a, I had a home care client who ended up getting bed bugs in his house.And it ended up coming from one of my caregivers.And so as soon as I got the call,I ended up, you know, getting the bed bug people out there,checking all my caregivers’ homes, checking theirs, then figuring out what it was and handling it, then paying for a hotel room so that that could get handled.I spent a couple thousand dollars handling that issue, but that was the right thing to do for that situation.This turns out that this daughter’s, that this man’s daughter is a geriatric social worker at University of Michigan here.

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So it was, you know, it just showed. And over and over and over, I’ve seen that when things went wrong,my people supported me because they knew that I had the intention of running it correctly.Even my surveyor and everyone, like they were like, we know what you’re doing here.We know you’re trying and we’re not perfect. But I always say, it’s in those moments of imperfection that you really prove your ability as a leader because you choose how to handle that and to take ownership of it and to move through it. And that’s always the best thing.

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Absolutely. And entrepreneurship can be both rewarding and incredibly demanding, we know.What are some of the biggest leadership lessons that you’ve learned from building businesses in the senior care industry? One of the big lessons I learned is you have to say no.

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I struggle with this a lot.And I think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with this because you’re building a business. You don’t want to say no to business. But here’s the thing that I learned is that if you don’t, it will hurt your organization. For me, I didn’t want to say no to people when they called in for home care.Even if I didn’t have staff, I don’t want to say no because I knew the desperate need that they had, right? And so I’d always try to figure it out. And in the meantime, what I ended up doing was just burning out a lot of really good staff and maxing myself past a level that I had the capacity to handle.So that’s one of the biggest things I tell entrepreneurs is you have to learn to say no.You can’t be everything to everyone.

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You have to create that niche and stay with it. Another thing is to have values in your organization because we had seven values and we actually, I taught as much on dementia as I did on my values in my company to my staff. And the reason for that is because you, when you’re in this kind of industry, you have to have a mission and you have to have everyone on board with the mission. And people don’t get it after one time. You have to continuously share the vision, share the mission and explain what you’re doing.I think Gen Z and a lot of our employees are Gen Z right now and they need to have meaningful work.

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They need to be able to know they’re making a difference.And so I think sharing that message clearly. And the one other thing I would say is make sure you know your why and make sure you explain your why. Absolutely. And my next question is about burnout. So to your point earlier about learning to say no, burnout is a challenge for both caregivers and leaders.

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How can women build successful careers in businesses without sacrificing their wellbeing or losing that sense of purpose? Honestly, I don’t know that, I think healthcare is just such a high burnout that you do have to create really strong boundaries and you have to really carve out time to do something that you need because it’s so demanding. And these are people’s lives in our hands, right? So I think for me, I learned kind of the hard way. I would always say, you can’t pour from an empty cup and you gotta take care of yourself too and all these things and not doing it.

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And I burned out very severely at the end. And what I learned was from a book actually, her name is Rachel Macy Stafford. And she said, even if you lose yourself doing good works, you’ve still lost yourself. And I think for me, what I had to do was figure out how to get, like how to create a schedule where I actually input my time for myself, input my time for my family and stuck with that, and was able to say, okay, I didn’t get everything done today, but I got enough done and I need to move forward because I need rest and I need this. And then also I think just communicating, you have to communicate your needs with your team. Right, yeah, absolutely.

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And great leaders don’t just build businesses, they also build people. So what strategies have helped you develop confident, compassionate and high performing care teams? One thing I think people don’t realize is that I really think that in general, our employees, our teams, they want direction and they need something, they need consistent things to follow.So for me, I was a checklist queen.

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Everything that we did had a checklist to it. And my staff actually really liked them because it was very clear what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do. When you have expectations of your staff,you have to make sure that you clearly said them.

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If they’re messing up, the first thing you should ask yourself is, did I clearly communicate that? And did I clearly demonstrate that in a way they can understand? And if not, it’s a you problem, it’s not a them problem, right? The other thing is when I talk about the why, your team doesn’t know your why unless you say it, right? So I’ll never forget, one of the things that I had in my company was I had these monthly meetings that were mandatory.And basically we told people that when you because they’re mandatory, there’s no way around them. And I remember at one point, we decided to get some feedback from our caregivers. And so we let them do like an anonymous Dropbox with like, which I wouldn’t recommend by the way.But I remember this one girl and I knew exactly who it was with everything that she wrote. And she just wrote all kinds of things.

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She was like, I don’t understand this, I don’t understand this, I don’t understand this. And that’s when I realized that I was not being clear with my why behind everything. And then you have to take it one step further and you have to do something called the WIFM, which means what’s in it for me.

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And every time I would roll out a policy or a procedure or anything, I would say, here’s why we’re doing it, right? So like, for example, no cell phones, that’s a big one for me, was always a big one for me. And it’s hard to implement that, right? But here’s what I would say. I would say, imagine, I would say, you being on your phone literally could be life or death for a person.

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Because imagine you being on your phone, you’re not recognizing it. They’re getting out of bed, they’re walking across the room,they fall, they break their hip and you were on your phone.Like you gotta try to make them understand the severity of those kinds of things.And again, the why behind them, because it makes a lot more sense to why you would need that. And just making them fully understand the mission, the goals, what you’re doing there and also how they’re making a difference. And I think the other thing is a lot of appreciation and encouragement. People need to be told they’re doing a good job. If you’re just going in and telling them everything that they’re doing wrong, that’s gonna be an issue. And I had days when I did that.

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And I know that I hurt my teams when I did that. And so I worked really hard to come up with creative ways, like little stickers and little gift cards and here’s thing. And like, we would just hand it to them and do things like when they started on any like anniversary, their birthday, doing little things for them just to show we actually care about you as a human being, not just you as an employee.

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Now it matters, absolutely. And as AI and technology continue to reshape home care, what opportunities do you see for women leaders to embrace innovation while preserving the empathy and that human connection that defined exceptional care? AI is incredible now. And it’s honestly the best assistant I’ve ever had. And it doesn’t talk back to me, but there’s a place, time and a place for it, right? But I think we need to use AI in things that we’re not maybe not necessarily good at, or that takes a lot of time away from caring for the people. So things like billing and emails and calendar stuff and like social media and your website, and AI can do a lot of that stuff for you now so that you can really focus on what’s important,) which is your people, right?

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Yeah, absolutely. And my last question for you, Joanna, if you could share one piece of advice with the next generation of women leading the future of home care, what would it be? It’s hard to just pick one really, but I would say do things in the right way for the right reason. One of the things in my first year of home care to my second year of home care, I grew it a million dollars in one year, my second year of business. And I remember someone coming in my office and they’re like, how are you having this success? And I said, you know what? I’m doing what I said I was gonna do, plain and simple. There are not a lot of businesses and people in general that actually do what they said that they were gonna do.

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And for me, when you are saying, I’m gonna be caring for your person, your most precious person in your life, right? And I’m gonna make sure that they’re cared for like you would, like family would.That meant everything to me, right? And you can’t just be saying things like that and you can’t follow through on it, right? Because people can tell. So I think that’s a big, I mean, it’s so simple, but not simple at all, right? Is literally when you say you’re gonna do something, do it.

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(And if you can’t, then you communicate why you can’t and try to fix it. Right, yeah, absolutely. Well, Joanna, thank you so much for being with us.There was a lot of actionable takeaways.We really appreciate that.And to all of our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in to CareSmartz360 on air. Thanks for having me.