From Advice to Action: What Women Founders Need and What Leaders Can Change
I recently attended the Scale Ireland International Women’s Day event and left with renewed respect for the founder journey. The conversation was focused and grounded. Two questions anchored the panel:
What is the best advice you have received as a founder or leader?
What would genuinely move the dial on building stronger pipelines for women into senior leadership and founder roles?
What follows is a structured synthesis of what stood out for me.
The best advice these founders received
Start with honesty—and the team.
A consistent message was that the quality of the team is not a “nice to have”. It is the operating system. Under pressure, trust becomes operational. The ability to make fast, high-quality decisions depends on the relationships around the table and the shared standards behind them.
Resilience is not optional.
Resilience came through not as a personality trait but as a practical requirement. The founder path includes ambiguity, setbacks and reinvention. A related point landed strongly: don’t run away from hard problems. Avoidance compounds cost. Mature leadership turns towards the issue early, even when the answer is uncomfortable.
Build range: the power of lateral moves.
Several speakers referenced lateral moves and breadth of experience as accelerators. In scaling environments, range matters. Leaders who can move across domains—product, people, operations, customer, build a stronger internal “pattern library” and improve judgement under uncertainty.
Make every day a learning day.
The mindset theme was clear: capability is built through repetition. The “I can’t do it” narrative is a trap. Replace it with “I’ll figure it out” and then create the learning conditions, e.g. feedback, experimentation, and reflection.
Invest in yourself—because it scales beyond you.
This advice was framed as self-improvement for its own sake. It was about the leader as a scaling constraint or scaling advantage. When leaders develop their judgement, influence, emotional regulation and decision quality, that capability compounds across the team.
Know the difference between good growth and bad growth.
One of the most useful distinctions discussed was good growth versus bad growth.
Good growth strengthens the business model and builds sustainable capacity.
Bad growth creates fragility—over-hiring, over-committing, under-provisioning, and stretching cash and leadership bandwidth.
The discipline here is the pause: Is this growth going to help us scale, or just make us bigger and more brittle?
Cash discipline is leadership discipline.
“Never run out of cash” was repeated with the kind of clarity that comes from lived experience. Know your cash position. Constantly. This is not finance hygiene; it is strategic freedom and risk management.
Be selective about investors—alignment beats capital.
A strong theme was being intentional about who you take money from. It is more than funding. Look for belief in the product and broader support, not just capital. Misalignment with investors becomes a distraction at best and a derailment at worst.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable—without outsourcing your judgement.
Founders spoke about pushing beyond comfort zones and taking calculated risks. But they also emphasised discernment: take advice with perspective and keep your own conviction. Leadership is not about collecting opinions; it is about making decisions with imperfect information and owning the consequences.
Let go of perfectionism.
Perfectionism surfaced as a subtle limiter, particularly when it becomes a reason to delay decisions or self-select out of opportunity. The message was direct: don’t talk yourself out of stretch. Confidence is often built after action, not before it.
The “bad advice” moment: “stay in your lane.”
One comment stayed with me. A founder described being told to “stay in your lane”—advice that slowed her down. For leaders, this is a useful mirror. Seemingly casual messages can quietly stifle ambition, particularly for women. What leaders say becomes culture. What culture signals becomes behaviour.
What will genuinely move the pipeline according to these founders?
Measure it: representation, progression, access to opportunity.
Mentoring and coaching: structured, sustained, and linked to real opportunities.
Financial awareness early: “know the numbers” should not start at founder stage.
Childcare: treat it as a pipeline and participation issue, not a side topic.
Early intervention at secondary school decision points: where pathways narrow quickly.
Visibility of role models: widening what feels possible.
Project allocation: watch who gets the stretch assignments and leadership roles. It is an opportunity to shine a light on upcoming talent.
Sponsorship: formalise it—mentors advise, sponsors advocate.