Built to Lead, Forced to Prove It | Leadership on the Glass Cliff

This Women History Month, we challenge the conventional narrative that separates "leaders" from "entrepreneurs", and examine what happens when you must be both, often simultaneously, often without formal authority.

Here's the question no one asks about entrepreneurship:
What happens when you must lead and build simultaneously, often without the formal authority that makes leadership legible to others?

No org chart. No HR department. No institutional credibility. Just you, trying to lead a team, manage clients, influence stakeholders, and build a business, while half the room is quietly questioning whether you have the right to be doing any of it.

For women, the data is uncomfortable:
38% have their judgment questioned in their area of expertise. 65% of women entrepreneurs experience burnout symptoms. Female leaders face a "self-reinforcing cycle of illegitimacy", struggling more than male counterparts to elicit respect from the same subordinates.

But here's what's interesting: This isn't just a women's problem. It's an entrepreneurial leadership problem that women experience in high definition.

Remove organizational scaffolding entirely, the job title, the corporate backing, the hierarchy, and suddenly everyone has to build authority from scratch.
The difference?
Male founders get asked about their vision. Women get asked about their credentials. Male entrepreneurs are "ambitious.” Women are "proving themselves."

This Women's History Month event examines the double construction project.

Our panellists represent a different reality: leadership as continuous negotiation, entrepreneurship as strategic survival, and impact as the metric that matters. This isn't about "having it all." It's about redefining what leadership means when you're building the plane while flying it.

Selina Adedeji Mortoni took over her father's publishing house after his death. She inherited the business, the team, the stakeholder relationships. She'll share what it's actually like building Edition Mabiki while simultaneously building policy influence across European institutions, managing the invisible labor of establishing legitimacy in every new room, and navigating the exhausting gap between competence and credibility.

Christian Vrient (25+ years building teams, now running a wellbeing practice focused on burnout prevention) will decode what's happening in real-time. Not theory. Tactics. The specific moves that work when you're leading without organizational authority backing you up.

Facilitated by Dr. Audrey-Flore Ngomsik (entrepreneur, sustainability strategist, TEDx speaker who learned that building new systems is easier than convincing people you have permission to build them).

Format: Real conversation. Selina describes a moment. Christian translates it into strategy. We extract what's transferable.

What we’ll explore:

- The authority gap: How do you lead when your legitimacy is constantly questioned, whether you're a woman in policy, an entrepreneur without a corporate title, or a manager challenging workplace norms?

- The sustainability of leadership: Why do entrepreneurial leaders burn out at twice the rate of traditional executives?

- When your business model IS your leadership model: What Selina's publishing house, Christian's well-being practice, and Audrey-Flore's CSR consultancy reveal about values-driven entrepreneurship.

- The invisible labor of building something new: Managing teams, managing stakeholders, managing policy constraints, managing yourself, what no one tells you about leading your own venture.

Why this matters beyond International Women's Day:
The future of work demands leaders who can operate without traditional organizational scaffolding. Yet most leadership development still assumes hierarchy, stability, and institutional backing.

Who should attend:

- Entrepreneurs managing the dual build (business + credibility)

- Leaders operating without institutional backing

- Anyone who thought "founder" would be enough (it isn't)

- People exhausted by having to prove themselves in rooms where others are simply believed

- Men who want to understand why their female co-founders, partners, or team members are burning out at higher rates

- Anyone building something and realizing competence ≠ credibility.

You can be fully qualified, properly positioned, demonstrably competent, and still spend half your energy managing a legitimacy deficit. Most leadership advice assumes you start with authority. This event is for entrepreneurs who don't.
Not inspiration. Strategy.