Failure is an unavoidable part of life — but for women, it often comes with heavier expectations, harsher judgment, and higher emotional tolls.

Dr. Tamara McMillan is a seasoned facilitator, consultant, educator, and transformational speaker. With over 18 years of experience across corporate, government, and higher education, she specializes in leadership development, self-mastery, and innovative problem-solving. Her doctoral research examined the impact of failure on women entrepreneurs, exploring how creativity and resilience shape their ability to persist, rebuild, and thrive. She equips women and organizations with practical, universal strategies for personal and professional growth.

In this episode, Tamara breaks down the three major themes that emerged from her research and shares the real stories behind how women redefine failure, ask for support, and stay persistently flexible — even in the face of constraints and gender expectations.

What you will learn from this episode:

  • How women entrepreneurs redefine failure to create healthier mindsets and business practices.
  • Why learning to ask for help is a critical skill for women leaders and founders.
  • What it means to be “persistently flexible” and why rigidity can kill progress.

“You have to build your network before you need it.”

– Tamara McMillan

Topics Covered:

01:02 – Tamara’s career path across corporate, tech, pharmaceuticals, and higher education.

03:14 – Studying the impact of failure on women entrepreneurs through creativity and resilience.

04:10 – How she designed her qualitative, multiple case study research.

05:20 – Redefining failure into opportunity, growth, and “necessary steps.”

06:50 – Why asking for help is harder for women — and why it matters.

07:32 – Being persistently flexible in goals, strategy, and business pivots.

08:26 – Building a powerful network before you need one.

09:40 – Gender expectations, family roles, and constraints women must navigate.

11:05 – Tamara’s work today in coaching, cohorts, and strategic learning for organizations.

12:30 – “Give what you did not get”: Tamara’s call to women supporting women.

Key Takeaways:

“She doesn’t even call it failure anymore. She calls it a necessary step.” — Tamara McMillan

“As women, we’re sent messages that asking for help somehow means we’re not good enough.” — Tamara McMillan

“They were persistently flexible. It wasn’t rigid. It wasn’t one way or the highway.” — Tamara McMillan

“Give what you did not get. Many of us are here because we had to take it on the chin.” — Tamara McMillan

Ways to Connect with Tamara McMillan:

Ways to Connect with Sarah E. Brown:

 

Full Episode Transcript:

(AI helped us put this together, so if you see any weird grammar or missed words—just know we nailed it during the actual chat.)

Tamara McMillan

So the overall topic, failure, one of the things that I was thinking about as my life was evolving and I was becoming more seasoned and professional, if you will, I was constantly reminded of the things that had gotten wrong. 

And when I came into the creativity space, getting the certificate in creativity and change leadership, my lens switched where mistakes, failures were a normal day occurrence because that’s how you get to new and novel things. And a light bulb went on.

Sarah E. Brown 

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the KTS Success Factor podcast for women, where we talk about challenges senior female leaders face in being happy and successful at work. I’m your host, Dr. Sarah E. Brown. 

My guest today is Dr. Tamara McMillan. She’s a seasoned facilitator, consultant, and educator dedicated to empowering women and organizations through self-mastery, leadership development, and innovative problem solving. 

With a PhD focused on the impact of failure and how creativity and resilience can be leveraged to overcome setbacks, Tamara equips individuals and organizations with universal strategies ideal for personal and professional growth. Welcome, Tamara.

Tamara McMillan

Thank you so much, Sarah, for having me.

Sarah E. Brown 

Well, we’re going to talk about your dissertation because that’s a very interesting topic. But before we get to that, tell us a bit about your background before you started your Ph.D. program.

Tamara McMillan

My background is very, I believe that’s one of the things that I’ve added to my superpower, but I started my career out in business, primarily corporate America, where I really cut my teeth on this notion, this idea of good customer service. I’ve done the things in advertisements. I’ve done the things in the computer space, executive sales and pharmaceuticals, and then in higher education. 

Sarah E. Brown

And what prompted you to go back to get your doctorate? 

Tamara McMillan

It wasn’t this, I need to have another degree, I need to have another credential in order for me to feel like I need to have it to do something or to say something or the work that I hadn’t done wasn’t significant enough. It really came out of a bet, kind of, so to speak, that I call it that. Adjunct professor, I’ve been doing so since about 2014, so I was interested to do it more consistently and to do it full-time or at least part-time basis. 

And the department that I was interested in at that particular time, I went, I shot my shot, made my pitch, And they’re like, well, all of the professors that teach for us, either assistant or associates, they have their terminal degree and you don’t have your terminal degree. Now, Sarah, let me say that I found it laughable because of all of the professors that had their degree and it was doing some great work, of course. 

I was on the top in terms of our engagement, in terms of recruitment for scholars to come into the program and then continue on to get their master’s. I won adjunct of the year three times, elected by the students, so I found it interesting. So I said, well, bet. So I went into a PhD program.

Sarah E. Brown

Ok. And that makes perfect sense. But you have a very interesting topic. So I mentioned it in the bio, but remind my listeners of the topic and then tell us a little bit about how you picked it.

Tamara McMillan

So the complete topic is the impact of failure on women entrepreneurs. It was a study in creativity and resilience. So the overall topic, failure, one of the things that I was thinking about as my life was evolving and I was becoming more seasoned and professional, if you will, I was constantly reminded of the things that I’d gotten wrong. 

And when I came into the creativity space, getting the certificate in creativity and change leadership, my lens switched where mistakes, failures were a normal day occurrence because that’s how you get to new and novel things. And the light bulb went off.

Sarah E. Brown 

Okay, so tell me about how you went about this research.

Tamara McMillan

So once I narrowed that one, I knew that I wanted to research and I wanted to dive into and immerse myself into failure. Then I had to think about, how did I want to add to the literature and leadership? How did I want to leave something that was bigger than myself? 

And as a woman, as a woman entrepreneur, and as an individual who loves women, I said, hey, thinking about how impactful we are in the small business space, helping with, again, movement, number one employer, yet when you look at the numbers that is posted by SBA, Small Business Administration, United States Small Business Administration, 50% of businesses fail within the first three to five years. 

And then for women businesses, as you know, Sarah, that number is even larger. So I said, well, is it the failure? Is it the gender differences? Is it the implication around it? What’s there? And so I began on this quest to better understand the impact of failure for women businesses who were able to persist past the five-year mark.

Sarah E. Brown 

Oh, okay. And so, tell us a little bit more. It was a qualitative study?

Tamara McMillan

Absolutely. Like, oh my goodness, as a storyteller, how can I not? Yes, it was a qualitative study. It was a multiple case study design, and it was exploratory. So I wanted to explore the lived experiences of these women entrepreneurs who had clearly failed in their businesses, but still leveraged creativity and resilience to move forward. And it was from an interpretive constructivism viewpoint, right? I wanted to better understand their experiences so we could put it out into the world and make it something bigger than all of us collectively.

Sarah E. Brown 

Yeah, that’s very much how I went about my research as well. So what did you draw as the key conclusions of your study?

Tamara McMillan

So I’m going to give you three of the overarching themes. There was a total, there was more than that, but for the sake, you know, of this particular conversation and giving your audience something to sink their teeth into. First and foremost, all of the women hands down came to the realization that they needed to, after coming to a redefinition of self, they redefined what failure was for them. 

So think about it where Silicon Valley really embraces and puts their arms around failure because it is a part of their process, MVPs and such, where Wall Street looks very differently at failure. So each and every one of them had a very healthy perspective and definition on failure, which I was so jazzed about. I was so elated because I was in the same space. So that was a wonderful thing that I found.

Sarah E. Brown 

Can you give me an example about how one redefined it? 

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Tamara McMillan

One said she’s redefined failure so much so she doesn’t even call it failure. She calls it a necessary step. Okay. Okay. So a necessary step. So looking at it as an opportunity that can be leveraged for the benefit of not only her, but for the clients and the work that she was specifically doing.

Sarah E. Brown 

Okay. So that was, one is redefining failure. So what were the other two?

Tamara McMillan

So then the second thing that came out of the research and the study, women understood how important it was for them to ask for help. Not as good, right? Because we’re sent messages, there’s a subliminal message the press happens upon us as women, and we receive this ideology that if we ask for help, that somehow indicates that we’re not good enough, that we can’t hold the position, we can’t be entrepreneurs, and we’re somehow less than if we ask for help. 

And then the next one was this notion, this idea, and I really love this one, of being persistently flexible. Being persistently flexible in their goal to being an entrepreneur and the ways in which it looked, it was not rigid. It wasn’t one way. And if it was that one way, then it meant it was the highway. They were persistently flexible in the ways in which they approached business and entrepreneurship. 

So, if they thought it was going to be A, B, and C, but then when they got to C, it looked very different and it needed to be 1, 2, and 3, they allowed themselves to be fluid. So, that was one of the other research ideas that came out of the research. That was one of the overarching themes, I should say. Thank you.

Sarah E. Brown 

Okay. Were there any nuances in the study that we should understand to really grasp this?

Tamara McMillan

There were. There are a few nuances. First and foremost, there was this nuance around building your network before you needed it. So thinking about women as, right, women who’ve been in corporate America before, because most of us start in corporate America before we branch out into entrepreneurship or that we’re doing them at the same time in the blend. 

And there were two examples specifically that I remember that always came to the top regarding the network. One of them, she was in the not-for-profit space and she was higher up and she said she remembered they were creating some kind of program of services and they were needing to do a pilot study. And the end users were women, right? Not exactly all of the details. 

And she remembered at that particular point, she really didn’t have a network of women she could either reach out to, to help with the recruitment. And she didn’t have women that she could reach out to who could be a part of the actual pilot study. And that was an aha moment for her. The next woman, her space was, she’s an accountant, bookkeeping, and she said, I never had a female friend group. I never had a group of women. 

And she even said, and I remember this, it was almost painful because she had really had some difficult experiences moving through, you know, family and professional life. And she said, maybe that’s why it took me so long to get to this point because I didn’t have a female network, like, even now, that still comes to the top and resonates for me. 

And then the last nuance is around this nuance of constraints. Understanding that we have constraints, one that we put on ourselves and then ones that come from exterior, whether it be, again, work, whether it be family life, social media, understanding those constraints and still being able to have the strength, courage, and confidence to move past those constraints.

Sarah E. Brown 

Got it. Okay, so the key things that they did was to redefine failure, to ask for help, and to be persistently flexible. Yeah. And in addition, they were building their networks ahead of time, or they learned that they needed to do that, and they needed to fully understand their constraints.

Tamara McMillan

And then in the constraints also about the gender differences and then how those gender differences may have had an impact on failure. So one of the women talked about how she had a friend who was also an entrepreneur, but she was married and had children. 

And then it was her husband’s expectation that she was supposed to be, you know, the wife and the mother first and then the entrepreneur second. So if she needed to go to any networking events, if she needed to do anything to kind of, you know, be out building the business, those things all had to be done on a particular time. timeline, and so that way it didn’t, what, encroach upon her family life, her husband, or he would have gotten mad because he had gotten mad. 

So just those kinds of differences and being able to, what, resolve and reckon with them and look at them and how it’s impacting us as entrepreneurs and being able to have open and honest conversations about it.

Sarah E. Brown 

So are you doing anything now other than being on the faculty? 

Tamara McMillan

I am. 

Sarah E. Brown

So tell us about your business.

Tamara McMillan

Yes. So there’s two aspects of the business. The first aspect I’ll speak to is relative to the work with women. So we have a community where we afford women a brave space to lay their burdens down as they are navigating what’s next. Most of them are middle career, you know, middle aged women who are looked up and realize, huh, there’s something more, there’s something that I’m missing and I really can’t put my hand on it. 

So we have a cohort experience. Our tagline is we can be bold together because we lean into, Sarah, this notion, this idea that collaboration is the new competition because there’s enough to go around. Debunking the rumor that there’s just this coveted seat for one and we do that in the cohort space so there are seven to ten women that go through the experience together or then for women who want to work with me one-on-one and executive coaching. 

So again helping them navigate the space personally or professionally and then being able to kind of pull back the layers and determine hey what does this look like for me in the next one, three, five years. Then the other aspects were strategic learning, executive training, development, consultant space. I work with small to medium-sized businesses and help them maximize their human capital via assessment. 

So qualified MBTI, Foresight, Myers-Briggs, and helping them put the right people on the right bus in the right seat so then that way the work really doesn’t seem like work or they’re trying to overcome where they don’t get high energy from. So it’s kind of like that strength quest. Who are you? What do you know for sure? And where is your energy? And then how do we put you in alignment with that? So it is a weld oil machine.

Sarah E. Brown 

Very cool. So Tamara, what did I not ask you that I should have asked you to help us understand what you learned from your study and how you’re applying it today?

Tamara McMillan

Wow, that’s good. I’d say kind of leaning into the tagline, we can be bold together. One of the things that I want your audience to hear and hear again is that females, we are the future. I believe that wholeheartedly and 100%. However, what I also know and what I also understand, we can’t be the future without telling the truth, even if that’s on ourselves. 

Tell the truth about, you know, maybe the spaces in the places where we may have trespassed against one another or even ourselves because betrayal is real, but self-betrayal is the worst kind of betrayal. 

So that’s the first thing, you know, that I would ask your audience to kind of lean in again. How are you reaching across the aisle, so to speak, with that new woman who’s coming to the office, or there’s a new entrepreneur that you met at this networking event because you served as a panelist? 

How are you allowing her to come along for the experience with you and learn from all the things you got wrong? And that leads to the last thing. Give what you did not get. Give what you did not get. Because many of us are here because we have to take it on the chin. 

We have to take it on the knee. Many of us got our mouths busted and had to taste blood because we didn’t have the modeling. We didn’t have the support. So I just implore your audience to give what they did not get themselves.

Sarah E. Brown 

I love that. Give what you did not get yourself. That’s amazing and a great thing to end on. Tamara, thank you for being with me today.

Tamara McMillan

I enjoyed myself. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Sarah.

Sarah E. Brown 

Thanks for listening to the KTS Success Factor Podcast for Women. If you like what you are hearing, please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave a review. And if you want more information on how we help women in your organization thrive, go to www.sarahebrown.com. You can sign up for our newsletter, read show notes, learn more about our podcast guests, read my blog, browse through the books, or contact us for a chat. Goodbye for now.

Sarah E. Brown
Sarah E. Brown