Over the past year, while studying my Master’s in Business Administration, I’ve had many moments when the two worlds I live in suddenly collided — university leadership theory and the reality of running busy hair salons.
And honestly?
It stopped me in my tracks.
For a long time, I think people saw my work as “nice little hair salons.”
Well-meaning. Creative. Not particularly serious.
But what this year of study has clarified for me is that running a salon is actually one of the most demanding and complex forms of entrepreneurship there is.
The Complexity of Salon Leadership
A salon is not just a service business.
It’s a live environment where you are:
- Delivering high-stakes, highly personal services
- Selling retail in real time
- Educating people on the job, every day
- Managing people, personalities, emotions, and expectations
- Making decisions constantly, with incomplete information
All while clients are watching.
When you step back and really look at it, a salon operates at the intersection of:
- Business strategy
- Leadership
- Education
- Customer experience
- Emotional intelligence
- Systems thinking
That’s not simple.
That’s complex work.
That’s complex work.
What University Changed for Me
University didn’t teach me how to run a salon — hairdressing already did that.
What studying leadership did give me was language.
Suddenly, the things we do instinctively on the salon floor had names.
They had frameworks.
They had decades of research behind them.
Decision-making under uncertainty.
Distributed leadership.
Tacit knowledge.
Adaptive systems.
Concepts I was reading about in leadership theory — including ideas explored in texts like Systems Thinking for Leaders — were already happening in salons every single day. They just hadn’t been recognised as such.
Why Hairdressing Deserves More Credit
I don’t think hairdressing is given enough credit for how intelligent and adaptable the profession actually is.
Many hairdressers are creative young women who have:
- Left high school early
- Chosen vocational pathways
- Learned through doing, not lectures
And because of that, they’re often not viewed as academic or deep thinkers.
But the more I study leadership, the more I’m convinced of the opposite.
The best hairdressers I know are:
- Exceptional decision-makers
- Highly emotionally intelligent
- Comfortable operating under pressure
- Incredibly adaptive
- Natural systems thinkers
They just learned these skills on the salon floor instead of in a classroom.
Why I’m Sharing This Series
This blog series is my way of connecting those two worlds.
Over the coming posts, I’ll be exploring some of the leadership theories and frameworks I’m studying through my MBA — and showing how they already exist in hairdressing and salon leadership.
Not to “teach” hairdressers how to lead.
But to name, validate, and strengthen the leadership they’re already practising every day.
My hope is that:
- Salon owners feel more confident calling themselves entrepreneurs
- Stylists recognise the depth of their skill
- Apprentices see their future as intellectually rich, not limiting
Because when we start to see our work clearly, we start to value it differently.
Stay Tuned
If you’ve ever felt that what happens on the salon floor is underestimated, overlooked, or misunderstood — this series is for you.
This is leadership.
This is complexity.
This is hairdressing.
This is complexity.
This is hairdressing.
And it deserves to be taken seriously.
The first post in this series explores decision-making under uncertainty — one of the most critical leadership skills hairdressers use every single day.
