Leader Spotlight - Anne Boninsegna and Jen Lindsey

Our Leader Spotlight includes advice and insights from our clients and friends. It is our pleasure to shine the light on leaders who inspire growth, collaboration, and impact.

Meet Anne Boninsegna and Jen Lindsey, Founders & Co-Owners, The Kitchen Columbus.

Most important lesson you've learned about building and leading a team:

"Meeting people where they are and leading with empathy gains more trust and yields better results than attempting to place every team member into the same category. Taking the time to learn who you are working with, how they best give and receive information, and what motivates them is worth the effort."

Balancing organizational goals with people’s needs, when facing a tough decision:

"This is likely one of the hardest aspects of leadership. While we lead with empathy, we operate best by centering the needs of the business first, then the needs of others. It is essential that the business survive and succeed for everyone’s collective well-being. We believe strongly in a positive work life balance for all team members (including ourselves), and we do our best to support a healthy work culture that celebrates time away. A company core value we have is 'One Team, One Dream' which means, no matter who it is, we will support a team member to successful outcomes and the expectation is that they reciprocate."

Practice or mindset to lead with confidence, and how it influenced the team:

"We began by building the business from the ground up, literally working every position our business required. We gained valuable insight on best practices, operational successes and failures, and clearly defined a way of “how we do it here”. The mindset we had at the beginning was figuring it all out but once we did, we had the insight to fill our positions and step further back to more accurately determine how best to grow it. Not being mired in the day to day afforded us the luxury of dreaming about new possibilities as we also allowed others to shine and enhance our operations."