For the past 20 years, I’ve steadily grown my family’s Evergreen company, Hello! Destination Management, by being flexible and making changes as needed to promote growth. But what I didn’t realize until just a couple years ago was that this also meant my leadership style — the one I had practiced and clung to for decades — needed to grow and adjust. That’s been a tough mental adjustment for someone with a nasty control streak and a tremendous fear of failure.

My first job upon returning to our family business was driving a cab for my father’s Orlando-based company, Mears Transportation Group, in the early ’90s. My father had inherited what was originally a cab company from his father (who founded it in 1939) and expanded it into all forms of passenger ground transportation and destination management — providing services like tours, team building and special event planning to corporate meeting planners.