In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, Malorie Nicole, a transformational executive coach, discusses the challenges that today’s leaders face in achieving personal business alignment. In her discussion with host Brandon Laws, Malorie highlights the importance of scaling a company by keeping the development and well-being of your people at the forefront. If CEOs can look inward to facilitate change, they’ll find that fostering connection, autonomy, and creativity will ultimately improve team performance. If you’re a leader of people, don’t miss this conversation on how to create real and lasting change for your team.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Malorie Nicole is a transformational executive coach who specializes in identity, habits, sales performance, team communication, and overall personal and professional growth. Her podcast, Abundantly Clear, was recently rated #1 by Forbes. With a focus on both personal and professional development, Malorie equips leaders with the tools and strategies necessary to thrive.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE CHALLENGES FACING LEADERS
According to returning guest Malorie Nicole, a significant challenge facing today’s leaders is achieving personal business alignment, which refers to the harmony between an individual’s personal values, passions, and goals and the goals and direction of their business.
The importance of creating personal business alignment has gained significant attention in recent years, and leaders are increasingly making decisions toward this end, including determining the markets they want to work in and the specific problems they are passionate about solving. Malorie explained that there is now a level of “radical honesty” when it comes to how a leader owns and operates a company, highlighting an exciting shift towards a more transparent and introspective approach in leadership.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
It’s About People
“Scale literally is people. It’s the development of people, but not everybody looks at it that way. When you think about scaling a company, you think about a business entity that exists outside of your mind or what you’re conceptualizing. But when you really look at the nitty-gritty of it, it’s just a bunch of people doing their jobs, right? So I think there are always people that are dealing with scaling issues, but how many of those people are really aware that it’s actually a people issue that they’re experiencing?”
Finding Connection at Work
“There’s a lot of pressure for CEOs to create an environment that fills people’s purpose needs that they have in their life that maybe, pre-pandemic, wasn’t necessarily there. But people don’t just want a place to work anymore. They want a place where they feel connected. They want a place where they feel like they have autonomy of creativity. They want a place where they feel like they can make decisions where they’re not being micromanaged. And when you really start looking at the culture that people are craving, there’s a lot of dismantling that has to happen if you don’t have a company that operates that way.”
Looking Inward
“I hear often that, on a first initial conversation with someone, or when a relationship is just starting to be built, the conversation looks a whole lot like, ‘I just can’t get my team to perform better, or I just can’t get my business to do X, Y, Z.’ And it’s always about the team or the business, and there’s some beliefs that have to shift and some paradigms that have to change in order for you to get to the point where you can say, ‘Hang on. Who created the business? Who made the rules? Who hired the people? Who put everyone in the positions that they’re in?’”
Getting Unstuck
“I’m gonna speak directly to CEOs for a second. What [being stuck] always means in the case of a CEO is you forgot to give yourself permission to do something. Like you just forgot that you have permission that you haven’t given yourself in a while — permission to change something that’s no longer aligned with how you wanna do the business, permission to let go of a part of the company, permission to make a pivot in a new market, whatever the permission is that you’re looking for.”
Creating Leaders
“What a lot of CEOs don’t realize is they still have this pattern of being overly controlling. Even though they don’t think they’re micromanaging their team, and they’re probably not energetically, they’re not releasing things so that they can be in their zone. Because really the CEOs that I see that are happiest, that are the top performers, their job is to make the strategic decisions. It’s not to look at the daily tasks. It’s not to be involved in every single thing that’s happening. The best CEOs can be really separated from what’s happening, and that takes time. There’s a process to get there. It’s not that you just wipe your calendar away and remove yourself from everything.”
A Focus on Emotional Intelligence
“The discomfort of emotions is one of the real skills that I think CEOs need to work on that will give them mental freedom, better performance, and better team culture.
Because what I hear a lot from people is there are leaders that think that they just make logical decisions. They’re all strategy. They’re all left-brain thinkers. But what they don’t realize is that most of the time, if somebody says that about themselves, what it means is ‘I actually don’t know how to move through EQ, and so I deflect all of it.’ It doesn’t actually mean that they’re all logical and all strategic. It means that that muscle hasn’t been built like a skill. And maybe you didn’t need it when you were first starting out and you had a few employees, but now that you have 50 to 100 to 200 employees that you’re overseeing, that’s the biggest skill that moves the ship forward more than anything else.”
LEARN MORE
Subscribe to Malorie Nicole’s email list to get up-to-date info on her latest resources, or to assess your personal leadership growth needs, visit Malorie’s website and take the quiz, “Do I Need an Internal Upgrade?”