We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Laurie Battaglia a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Laurie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you wish you had waited to start your own firm or do you wish you had started sooner?
When the entrepreneurial bug first bit me, I was about 15 years into my financial career. After starting as a teller in 1978 and then working my way up in the branch system of savings and loans, I was pushed, kicking and screaming, into a training role. I didn’t want to be there. I liked training, as a side gig, not a career. It felt like I had failed somehow, from achieving my dream of running a branch system.
I felt the first stirrings of having my own consulting business in 1993, when my employer, a savings and loan in suburban Philadelphia, PA, was taken over by the government. I realized a couple of things: companies were either focused on people or profit, but not both, and they were losing out. And organizations smaller than mine couldn’t afford to have someone like me, a learning and development leader, on staff. Perhaps there was a business opportunity there?
And then I talked myself out of it. I didn’t have a college degree so would I be respected? My first marriage was failing, so there was no back up income. Was there truly a business opportunity here, or was I kidding myself? The doubts crept in, and I had no immediate family role models for entrepreneurship. I did have mentors who were encouraging me to leap, but I just didn’t feel, financially and knowledge-wise about running a business, that I could do it and not fail.
Over the years, I nourished the dream, taking courses on running a business, getting my Associates, Bachelors, and Masters degrees, researching what it took, talking to others who had their own businesses. I kept on “getting ready” to run a business. I still had money concerns — I’d met the love of my life and he had four kids to put through college. We had a goal of moving from PA to Arizona, that would take money. It still wasn’t “time.”
Finally, in 2015 I made the leap. In order to get to that place, all the kids were through college, we had settled in AZ in 2010, I had gotten coach certification and my husband had as well, and we were running a life coaching business on the side while I worked my full-time banking job.
Waiting for 22 years to serve the needs of others while you put your dreams on the back burner is not what I’d recommend to folks. While getting the experience and knowledge of large organizations for the last 17 years of my corporate career was helpful, I strongly feel that I could have made it earlier, if I’d had someone who could have taught me what I needed to know at the time. Alas, that wasn’t the case.
On the other hand, I’ve used pretty much everything I learned in 37 years of leadership in banking and investment banking, about leading others, moving groups of people into alignment, and bringing out the best cultures where people thrive. I don’t feel it was a waste of time, and everything got me to where I am now.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Aligned at Work – Company Overview
Aligned at Work is a leadership consulting firm that specializes in building and developing inclusive leaders within client organizations. When leaders lead inclusively, cultures of belonging grow, and the humans at work thrive. Leaders balance their focus on profit AND people.
Vision Statement
Aligned at Work is an internationally known and respected company, the go-to expert for inclusive leadership concepts and practices. We believe that businesses can’t succeed without an eye on both people and profit. We lead with love and compassion. By engaging the head, heart, and hands of each human we interact with, all things are possible.
Mission Statement
We shift organizational cultures by paying attention to workplace and world trends, listening to people, mind, body, and spirit, and creating a world at work and home where they thrive. We build cultures of inclusion and belonging, built on the principles of diversity, equity, and accessibility for all.
Company Values
1. Disruption. Sometimes systems, processes, and best practices need to be turned upside down and examined. We do that and put them back together, better than before.
2. Inclusiveness. We constantly learn and improve our understanding of others, so we can meet them where they are, and always welcome people into our world, our community, and the conversation.
3. Integrity. We are always aligned with our truth and walk in honesty and honor.
4. Compassion. We respect others and do our best to understand and walk beside them.
Services Overview/Description
Diversity/Equity/Inclusion/Belonging/Accessibility (DEIBA)
• Set your organization’s DEIBA strategy to chart your course.
• Equity/Employee Experience surveys and focus groups to understand where you are now.
• DEIBA curriculum, conducted in a live, virtual format or in person. White labeled and licensed for use within your organization; Train-the-Trainer certification available.
• Cascade your inclusive culture throughout the organization through Diversity Councils, Ambassadors, and Employee Resource Groups. We provide guidance and support.
• Review and update HR Policy and Practice to ensure that your policies and practices are inclusive and free of discrimination.
• Leadership and team coaching supports your changing culture and shifts behavior.
• Succession planning ensures that you are building your bench inclusively.
Leadership Development
• Determine your leadership vision and strategy.
• Assess where your leaders are now in their everyday practices.
• Aligned Leader curriculum, customizable and white-labeled to fit your business needs. Train-the-Trainer certification available. Licensed for use within your organization.
• Support for new leadership skills through Executive/Leadership Coaching, both 1:1 and in small cohort groups.
• Measure progress through metrics and assessment.
Organizational Culture Consulting
• We use our Explore, Ignite, Amplify, and Optimize process to fully determine where you are now, and what type of culture you’d like to build. Our Explore phase helps uncover what’s really going on in your workforce and positions your executive team to set direction for the future. It’s designed to get to the root causes and to gain buy-in along the way. The Ignite phase is next; gaining commitment from your executive team and radical self-awareness for leaders gains a larger ROI for your organization. Culture-shifting continues with Amplify, where communication throughout the organization is a key factor. And Optimize cascades the new culture through everything you do – your processes and procedures, your employer brand, and more.
Professional/Personal Development
• Our Aligned for Life Model brings out the best in people by combining the five elements of Vocation, Relationships, Finances, Wellbeing, and Spirit. Each person has their own unique combination of elements. We help you become aligned for life.
• We offer several workshops that develop professional skills like emotional intelligence, energy leadership, moving into leadership, coaching skills, communication skills, thriving in times of change, and more.
Team Alignment/Executive Strategy Retreats
• Organizations and people never reach their full potential when leadership teams are not in alignment. We know how to unite groups so that they work better together, breaking down silos across teams.
• We provide all facets of Executive Strategy Retreats, from strategic planning, to getting to know each other better, or providing guest speaking services.
Keynote Speaking/Conference Workshops
• Aligned at Work’s CEO, Laurie Battaglia, is a highly requested keynote speaker and breakout session leader.
Her most popular topics include:
o Breaking All the Rules: Why Old Ways of Leading Don’t Work Anymore
o Building Inclusive Cultures Through Everyday Actions
o Thriving in Times of Change: Lead Yourself First
o 5 Secrets to Love What You Do—For Life!
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
One of the biggest things to unlearn is how the corporate structure/hierarchy does not need to define you after you start your own business. I learned from the people that I mentor that they were seeing me very differently than I was seeing myself. I was allowing the old titles/salary to box me in, without even seeing it.
As the CEO of my company, one that is scaling up, using a bench of consultant contractors, I need to make decisions and define myself very differently than I did in my corporate career. I’m 8 years into my entrepreneurial career and it probably took 5-6 years to figure out that I was limiting myself and didn’t need to.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who was organizing an event for a professional organization. They were frustrated that some of the supporting organizations were not providing people for panels and speaking, as they had promised. And I realized that they were thinking the way I used to, relying on people’s titles, vs their achievements outside the workplace, to define who belonged on the stage. It was causing the organization to overlook some people who were accomplishing great things outside of their corporate roles.
My hope is that we stop looking at titles and artificial boundaries that we create to keep ourselves imprisoned in situations, roles, and relationships that don’t serve us any longer. I wish we could see the humanity in one another and react to that humanity. We’d have a more peaceful, kinder, and less violent world.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Social media can quickly become overwhelming and it can be a giant time suck. It can also be a place where people compare themselves and their businesses to others. Comparison is the thief of joy, as they say.
I built my audience on LinkedIn, after trying Facebook early on. LinkedIn is where the corporate decision-makers are hanging out, and they are often quiet about it. Don’t expect a CEO to weigh in on your post, but know that they may be watching. I have just over 14,000 followers/connections on LinkedIn. For some, that’s a lot, but for thought leaders and influencers, it would be a low number. Regardless, I’m thrilled with the 14K and they support my growth and impact.
On LinkedIn, I enabled Creator Mode when it became available, which allows us to publish a newsletter — we do it monthly — and to run LinkedIn Live broadcasts. We stream those through Streamyard and they live on both LinkedIn and YouTube afterward. There are other options as well with Creator Mode that don’t appeal to me, but might to others.
Here’s my best advice about growing your social media presence.
– Where is your target audience? No need to worry about TikTok if the target audience doesn’t use it for buying decisions.
– Which platform aligns best with who you are and with your target audience? Are there any that don’t sync with your values?
– Choose one platform and make impact there. Don’t try to be all things to all people. It doesn’t work that way.
– Use all the options that appeal to you and are easy enough to do on your chosen platform. Keep at it.
– As you go along, you’ll develop your voice and your message. It’s OK to work on that before you start doing social media, but know that your message will evolve over time. And you won’t get it perfect, which is OK.
Here’s my best advice on what not to do on social media.
– Don’t be inauthentic. People can sense it, or they’ll figure it out over time. Don’t lie or exaggerate. Be as close to who you really are as you can be. Post-pandemic, folks have let their guard down and so should you to the extent that it makes sense for you and your brand.
– Don’t waste a whole lot of time on social media. There is usually very little immediate impact, so if you think that social media will have people flocking to your door, think again. It’s a very long game, a marathon at best.
– When you are ready, hired a social media person who understands your brand and voice. They will pay off in time that you don’t need to spend there.
Let me say again, social media is something you should do AFTER you start finding clients. There are many “experts” out there selling the concept of building the sales funnel and making it look remarkably easy to get “high ticket clients.” Good luck with that.
Now get out there, choose your platform, and try things. Don’t spend a lot of money on ads unless you have a product to sell. Get your voice out there, above the noise. And best of luck building your brand!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://alignedatwork.com/
- Instagram: @AlignedatWork
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alignedatwork
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauriebattaglia/ AND https://www.linkedin.com/company/aligned-at-work/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@alignedatwork1052
Image Credits
Karianne Munstedt for first three images on previous page