They say adversity is the mother of invention. This has certainly been the case over the course of my professional life. In 2014, I was creating a revolutionary recruiting software when the code was stolen, forcing me to redirect my career. I decided to combine my coaching certification, decade of leading seminars and introductions for large-group self-awareness workshops, and twenty years of executive search experience to launch an organizational culture consulting business.

To promote my new venture, I wrote some articles about the importance of healthy corporate cultures and the impact of the leadership team’s mindset, behaviors, and overall self-awareness of that culture. The CEO of a company with severe cultural issues read one of my articles and reached out. “We have every problem you mentioned,” he told me on a call, “and something tells me I’m the problem.” He hired me to run a retreat to bring his leadership team together to solve their many organizational issues. At the time, I wasn’t completely sure what I was doing, but I knew I had the right combination of skills to help this team achieve transformation.

Around the same time, I heard world-renowned leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith speak at a Human Synergistics® conference. When he talked about the main theme of his book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, a light bulb went off. The inner work on self is what leaders need most. If they can learn to address their own internal issues, they can learn the authentic human skills needed to lead others and create healthy, high-performance organizational cultures. Inspired, this fixing-culture-from-the-inside-out approach became a hallmark of my coaching and consulting. I required that all my clients read Marshall Goldsmith’s book and start journaling to see how their mindset, biases, and behaviors might be contributing to the breakdowns at their organizations.

As my coaching expanded to leadership teams, we created two-and-a-half-day workshops to learn how to look inside, own and address personal issues, heal broken relationships, build trust, and start working together more effectively. The feedback was tremendous. The deep internal work, self-reflection, and skill-building around effective communication, respect, honesty, ownership, trust, and authentic empathy helped these groups of leaders tackle the inertia, resistance, and disconnection they were experiencing within their organizations.

A decade later, we’ve had more than a thousand leaders read What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. We use the book to grease the wheels and prepare leaders to look in the mirror honestly and open themselves to learning a new way of being and working. Today, the intent of my company, KeenAlignment, is to forever liberate the human spirit at work. And it is my truest honor and joy to watch this happen every day.

To your success!

Margaret Graziano