Authorpreneur Dashboard – Margaret Graziano
Ignite Culture - Masterclass Companion Workbook
Business & Investing
Unlock your organization’s potential with the Ignite Culture Masterclass Companion Workbook. This comprehensive guide, developed by cultural change torch bearer Margaret Graziano, offers a step-by-step framework to empower business leaders in fostering an intentional, healthy, and high-performance organizational culture from the inside out.
• Develop yourself as a leader capable of inspiring others and leading effective change initiatives
• Align both individual and collective team values to create a harmonious, high-performance work environment
• Transform organizational challenges into opportunities for innovation, elevating your business as a leader in the market
• Catalyze positive change and create a culture that nurtures collaboration towards shared goals, fostering a sense of unity and purpose
An intentionally designed organizational culture is the key to inspiring individuals to fully engage in strategies that propel an organization forward. This guide aims to equip leaders with the necessary tools to shape a vibrant and purpose-driven emergent workplace culture. The accompanying masterclass, available through KeenPublishingGroup’s learning center, enhances the learning experience, ensuring a comprehensive approach to elevating your organization’s culture and achieving peak performance.
Book Bubbles from Ignite Culture - Masterclass Companion Workbook
Ignite Culture
Business & Investing
Learn how to Empower and Lead a Healthy, High-Performance Organization from the Inside Out in this Wall Street Journal Bestseller!
Sometimes corporate leaders forget that businesses are human systems. Revenue, innovation, and growth are all generated by human beings. Every organization is a human system, an amalgamation of personalities, behaviors, moods, actions and interactions. All too often, personalities when on overdrive, cause defensive aggressive or passive defensive polarities in how people work together. This causes relational friction, dysfunction, dissatisfaction and stress - all adversely impacting organizational culture.
Offering a unique combination of experiential coaching, evidence-based leadership tools, and actionable strategies, this book empowers business leaders with the wisdom and insights they need to assess how personality overdrive is causing relationship breakdowns and unnecessary conflict.
Ignite Culture gives CEOs, HR, and Business Leaders a first-hand view into what causes dysfunction in the workplace and what to do about it. You learn how to cultivate a healthy company culture, increase employee engagement and performance, spark innovation among teams and align people towards a common cause.
Inside, you learn to:
-Understand how important introspection and self-discovery are to personal and organizational performance.
-Learn the impact of our behavior on the spaces in which we work.
-Experiment with new ways to alter old behaviors that inhibit growth.
-Be equipped to coach and mentor others on owning their impact.
-Catalyze positive change across the organization.
-Inspire peak performance and achieve market leadership.
"Margaret is an expert in the field of culture change and development. Her work has helped thousands of people across companies heal trust, mend broken relationships, and create space for people to start working together more effectively. Her real stories and experiences combine with research to create an authentic and powerful resource. This is the book every leader needs to read!" -Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, #1 Executive Coach and New York Times bestselling author of The Earned Life.
Get Ignite Culture today!
Book Bubbles from Ignite Culture
Sam Smith and the Power of Culture
Leaders can sometimes get so wrapped up in results and driving growth, that they forget about the people side of the business. By the time they realize that, it's often too late and employees have are underperforming, unhappy, and have even left, leaving the company in disarray and less successful than it otherwise could have been. Sam Smith is one such example. The instigation for him changing the culture of his company was realizing that it started with him. It always starts at the top. You can have amazing, driven, talented people working, but if the leadership team pushes too hard and doesn't focus on the human system, those people can't succeed in the resulting environment.
Culture Starts At The Top
What do Volkswagen, Uber, and McDonald’s have in common? They’re proof that culture starts at the top. Back in 2015, Volkswagen’s emissions scandal rocked the world. Stocks tanked, trust evaporated, and it took years to recover. And while it’s tempting to point fingers at a rogue department, the truth is clear: Cultural dysfunction always starts at the top. Leadership sets the tone. Always. Volkswagen isn’t alone: • Uber is still wrestling with the fallout of its old toxic culture. • McDonald’s is working hard to shed its “bro-party” reputation. And so many “rebrands” fail because the same leadership operates the same way—just with a shinier logo. If your culture is broken, it doesn’t matter how great your strategy is. Culture will always win. The question is: Are you ready to lead the kind of change your company needs? Because fixing a toxic culture starts—and ends—with leadership willing to own the hard work. Leadership sets the tone. Period. 2025 is the time to set the right one.
Listening Part 3 - The Highest Levels
Listening at the Highest Level Every Time - We all need diverse opinions and viewpoints. When you listen from the lower levels of listening, which is not really listening at all, you miss out on so much, from critical information and feedback, to a chance to develop rapport with your team, a loved one, or even a total stranger. The most effective leaders all excel at listening from the highest level. They make people feel valued, respected, and understood. They are also always honing their skills and becoming better listeners. They continually work on opening their mind, heart, and will. It’s a continual process of evolution. They are present and focused on whatever or whomever is in front of them. Meaningfully listening to those around you enables you to elevate yourself as a leader, build trust and rapport, and empower the people you’re listening to. Evolving your leadership and achieving optimal results begins with listening.
Listening Part 2
We all need diverse opinions and viewpoints. When you listen from the lower levels of listening, which is not really listening at all, you miss out on so much, from critical information and feedback, to a chance to develop rapport with your team, a loved one, or even a total stranger. The most effective leaders all excel at listening from the highest level. They make people feel valued, respected, and understood. They are also always honing their skills and becoming better listeners. They continually work on opening their mind, heart, and will. It’s a continual process of evolution. They are present and focused on whatever or whomever is in front of them. Meaningfully listening to those around you enables you to elevate yourself as a leader, build trust and rapport, and empower the people you’re listening to. Evolving your leadership and achieving optimal results begins with listening.
Listening from Obligation
These two levels can both be seen as listening from obligation. When this happens, there is little to no effort from the listener, either due to various distractions or a lack of caring about what the speaker has to say. Common behaviors when you’re listening at this level are multitasking, such as playing on your phone or scrolling through emails when someone is talking to you, tuning out/daydreaming, and anticipating what you think they are going to say and interjecting words for them. This kind of listening makes it impossible to develop rapport. This level of listening also includes pretend listening, where you are not paying attention to the speaker, however you still act as though you are listening. The listener’s brain is paying attention to other things, but they are maintaining involvement in the conversation. Think of sitting next to someone very talkative on the plane or talking on the phone with a chatty family member. You aren’t absorbing or understanding the information the speaker is sharing.
How to Manage Your Ego at Work
Allowing your ego to take charge of your behaviors only leads to a struggle to innovate and grow as an organization. That goes for everyone else in your organization as well. It’s important that you take a good look in the mirror and see where you resist doing things differently or moving into unknown territory. A few ways to manage your ego include: 1. Encouraging feedback from within the organization - It allows for you to better understand what’s working within your company and what can still be improved upon. 2. Practicing Self Awareness – If you don’t realize your ego is controlling your actions, it’s crucial to look inward to understand why it’s causing you to act in ways that thwart your personal effectiveness so that you can be better at self-managing. 3. Being grounded in who you are – Living true to yourself and understanding your values and goals is key. The ego often overreacts to failure and self-limiting thoughts. Grounding yourself in authenticity fosters consistency and clarity of direction. When your actions align with your true self, you project clarity and certainty because you are being genuine and transparent. 4. Getting out of Frustration and into Courage - It takes courage to be wrong and admit to it. Cultivating your ability to admit missteps and embrace vulnerability is key to effectively managing how much your ego controls your behavior. This transparency also models vulnerability and authenticity for others to follow.
What's Causing Fear at Work
A big problem with having unresolved fear present in your organization is that it’s hard to know where it’s coming from. In fact, most of the time, you won’t even realize you or the people around you are in a state of fear. You can’t fix a problem you don’t even know about. Change management can only be effective when you navigate your fears. Some common fears can include a fear of failure, fear of not being able to manage change, fear of exposing one’s vulnerabilities, and fear of the unknown. These just scratch the surface. Every person and every organization is unique and has different fears that may cause challenges in the workplace. To overcome fear, you first have to understand what is bringing that fear to the surface. Be conscious of your own fears and acknowledge them. Be curious and ask others in the organization what concerns them about impending changes and what makes them uneasy about moving forward. Ask why people are afraid. Getting past fear is much easier when you know what you’re up against.
Develop Rapport and Lead By Example
Developing rapport is essential to cultivating healthy and harmonious relationships with those you work with and those in your personal life. Rapport is about understanding and respecting the feelings of others and in doing so, strengthening your ability to work together. Developing rapport requires you to establish trust. To do that you need to be able to offer support, communicate effectively, and follow through with what you say. The number one way to break trust is to make promises you can’t or don’t keep. When you can’t keep a commitment, make sure to alert people affected by it as soon as you know. Life gets in the way sometimes. People will understand that a lot better when they are notified in advance of you breaking your agreement.
Be Present in the Room with Sensory Acuity
Sensory acuity is using all our senses to observe the world around us in order to gather detailed information about the present moment. This is especially important for communication because there are other factors that contribute more to understanding someone than just their words. In fact, words make up only about 7% of communication. Mastering sensory acuity requires using your other keen senses to expand how you see, perceive, understand, and communicate with others. Things like tonality, where their eyes are looking, what color their face is (i.e. blushing), the shape of their mouth, and how they are standing or sitting are all indicators of the way someone feels that is not communicated through their words. Developing this skill requires you to focus entirely on the person with whom you are communicating with. Mastering this not only allows you to read people at a higher level, but to also understand and relate to them in a deeper manner.
Another Key to Presence: Childlike Wonder
Childlike wonder is being completely immersed in the world around you. It’s about coming from an open/neutral perspective, getting curious, asking questions, and being aware of when you are judging and evaluating. Many people become entrenched in their perspectives, beliefs, preferences, points of view, etc. as they grow up. To be fully present with others, you have to let go of your inherent or historical biases. Otherwise, It’s as if you are viewing the world with orange tinted glasses. Everything you experience is tinted orange because that’s how you see and perceive. In this mindset, you won’t be able to accept new and different ideas, or engage with others you speak to. When it comes to childlike wonder, it’s about setting aside all biases, agendas, perceptions, and beliefs about how things are going to go and being curious so you can truly connect and interact with others as an “empty vessel”. When you are empty of perceptions, preferences, judgements, biases and beliefs, you are truly able to meet people where they are and enable them to not only feel like they are contributing, but to actually contribute.
Staying in the Moment for Optimal Leadership
The working world is full of things that can take you out of the present moment. Things like multitasking, keeping your cell phone on, constantly checking your emails, and having many open windows on your computer are all things that distract you. Cognitive overload is the result of these distractions, leading you to experience an inability to focus and stay on track, bouts of agitation, and increased distress, culminating in decreases in productivity and strained work relationships. No matter the skill or competence level, when a human being has too many things to keep track of, it's difficult to focus and complete tasks. One of the most important things to do to get present is to remove yourself from the world of distraction. Attempt to implement some liberating constraints, such as turning your cellphone off during periods of focus, signing out of your email account and only logging in during scheduled email sessions, keeping only 1 or 2 windows open on your computer, and blocking out time to focus on specific tasks or projects. Another way to keep yourself on track and in a present state of mind is to know, understand, and experience what your ultimate purpose is and define what it looks like to operate in alignment with that purpose. When you do that, you give yourself the opportunity to tune in to what is important and how to work in service of that purpose.
The Impact of the Energy We Emit
We are all emitting energy every day and in every interaction. Energy has the power to create, destroy or stagnate. Each of us brings our moods, behaviors and actions (for better or worse) to each interaction and each relationship. We are either catalyzing or constraining forward movement by how we operate with each other at work. All organizations are human systems and we each impact those around us. Understanding the components impacting the system is where it all begins. This is what happened to Tom. Tom is highly cautious, which has contributed to his success. He is systematic and a perfectionist. While these are traits that are very useful for leadership, if they dominate your thinking and actions, they can create disruptions, lead to micromanagement, and have a negative impact on a company's culture. In Tom's case, his perfectionism and desire to have things done exactly as they should be led him to be abrasive towards his employees. Instead of empowering them to perform their tasks in the proper manner, he was putting them off and leaving them discouraged and disgruntled. Like many other leaders, he couldn't see that he was the one causing this problem that was festering in the company's culture.
Discovering Blind Spots is Key to Growth
This book gives CEOs, HR and Business Leaders a first hand view into what causes dysfunction in the workplace and what to do about it. There is no quick fix. There is no system for culture that will make things better until people thoroughly understand who they are, what works about their behavior at work, and what is in the way of making a positive impact. In this excerpt, Cali is an example of stability. As a leader, she is consistent and measured. She sticks with what is working and continues moving forward with other like-minded individuals. The problem for Cali is that always sticking with the status quo will never benefit a company in the long term. Businesses are always changing and evolving. Cali didn't realize that was becoming an issue for her company until problems began cropping up. She was taking on too many responsibilities as a leader, while also neglecting to build the proper framework to support both herself and her employees, which caused employee turnover and missed deadlines. She didn't create a balanced team in her company, which led to her having many effective and productive people who were only focused on one aspect of the company. Hiring a variety of people with differing perspectives, knowledge, and talent would enable her to have a well rounded team that could grow the organization by seeing and doing the things that Cali couldn't.
The Unintended Consequences of Our Strengths
The unintended consequence of leading with our strengths on overload can cause us and others to engage in passive defensive or aggressive defensive behavior, all negatively impacting our organization's ability to navigate change and uncertainty, and acting as barriers to evolution, innovation and market leadership. In this excerpt, Donna is someone who moves fast and gets things done. As a leader, she's persuasive and inspiring. She's also social and outgoing. However, the consequences of these aspects of her personality are that she's always doing too many things at once and communicating with too many people at the same time. Despite her best efforts to do so, the human brain can't multitask, and this causes breakdowns for Donna and her team. Because of this, roadblocks occur that could have been prevented or fixed much sooner, and the team is less cohesive than they otherwise could be. For Donna, it's important to take the time to slow down and be present to each and every thing she does. Giving the person she's communicating with her full attention, and eliminating distractions enables her to complete tasks and delegate in a more effective manner, allowing for more work to get done and less problems to crop up.
The Dysfunction of Auto-Pilot
"Ignite Culture" is an inside out reflection of what is going on inside organizations and how to turn around what isn't working for the betterment of all. Everyone has personality strengths that serve us in making things happen and moving our careers and organizations forward. However, when we get into our subconscious autopilot, we often cannot see how these ”winning behaviors”cause deep dysfunction in our workplaces. In this excerpt, Sam Smith's greatest strength as a leader is his decisiveness. He's determined and resilient, he gets things done, and doesn't let anything get in his way. The problem for Sam was that he was allowing the weaknesses of being highly decisive to also run the show. Because of this, he had shaped a culture that caused his company to suffer from a lack of employee engagement, retention, and satisfaction. And he wasn't even aware of the impact he was having. To others, he seemed overbearing and aggressive. His people were afraid of him and likely working too hard to appease him, causing them to suffer from burnout in the process. To overcome this, Sam had to be willing and committed to self-reflect and take responsibility for the systemic implications of his behavior on the company's culture. That enabled him to begin the process of shaping a healthy, high-performance culture.
Awakening the Corporate Soul: A Radical Shift
In these tumultuous times, it's undeniable that our world is undergoing profound changes. As I reflect on the challenges we face, I can't help but think that this might be the wakeup call our corporate landscape desperately needs. At the core of every organization are people, and their well-being is the heartbeat of success. As President Abraham Lincoln profoundly stated, "Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital... Labor is the superior of capital." When crises strike in the corporate world, leaders often scramble for quick fixes, relying on external solutions. However, these remedies seldom address the root cause—the erosion of our organizational cultures. Businesses are intricate human systems, and genuine transformation must begin from within. I'm here to propose a radical shift in approach—one that nurtures the human spirit at work, sparking change from the inside out, one individual at a time. Links: Get a copy on Amazon and leave us a review: https://a.co/d/iGHUWUm Get to know Margaret Graziano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT3hvynqSxE Follow me on my socials and look forward for the release of the audible version is coming soon! Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaretgraziano/ Instagram: www.instagram.com/keen.alignment Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/keenalignment Let’s liberate the human spirit together!
Igniting the human spirit at work
They say that 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 executive coaching 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 on that culture. 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.
