How Leaders Honor Others with Laurie Battaglia

//What does it mean to be aligned at work, and why does it matter? Thought Leader, Speaker, Author, and Transformer of people, cultures and workplaces, Laurie Battaglia is CEO of Aligned at Work® in Scottsdale, AZ. Having spent 35+ years leading people in corporate environments, Laurie discovered ways to engage team members, build trust quickly, and align them to create happy and high performing workplaces. Her life’s mission is to change the culture of workplaces into inclusive places where all people feel they belong.

Aligned at Work® provides inclusive leadership training, diversity/equity/inclusion/belonging training and consulting, executive retreats, executive coaching, team alignment, keynotes, and workshops.

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Transcript

Hey there!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  Today, I have with me Laurie Battaglia, who is the CEO of Aligned at Work.  And she’s a colleague. She’s a friend.

It’s so good to have you here on the Voice of Influence podcast, Laurie!

Laurie Battaglia:  It is wonderful to be here, honored to be asked.

Andrea:  Oh!  Well, yes.  So, you are a thought leader, speaker, author, transformer of people, cultures, and workplaces.  I mean, I love what you do, and I love what you say, about your life’s mission,  to change the culture of workplaces into inclusive places for all people to feel like they belong.

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah.  It’s all about that.  I’ve spent too many years at work myself where sometimes I felt like I fit, sometimes I felt like I didn’t fit.  So, for me, it’s making it so that people actually want to go to work.

Andrea:  Yeah.  So, tell me what does it mean to be aligned at work?

Laurie Battaglia:  You know, it started out as one thing – it’s just kind of evolved.  So, initially, what I dreamed about Aligned at Work, it was about bringing your whole self to work.  It was about being able to show up as who you are.  Now, this was back about six years ago.  So, if you think about the way the world has transformed in the past six years, thankfully, in many ways.  I think we’re going in the right direction in so many ways.  I think we’re going the wrong direction in so many ways, too, but that’s probably for another time.

So, Aligned at Work started as this, how do you figure out who you are and bring yourself to work?  And then as a leader, because I’ve been a leader for so many years, and I’ve taught leadership for so many years, as a leader then how do I honor each individual person that’s in my workplace, or it’s in my workspace, now, it would be a virtual space, in many cases?  But how do I get to know those people well enough that they can really be themselves so that we can all show up authentically and get it done?

Andrea:  So, I think a lot of us, especially the people that are listening are probably totally on board with this idea.  But why should we want to be aligned at work?  Why should that even be something that we really care about when it comes to [it], but we have all these things that we need to get done, you know, we’re trying to just survive and trying to get you a paycheck or whatever, why does being aligned matter?

Laurie Battaglia:  You know, there’s two ways to look at it.  So, as a person who spends a lot of time in leadership and in the learning and development area, for whatever reason, I would end up reporting to numbers people.  Oftentimes, the numbers guide.  And so, I learned how to look up the statistics and to get the data and to look at the research because, intuitively, I knew what worked.  And I was after this balance of people in profit, but if I don’t speak the language of the leader I’m reporting to then, you know, does it get done or not?

So, it is important because there are statistics out there that showed that when people can be themselves, when they like coming to work, when they feel included in things, when they feel like they belong, there’s the numbers behind it with higher productivity, higher earnings per share, better engagement, and people stay longer.  They don’t go out looking for jobs when they like the people they work with and when they like the boss they report to.

And when I say like, there’s a lot that goes into that.  It’s not just that “I like you, you’re a cool person,” but it’s “I respect you; I know you’ve got my back,” all those kinds of things.  So, there are numbers and data.  And then there’s the, it’s-the-right-thing-to-do kind of thing.  And I think when we don’t feel aligned, it sucks the soul out of us, and we would just rather be someplace else.

Andrea:  I mean, we spend so much time at work.  If it doesn’t carry some sort of meaning for us, I don’t know how we survive.  I mean, I can easily go down the path of, you know, what’s the whole point of everything?  So, for me, I’m like, if it doesn’t mean something….

Laurie Battaglia:  Right, right.  And that’s becoming even more important as people go on.  It’s kind of interesting because you may notice from looking at me that I’m a baby boomer.  I’m about to turn 65 in a few short weeks.

Andrea:  Congratulations!

Laurie Battaglia:  Yes, exactly.  So, Medicare, yay!  But when I think about that, I used to start out my talks asking people to calculate the number of hours they spent at work and add their commute in and add all that up.  And of course, even if you do a 40-hour work week and then I asked how many people in the audience actually just work 40 hours and they rarely do that.  So, you know, add it up to maybe 50 hours a week, add on the commute time, and I was easily up over 100 hours of time.  And that’s time you never get back.

So, you know, isn’t it a better thing to want to be where you are rather than just, you know, like, “Unh, I don’t really want to be here.”  And I think most people have had the experience where they couldn’t wait to do something, whether that was work or outside of work, or were just like, “Oh, no, I’ve got to go through this one more day.”

Andrea:  Yeah.  So, are there  pieces to the puzzle of being aligned?  What are those pieces?

Laurie Battaglia:  Yes.  So, the original model that I started out with has evolved into one called the Aligned for Life model. That one really asked people to look at, what is your right work?  What is your right vocation that you are meant to do, that when you’re doing that, time passes quickly and you’re energized, and all those things?  And you feel like you have some purpose, you align with that purpose.  And if you’re working for a company, the company values [you] and all those kinds of things.

And then there’s also relationships, the  relationships around us, too.  Are we good at creating supportive relationships for ourselves? Because sometimes the dysfunction is usually within us.  And then we go seeking  that, even when we think we don’t seek it.  So, how good are we at forming these supportive networks and being part of those networks on both ends of it?

The third piece that I like to look at is the finances.  What about our money ideas?  You know, one of the stories we tell ourselves about money, and it’s not just about having it and  understanding  how we use it and how to support ourselves and invest for the future and all those things, but one of the stories that we tell ourselves is that it’s never enough.  And does it support the kind of life that we want to lead?

And then there’s wellbeing and spirit.  So, wellbeing is really about health, happiness, and success and how we define that.  Spirit is about the soul of who we are, that authentic part of us that shows up, whether we like it or not.  Whether we feel like we can really honor that human or whether we have to cover that human up when we’re in certain situations and things.  So, yeah, those are those pieces that I’ve been kind of working with.

I think I had the divine download, as they say of that, in 2012.  And I didn’t really start my business full time until 2015 into 2016.  So, it was kind of sitting there waiting until, you know, it could come out and be looked at and held up.  And that’s what my book Aligned Workplaces is about, figuring those things out and then taking it into the workplace with activities where people can figure that out for themselves.

Andrea:  Hmm.  So, when somebody is feeling like they might not be aligned, what are they experiencing?  What happens if we’re not aligned?

Laurie Battaglia:  You know, I used to think of it as like gears coming together or the teeth in a zipper might be easier for people to figure out.  So, when your zipper is like one tooth off, things aren’t right, you just know, and you’ve got to unzip that thing, pull it apart and restart it to get it going again.  It’s like you can’t fix it in the middle -wheesht! – or pull it apart with a pliers sometime.

And I think humans are like that, sometimes we feel like, you know, we do the work as they say, we do the deep inner work, and we feel like we’re just trying to get the teeth of the zipper apart and nothing’s working, and it’s time to get the pliers.  You know, maybe a coach or a therapist to pull it apart.  And then: Okay, now. Do I really want that zipper to go up the way it did?  Does it need a little oil on it? Maybe.  Did I bend a tooth?

Andrea:  Yeah, right.  Oh, that’s really good.  Do you think that people go after that proactively, or do you think that people wait until the pain is great enough in their lives that they have to change something?  And so, then they’re finally ready to go through the ripping apart?

Laurie Battaglia:  I think it’s that.  You know, if you look at just the impact that the pandemic had on people, it probably made us realize where we really had it  good and where we really need to do some work.  And then it’s either fight / flight, or fight or flight, or ….

Andrea:  Freeze or fawn response?

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah.  That freeze.  So, I think we did some freezing at first.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Laurie Battaglia:  And then many of us got out the baking things and said, “Let’s eat!”

Andrea:  Yeah!

Laurie Battaglia: “Let’s eat cake and bread.”  And then if you’re like me, you eventually said, “Okay, I’m going to sign up for Noom and take good care of myself.  Oh, why aren’t I actually getting on the floor doing my movement when I know that’s what I need to do because I can’t blame it on the commute or the travel or anything like that anymore.”  So, it’s the phases that we go through.

Usually, most people, they wait until they are either unemployed, they see layoffs coming,  they watch a friend go through it or a loved one go through it.  There’s some kind of crisis that hits them or they just can’t ignore it any longer.  Sometimes, the crisis is within us. You know, midlife crises,  they’re talking about for a reason, because it generally does happen in the late 30s, early 40s where you’re like, “What’s life is all about?”  “What if I have to do this for another 40 plus years, can I live with it?”  And for me, that was a turning point in my life where it eventually culminated in a divorce, singlehood for a while, and then finding my Joe, so yeah.

Andrea:  So, when you kind of came to that point for yourself, I mean, is there anything that you want to tell us about that story?

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah, I’ve gone through therapy, coaching.  Not all at one time but, like, over the years.  When I say “what are  the things that did it for me?”  Yeah, changing your peer group sometimes becomes a necessity, because you’re just not in the right place or you’re in a place that was good up to this point but it’s not going to support where you need to go.  And so, I think sometimes divorce comes about as a result of being with a person from the time you’re a teenager and then having different growth paths.  You know, you’re just like, you either do it together or you diverge, and do you come back together?  And when it’s clear that you’re not, Then sometimes that happens.

But there’s a little therapy there.  There’s a lot of therapy at the beginning of my marriage to Joe, because we wanted it to get off on the right foot and said, “You know, you were with somebody a long time, I was with somebody a long time, where the patterns are deep.  We don’t, really, even know for sure how to come together.  And what if we disagree on something like we haven’t?  But what if we do, then how do we argue about that?  How do we fight in a way that’s loving and get our stuff on the table?”

So, we did quite a bit of therapy to get started and credit it with a strong marriage now.  And we continue to have times where either he or I will go back and find a coach or a therapist to go through.  So, I think that’s really helpful.  

I also like retreats.  And even if it’s a one day, like now with a pandemic, we decided that at least one day a month, we would pack a lunch or find a place where we knew I could order food on an app and go do, you know, contactless pick up and be outside and get out of the heat of summer because I live in the Phoenix, Arizona area.  So, summers are, of course [hot]. We came through the hottest summer that they ever had in 2020, because why not, on top of a pandemic? So, we would drive into the mountains and have a day away, just to change the scenery.  And it was amazing what it did for clarity and purpose and clearing the head a little bit to come back home again and go back into it.

Andrea:  Yeah.  My husband and I find that leaving town and going to a bigger city often, but not necessarily bigger cities, sometimes, it’s other things like a more remote place, but to just be able to get out of that normal environment.  There’s some sort of cleansing or something reinvigorating that happens in your brain, in your soul.

Laurie Battaglia:  Yes.  It’s like a change of scenery allows you to see things differently.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Laurie Battaglia:  I had some of my best business ideas when I was just sitting there with a journal and writing when I was, you know, in a different place than what I typically am, looking out my window into my tree.  And sometimes there’s a hummingbird that sits on that tree or a woodpecker.  But it’s the same tree every day and that’s pretty much all I can see, tree and sky.  So, you know, let’s switch it up a little bit.

Andrea:  So, to kind of close the loop a little bit on this idea of being Aligned at Work, what are some things that you have noticed really help people to identify things?  You know, one of the things that I saw on your website when I was doing some trying to figure out what we would be talking about, I saw that you were talking about role experimentation at work.

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah.

Andrea:  I thought that was really interesting.  Can you tell us a little bit about what that is and why we should be interested in it?  Why leaders should be interested in letting people do that?

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah.  Role experimentation is a lot of fun for people.  So, for me, it came  [by] participating in an outside association early in my career.  I was asked by a boss of mine very early on.  He was really my first mentor, but we didn’t have that word then or know what that was.  So, he was, looking back, I’m like, “Oh, he was a mentor, a sponsor, he promoted me.”  And he asked me would I like to train savings and loan classes at night.  And I said, “Sure!”  And then I got the one that I probably like the least, which was sort of the history of savings and loans.

And I am a futurist, not a look-back. I look forward.  But I’ve learned as I’ve grown, you know, do not repeat the lessons that history has already taught. So there’s a reason to look back so  you can look forward, but I wasn’t at that point of my life, so I would do these courses at night.  I got into that organization on the board.  It was my massive growth opportunity.  I was the first female leader in 33 years, when I was 33.  So, it was a massive growth opportunity.

Then later on, I got pushed kicking and screaming into training with what I didn’t want to do.  So, what’s my vocation, my life’s calling?  Train people, developing them, coaching and mentoring them.  You know, sometimes others will see things you don’t see in yourself.  And the way I’ve seen other people do it, like I had a group that supported the fund accounting department at Vanguard Mutual Funds, and we would occasionally see people come in that were good accountants.  But they were never going to be the best accountants because they couldn’t stand sitting at the desk all day long with no human interaction.  They needed to get up and talk to people. And that meant that they were never going to be able to keep that, you know, just keep my head down and do that work over and over again.

So, they would sometimes wander over to the trading and development group.  We called ourselves career education and development.  And they would then be talking to us and they said, “What do you do?”  And they would always see the person that would get assigned to train people one-on-one.  So, their role experimentation was to try this training thing out and see if they like it.  And then they realize, “Well, that’s a lot harder than it looks.”

There’s an art and science to training when you do it right. It looks like you’re not doing anything.  And when you’re doing it wrong, everybody can tell.  So, sometimes we would have them come over for internships and they would, you know, I’m like “I need them for a while because it takes me basically six months to ramp up a trainer, but maybe I can peel off a little project for them to work on.  This is going to help their department when they go back to that department.”

So, I think maybe only one or two of those people ever went full time into training.  But a lot of them went back and said, “Okay, what I learned from that is I need more people interaction that I’m gonna get with my head down.”  So, they stayed with Vanguard, but they went off and do things like, you know, client sales, relationship management, or bank interaction with a correspondent bank.

They got a job,  they realize that it’s not this and it’s not that, but what’s in between where I can do some of this deep work and some of this generalist kind of thing, where I’m interacting with other humans, and they would come to it by that experimentation.  It’s just as important to know what you don’t like doing as it is to know what you do like doing.

Andrea:  Yeah, I like that.  People feel, when they’re actually doing some of their best work, they feel alive and all that, then you certainly get more, a higher quality.

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah, you do.

Andrea:  But they also have such a better experience, too.  So yeah.

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah, yeah.

Andrea:  So, one of the things I’ve heard you say is when we feel like we’re valued and heard, it makes a huge difference in the work output.  I’m a huge proponent of voice, Voice of Influence.  So, one of the problems, and it’s very common, I think, that we run into in working with executive teams to really just kind of help them increase engagement, and that sort of thing, is that they often feel like they’re trying to give people an opportunity to speak up, but they don’t.  I would love to hear your take on what might be going on when this is happening.

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah, it’s interesting.  There could be so many things going on.  When I used to train in a classroom.  I always said that we had to deal with all the trauma of everything from preschool and kindergarten on up.  Every trauma that happened in the classroom, they walk in, and they’re like, “Ohh,” you know, so you have to kind of unpack that.  So, with leaders, when they’re like, “I’m giving them the opportunity [to develop] and they’re just not,”  there’s either something that leader is [doing or not doing], so, it could be that, or,  it could be the person. And in fact, [it may be] that they’re just not going to speak up because they don’t have a voice.  And that generally goes over into the rest of their life as well.  So, it’s one thing.

The other thing is, there’s something in the culture, there’s something that the leader is doing or not doing, that makes that person think they can’t speak up.  So, it might not be that “I don’t get listened to.”  But let’s say, Andrea, that you and I are working together, and I see our boss just stomp you one day. You say something, and they…you know, in some organizations they thought that “if I’m not razzing you all the time, if I’m not kidding around, if I’m not teasing you,” which I think is actually cruelty in disguise, in my old age.  It used to be okay, now it’s not.  But I think if I see that person put you down in some way, and it hits me right in the gut, the heart, you know, I’m like, “Ooh,” then I’m not going to take a chance the next time. So, it’s like, minute by minute, that leader needs to be really self-aware about how they’re showing up and what kinds of actions they’re taking.  

Or, was it that we all got in the room when we said what we thought and the leader said, “Great, great, great!  We’re gonna make that happen,” and nothing happened.  So, it’s so many things. 

Or, “I trust my leader, but I realized that his power is limited in this culture.  And so, who cares if I speak up or don’t speak up because it’s never gonna go more than with him.”  So, it could be the person.  

It could be the bullies on the team.  It could be the leader,  it could be the culture.  And I would put the bullies on the team as part of the culture, or just the way we lead.

You often see leaders saying, “Take initiative,” “They don’t come forward, nobody ever [does],” and so on.  I work on both sides of that equation.  Is the leader really, truly supporting them?  And over here, do they know how to bring an idea forward in a way that makes it really super easy for the leader to sign off on?  Because I figured out along the way, that if I put something out there, and it was easy for them to say, “Yes! I’ll make a call. Go do that!”  it got done.

Andrea:  Oh, I love that.  So, what do you do to make it easy?  Do you have a filter you run it through?

Laurie Battaglia:  Well, yes.  You know, sometimes I was the filter.  There was a leader that I reported to.  She was female, and there were two guys and me.  And everything that we would take her, they would run through me first because I understood how she thought.  I knew where she was going to go like “-er” and where she was going go like, “Yeah!”  So, they would run by me because they just didn’t have that lens of a female leader.  And she was a very directive leader, as was I at the time, and so I got it.  So, you can run it through somebody like that, or sometimes you have to go ask the leader a number of questions about “What would it take for you to sign off on this?”, and you have to ask those questions.

So, I kind of go, I look at life as one big web.  So, it might be people who have worked with a leader before, if I’m new to them, and I don’t really know.  Ideally, in a perfect world, you go directly to them and say, “What would it take?”  So that you’re getting it, you know, as we used to say, straight from the horse’s mouth, getting it directly from the leader.  But sometimes, that’s not possible, or they’re so busy that you want to work [it out yourself] or you’re worried about your credibility, and you don’t want to go half prepared.

And by the way, I think there’s another way that leaders shut down people all the time; they say, “Don’t come to me with a problem unless you have a solution.”  Frankly, if I have a solution, I don’t need to come to you.  So, there’s that.  So, I think leaders need to really watch all the old truisms that we kind of grew up with and have passed along because they’re not helpful in a lot of cases. Things like,  “Well,  common sense says….” Now, it’s only common if I grew up in exactly the same place as you, at the same time, with the same exact circumstances.  And that’s nobody.  So, common sense is also not common, and stop saying that, too.

So, I forget where I was on that pathway to… oh,  how to make it easy.  But I think it’s just asking the questions and making it easy for them, you know, and realizing what system the leader plays in, what’s their power stance.  Like, do they have the power to get this further up the org chart, or are they new in their role and uncertain at this point.  They haven’t really coalesced their power base at this point.  So, that makes a big difference whether something gets done or not.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Interesting.  Laurie, you have really started, in this last year, you’ve started focusing a little bit more on diversity inclusion.  Can you tell us about how that got going and what you do with that?

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah, that was an interesting story.  So, we’re in the pandemic.  And for three months, nothing is happening.  I got my website built, finally.

Andrea:  It’s beautiful, by the way.

Laurie Battaglia:  Thank you!  So that thing got built during the pandemic, but then we’re coming down the homestretch and nothing’s really happening.  And there’s a real press initially in the pandemic to just kind of like, give the work away, because everybody’s just, “Oh, no  money coming in.  What are we going to do?  And how long is this thing going to go?  It can’t go on for a year!”  So, it can’t go that long, like they’re saying, right?  So, we all think we’re going to go back in a couple of weeks.  And about the three-month mark, leaders in the organization said, “We’d better get ready for the long haul.”  So, in the world, not only do we have the pandemic, but now we have the murder of George Floyd.

Andrea:  Yeah, the three-month mark.

Laurie Battaglia:  And so many others.  I’ve got a list in some of the training that we do, but so many others.  And so now, the world is out, protesting.  Some of the protests are peaceful, some of them get violent, not necessarily protesters, but you know, other forces come in.  So, the world’s going crazy.  And I am speaking to somebody in a call that I met in a breakout room in an association meeting for HR professionals here in Arizona.  And she and I hit it off.  We were all LinkedIn with each other before we even got off that call, then we had a follow up, then we had [another] follow up,  then George Floyd happened.

And here we are, and she says to me in a zoom call, “Your phone must be ringing off the hook.”  And I say to her “How so?”  Because it’s not, and I’m like “What are you talking about?”  And she says, “Well, you do inclusion, right?”  So, of course, we build inclusive cultures, inclusive leaders.  That’s the hallmark.  We’ve got, you know, an ROI on our leadership development program of 113 percent, and we know it works and all that.  But that’s about building inclusive cultures where people feel they belong.  They want to go to work and all that.  But it’s not that, you know, diversity and inclusion work that’s been out there for 20 plus years.

So, my “gremlin,” to put it in coach language, came up sat on my shoulder and said, “You don’t do diversity work.”  Now, it took me a while to come to this.  I’ve been doing diversity work for a long time, just not formally.  I did it on a volunteer basis for the National Association of Women Business Owners, with my colleague, Tish Times and my other colleague Phaedra Earhart who got an inclusion grant for NAWBO, we’ve been doing that since 2017 together…totally forgot about that.  Watch out.  Our coach talks about corporate amnesia, total diversity amnesia, and I’ve always been interested with his story.  I told myself, “I am a white straight boomer woman.  What the hell do I know other than feminism, about diversity and inclusion?”  That was the story in my head.

Andrea:  I’ve heard that story before, too.

Laurie Battaglia:  Right.  And then there’s all these other stories that we probably don’t have time to go through.  So, what I did was I immediately recognized that “the gremlin” was talking, and I said to myself, “You know, you could just ask questions and listen and find out what she’s talking about.”  So, I began to do that, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”  She said, “You know what I’d really like to do is I’d like to get my colleague Mary on the line, too, and then maybe we could have a conversation about it.”  So, we do, and I say, “Let me get mine.”

And other conversations happen.  I bring Tish, she brings Mary.  She says, “We want to have a one-on-one conversation about this.”  They interviewed us and two other companies,  picked a company that had an off-the-shelf online product that they could easily use for the masses, because this company has about 1100 people.  And then for our leaders and administrative folks, “We do live virtual, can you do that?”  “Yep, that’s our thing.”

And so, we developed our course materials for them and then pulled it out even further than what we did with them, which was a basic diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging course, and then we went into systemic racism.  And the way we go at it is, we never shame or blame for who you are and how you grew up, and that’s that.  So, we’re going to meet you where you are, take you gently into the shallow end of the pool, get your feet wet a little bit.  And then if you get cold, you can jump out for a minute.  And then you can come back in again and walk a little deeper, maybe you’re up to your knees, but we never throw anybody into the deep end.  That’s just how we go at it.

And I play the role of the white person and Tish is black.  And so, we automatically know, based on someone’s comment, who’s going to take that.  And again, never blaming or shaming but meeting them where they are, but acknowledging, validating what they just said, and why they might feel that way and then taking it, “Uhh, here’s how I got to where I am now, this is what I realized, and that’s not what that means.”  And so, I explain things like white privilege, and what it really means and, you know, why that’s a trigger for so many people and then I will take them there.  But if Tish answered that question or that comment, it wouldn’t feel the same to that receiver.

So, she and I inherently know, because we’ve been doing this since 2017, on a volunteer basis.  Now we get paid for it.  And so, I’ve gone deep into the research and, you know, all the stuff and continue to build up my network of diversity, equity, inclusion people, because we all need to support each other.  And then looking for the people that have the same flavor to their work that we do, meet them where they are, and then go further.

Because organizations are at different places on that journey themselves.  Some are fully, you know, I think of Vanguard and Wells Fargo, where I worked for 17 years, between those two places.  They had the fully built out programs and continue to go deeper and deeper and do their work and, you know, screw it up and do it again.

We love the organizations who are like, “We got to do something about this, but don’t have any clue where to start.”  Those are our people, because we can meet them where they are, see where they are.  We’ve got the basics to form the language and the foundation for them.  And then we’ll take them further through consulting, pulling in experts when they need them, and helping them build it out.

Andrea:  So, how do you see this being connected to the idea of being aligned at work?

Laurie Battaglia:  Well, you know, what we didn’t talk about yet is I actually have a leadership model I was trying to use, the first model for everything, and it just wasn’t quite landing with leaders.  And so, in the leadership model, we taught our five-part model and it’s like a circle with a quadrant with a big circle around that.  What we talked about is honoring the people.  So, it’s about the basic physiology thereof, you know, you can’t work them 24/7, which is happening now with the pandemic.  You can’t work them 24/7, you know, seven days a week and expect that to be sustainable without burnout, without all these things that will interrupt your profit line.  Yeah, let’s get clear on that.  They need to have a life, too.

And so, there’s honor the people, there’s healthy safe environment.  This model was created pre-pandemic, and it was about psychological safety and non-bullying and all those kinds of healthy environment.  But it has now become the physical safety piece of it, as well, and for some of our clients in construction and those kinds of roles,  it’s always been OSHA kinds of safety issues, too.

Then there’s getting people and positions aligned.  And then there’s “do as I do leadership”, so walking the talk yourself.  Don’t expect people to do something that you won’t do yourself, in that they will follow what you do more than what you say.  And then around the whole outside is what’s serving the greater purpose, what greater purpose do we all serve?  So, when you look at that, and it’s a way to include everybody, that’s really what diversity equity inclusion / belonging is all about.

It’s about understanding that my lens  as a white, female, straight person,  I can surround myself with the LGBT community all day long, and I have for a number of years, I just  thrive there.  And yet, I have not walked in their shoes.  And same thing, I realized through a number of conversations, some of them online, some of them directly, with black women in my circle,  that my experience as a white woman, and their experiences as black women are totally different things.  And  I can’t relate to that until I hear their story.

Andrea:  And that kind of makes me think of situations, where maybe there’s a leader who realizes that they’re supposed to have this kind of training, but they don’t necessarily understand why.  What do you say to somebody who is sitting there going, “Well, why should we be worried about this particular issue, isn’t that an issue for everybody?”  You know, it’s probably part of your training itself.  But how do you, actually, talk to the leader about it?

Laurie Battaglia:  You know, if they’re not coming in, they may want to do the right thing.  So, when I say this next thing, it’s not that they don’t want to, but for some people, that’s enough. “It’s the right thing to do.  I don’t understand it.  I don’t like this political correctness,” whatever story they’re telling themselves. “This is bull, white men are under, you know, duress all the time.” Now, when I explain white privilege, it’s like, “Have you ever lost a job because you’re white?  Have you ever lost the house because you’re white?”  “Have you ever….”  And then people realize, “Oh, I’ll think about that now.”

So, if I can help them uncover even one thing that they have the aha moment of, “Oh, my experience is not what everybody else is experiencing,”  that’s big.  If they hear a story, like I found with women, that my circle of male bosses around me, when it wasn’t that they had a working woman wife, it was that they had daughters that were coming up through and they didn’t want anybody messing with their little girl!  So, that was the turning point for them.

So, sometimes there’s a story or a situation that will have somebody have an aha moment.  When that doesn’t happen, I give them all the statistics about how it’s going to hit their profit line, and how they maybe can get away with it for the Boomers and Gen X, probably.  But those millennials and Gen Z’s are not putting up with the same crap that we did.  And typically, they have a child or grandchild that is in that age group, or their younger sibling or something.  They know somebody and they’re like, “You’re right, there.  They’re different.  Those Gen Z. kids are so strange!”  Yeah.  So, they’re not going to put up with the same stuff we did.  So, you can hang on to it now if you want to, but it’s not going to serve you and your profit line is going to suffer.

Andrea:  So, one of the things that we’ve been experiencing then is certainly this big divide, the political divide.  Have you seen that show up in the work that you’re doing?  And, especially, maybe with this diversity inclusion work that you’re doing, but then how do you…what kind of hope, I guess, do you see for the future?

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah, it’s a very divided world, especially, in the United States right now, where we have these different points of view.  And so much of the diversity or inclusion or just the way we lead people, and everything is viewed through a political lens.  So, I was a little blindsided by that a couple of years ago, when we created a leadership program for an organization.  And, you know, how there’s like all this good feedback and there’s this one piece of feedback and you’re like, “What?”  So, the one piece of feedback was, “It got political sometimes.”  And I had no idea what that meant.

And here, I realized that my focus on the humans and the way you treat them, and that, you know, the “we rise, everybody rises” kind of culture was not cutting it, but was perceived to be a liberal leaning kind of point of view.  And I was like, “That’s interesting.”  It took me a while to figure that out.  It wasn’t until I was speaking to another colleague, who’s a coach to me sometimes, and he said something, and I was like, “Political?  What?!”  And then I realized, “Oh, my gosh, if you perceive me to be liberal and you’re conservative, in our very divided world, if you want to put that label on it, now you’re seeing all this diversity and inclusion stuff through a totally different lens.”

Andrea:  Yeah.

Laurie Battaglia:  And so, you know, I went through Crucial Conversations training a while back and sometimes there’s the “what we want, what we don’t want.”  And so, I will make it very clear that when I talk about these things, it’s through the lens of humanity, not any specific political lens, and please meet me there, you know.  And if you’re having a reaction, like when we do the racism training, we start with a mindful moment.  We try to start all of our training with that.  There’s a tree, you know, out in the middle of a beautiful field, this is like coming in with a tree, and we’re going to breathe.

And so, we just talked about the, you know, “inhale for four, hold for four, exhale for four, pause for four; and that box breathing four, four, four, four at your own pace.  When you get triggered, just sit with it.” And to tune into where it’s showing up in the body, we get the strongest of people to, you know, go with us on this thing.  “And if you’re not feeling it at all, maybe ask yourself about that, because people are dying in the streets and in their homes, on their couches.  So, if this were your child or your best friend or whatever, what would that do to you?  And can you get into those shoes for a minute and see it from the other perspective?”

I think in our world today, one of the things we know in the world of diversity is that when we can dehumanize someone, we don’t have to care about them.  And when we can humanize someone, we do care about them.

Andrea:  So, true.

Laurie Battaglia:  So, who are we doing that to?  You know, who are we assigning which roles to will get us a long way toward understanding ourselves and our own internal motivations, and where the real  messages came from.

Andrea:  So, we’re kind of heading to the end of our conversation.  I feel like we could talk for a long time.

Laurie Battaglia:  Yeah.

Andrea:  First of all, would you share with us, I’ll have another question for you at the end, but would you first share with us where people can find you, find your book, and connect with you?

Laurie Battaglia:  Yes.  So, you can find me online at www. alignedatwork.com and can always connect with me there.  And you can find me on LinkedIn, Laurie Battaglia.  At the end of the LinkedIn thing, that’s my own personalized URL.  You can always reach me through there.  But you can also get me directly at laurie@alignedatwork.com.  And our phone number is 602-888-0975.

Andrea:  And we will make sure to include your links in the podcast show notes on our website so that they’re easy to find.

Laurie Battaglia:  Awesome!

Andrea:  What last piece of advice do you have for somebody who would like to have a Voice of Influence?

Laurie Battaglia:  Don’t wait too long to try out the messaging.  And I say that because a lot of us, if we’re in these workplaces, we get told overtly and covertly that, you know, “our opinions are our own and not the company’s opinions” and things like that. And then we’re supposed to find our voice!  But if we’ve been sort of told or shown that we should sit down and shut up, how do we find it?  I found that I had my voice in my 20s and 30s.

And as I got into my 40s and 50s, based on places I worked and things I was told in no uncertain terms to sit down and shut up, and I’m still unpacking that 20 years later.  Well, how do I get out there and say it, then?  How do I put myself out in the world?  And I’m willing to get up on a stage and tell everybody what I think.  But the interesting thing is, I fuss and I fume over what should I put on social media and how should I speak out about that.  And so, then I’ll say nothing, because I’m afraid of getting it wrong.

And what I’m learning with the diversity work is, it’s never done.  It’s always dynamic.  The world is constantly changing as we sit here doing this for the last hour, and we will never be able to get it just perfect.  So, be direct.  Say what you think.  Take your hits and refine your message, but don’t wait until you have it perfect to get it out there.

Andrea:  That’s a great advice!  Thank you so much!  Thank you for coming today for sharing your wisdom being a Voice of Influence for our listeners.

Laurie Battaglia:  Thank you for having me!  It’s been a lot of fun!  I really enjoyed it!

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