The Leadership Vision Podcast

Embracing the Dynamic Role of a Chief of Staff with Maggie Olson

• Nathan Freeburg • Season 7 • Episode 41

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In this episode of the Leadership Vision Podcast, we chat with Maggie Olsen, founder and CEO of Nova, Chief of Staff, about her dynamic role and extensive experience serving high-level leaders at Nordstrom, Starbucks, and T-Mobile. Maggie sheds light on fostering entrepreneurship, navigating feedback, maintaining consistency in leadership, and the nuances of emotional regulation for leaders. The discussion focuses on trust-building, adapting to failures, balancing flexibility, and the importance of personal well-being for professional effectiveness. Maggie also introduces Nova's certification course and other services while highlighting the significant role of feedback culture and continual learning in leadership. Enjoy!

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The Leadership Vision Podcast is a weekly show sharing our expertise in discovering, practicing, and implementing a Strengths-based approach to people, teams, and culture. Contact us to talk to us about helping your team understand the power of Strengths.

Speaker 1:

If we are not communicating really quickly and moving really fast, we're not going to be getting done what we need to get done. So it's just simply a core principle that we're learning, testing, failing, moving forward and always giving each other feedback. And in the course we talk a lot about how to approach situations and the emotional intelligence of the chief of staff role and testing and learning. So in module two there's six modules in the course and module two students get 20 or 30 templates and it's all about testing and learning what works for you, making things your own, adopting new practices and principles that might support your leader, and if they do, great. If they don't, let's move on to something else, because we're all solving problem and the problems are all different. So it's important to have that you know, feel quickly, move forward, give the feedback, ask for the feedback kind of environment.

Speaker 2:

You are listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture. Our consulting firm has been doing this work for the past 25 years so that leaders are mentally engaged and emotionally healthy. To learn more about us, you can visit us on the web at leadershipvisionconsultingcom. Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg and in this episode of the Leadership Vision Podcast, we're discussing the dynamic role of a chief of staff with Maggie Olson, founder and CEO of Nova.

Speaker 2:

Chief of Staff, maggie shares her experience serving high-level leaders as a chief of staff at places like Nordstrom, starbucks and T-Mobile. She shares examples of lessons that she has learned from watching these high-level leaders and tells us how she has incorporated them into her own company and offers some ideas for how you might do the same. We discuss ideas like fostering entrepreneurship, navigating tough feedback, building trust, enhancing communication, perfectionism and maintaining consistency in leadership. We also explore the nuances of emotional regulation for leaders and how everyone could perhaps benefit from a little bit more vulnerability in our lives. There's a link in the show notes to everything that we discussed here today, so check it out after you finish listening to Maggie Olson and I as we learn from and about the chief of staff role Enjoy. Hello Maggie, how are you today?

Speaker 1:

I'm good. How are you?

Speaker 2:

Awesome, maggie. Can you just introduce yourself? Whatever your elevator pitch is that you want people to know about who you are and what you do and why we're chatting today.

Speaker 1:

Sure. So Maggie Olson here. Founder CEO of Nova. Chief of Staff. So Nova is really the premier destination for education, development, consulting, recruiting, for all things. Chief of staff. We built a certification course, gosh. It's been live for about 16, 17 months now and it's been incredibly well received in the market. First of its kind. Nothing like it exists Hands-on online certification course for aspiring and existing chiefs of staff. So that's been really fun. My new entrepreneurial venture Before that, my last corporate role, I was in a chief of staff position to one of the presidents at a major telecom company which you know T-Mobile, and I loved that job.

Speaker 1:

I finally had found kind of career alignment in the chief of staff role and I was really privileged to build out a team of seven or eight people on my team, build every role, system, process, tool for all the people on my team doing chief of staff work. So that really led me into building the course and doing chief of staff consulting. But yeah.

Speaker 1:

I'm a customer experience junkie. I've worked in customer experience leadership roles for decades now, leading people and serving people. Um, so you know that's a little bit about me. I had a baby gosh about a year and a half ago almost two years ago, so I've got a little one.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, yeah.

Speaker 1:

I built my course while I was pregnant and now I have a new business and a new baby and I'm in a new town here in Lincoln, nebraska, but I grew up just north of where you are. I grew up in Seattle.

Speaker 2:

I was in Seattle Washington for 35 years. I saw that You're a Husky, is that right? Yes, okay, which is the fan of the West Wing? And Leo was the chief of staff. And we hear about this word, chief of staff, in political circles, can you just so we're all on the same page. What is a chief of staff?

Speaker 1:

And what kind of do they do in an organization? Yeah, well, great.

Speaker 2:

first question Start with the basics here, right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you know what's interesting about the chief of staff role and we can dive into this further.

Speaker 1:

But to summarize a little bit, the day-to-day of the chief of staff role might look really different depending on the organization, the company, the size of the company, the leader they're supporting.

Speaker 1:

But the purpose of the chief of staff role is the same everywhere and that purpose is to maximize the leader's time, drive alignment across the executive team, manage and often lead many of the leader's most important initiatives that have nowhere else to land.

Speaker 1:

To really be an advisor and a proxy at times, giving feedback, bubbling up team, employee, company culture to the leader Because, as we all know, leaders hear less and less of the truth the higher and higher they raise up in their roles. So the chief of staff role is incredibly multifaceted. They lead business planning and executive preparedness and oversee events and communications and prioritization, but at the meat of it they're there on behalf of the leader. They are there to support the leader that they work for in whatever ways are going to maximize that leader's efficiency. So, different than like a chief operating officer or a chief marketing officer, those roles exist to really better the company, to solve a problem in the company, to lead a category of business, a chief of staff role and a senior executive assistant role, a very different role, but those two roles exist for the purpose of that human of that leader to support them.

Speaker 2:

So different than an executive assistant role who is maybe doing more of the I don't know the tasky things. A chief of staff is really this advisory role. Would you say? A chief of staff and a leader work hand in hand then to kind of build the culture of the organization or the team Like that's ultimately their job, kind of.

Speaker 1:

You know it just depends on the role. So working hand in hand would be a great working relationship. So an executive assistant is almost always going to own the core functions of admin work, being scheduling, logistics, travel expenses, calendar, inbox management those core functions and then a really great EA may step in and lead a strategic project or two or may fill a gap or solve a problem. But those are really core, foundational aspects of the chief of staff role to be excellent at execution, to be fast, to solve problems, to remove roadblocks, to build process. So the seniority level of a chief of staff can range on. The far end of seniority would be that proxy, that advisor that let me work with you to build this company. But more often than not the chief of staff understands the strategy, they're excellent at execution and they run with that leader's vision and help cascade it, help implement, execute, delegate, build processes and systems. They're kind of the strategic right hand versus an executive assistant who's a little bit more of that administrative, logistical left hand.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha In my research for this. I was on your Instagram and I can't find it now, but you had a thing about like if the leader is the brain, the chief of staff is. Is it the nervous system or I'm getting this wrong? Do you remember? Yes, we credited somebody from LinkedIn on this analogy.

Speaker 1:

It was brain, the nervous system and the body and how all three really are important to work together, and I believe the chief of staff is the nervous system that cascades everything to the team and to the company. And the executive assistant is the body, the heart of the organization, and the brain is the vision, the CEO leading forward.

Speaker 2:

Okay, that makes sense. So, yeah, then all three I mean whether or not it's an explicit role, I mean those things. Well, everybody contributes to the culture of the team, right, and so if chief of staff, ea and the leader are working together, I'm imagining it's an easier perhaps I don't want to say simpler process, because it's always just a lot of work, but hopefully it's not quite as gruesome. I want to back up a little bit. I'm curious. You had some of these jobs. What inspired you to create Nova? What was the moment maybe you're sitting home pregnant, as you said, and you're like I need to do this. What was it about your experience that really kind of inspired you to create this and train all these people from all over the world and in how to do this type of work?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, thanks for that question. It's fun to think back on. I think that entrepreneurship and kind of that risk taking is within me, but it was really really deep down hidden for a while. My parents are both PhDs like the most risk averse group of people that you can find.

Speaker 1:

My brother, though, um, is absolutely like an incredible entrepreneur and has been for a long time, um, and so I got, went back to school, got my MBA, and I think I started to figure out that I actually really wanted to be an entrepreneur and I just needed to figure out how and what and who and when and all of that.

Speaker 1:

So I ended up getting recruited for an executive development program out of my MBA program. That's how I landed at T-Mobile, but the catalyst for Nova was I had finished with my chief of staff role at T-Mobile and I was moving into chief of staff consulting building a fractional business of some sort, sitting on the couch with my chief of staff role at T-Mobile and I was moving into chief of staff consulting building a fractional business of some sort, sitting on the couch with my mom. I wasn't pregnant yet and I was saying, mom, it's just crazy that there's 20,000 or some project management certifications out there. Everywhere you turn, every school, every private company, every learning platform has some form of a project management certification and nothing for chiefs of staff exist, nothing. And she said, well, why don't you build it?

Speaker 2:

So, here, we are. I love it. I love it. That's so cool. So how do you PhDs not being you know the most. I worked in higher ed for a while and education, especially higher ed, is the most risk-averse Get tenure? You just kind of stick and do your thing. Do you like the risk and reward of being an entrepreneur? What does that light up in you to keep doing? Because it's a lot of work, it's so much work. So what do you? Do you like it? How's it going? I'm obsessed with it.

Speaker 1:

I love it and it's hard. I think somebody recently mentioned that like Cody Sanchez um super famous entrepreneur had some reference about, you know, being kicked while she's down and still choosing entrepreneurship day after day, and that's, that is what happens.

Speaker 1:

Like you have the worst week and you're just still so in it and I love it. I love it for a lot of reasons, but I love that I am the one making these decisions. I'm learning something new every single day, very similar to the chief of staff role I'm building constantly. Also similar to what I love about the chief of staff role You're building, and for me it comes down to, like the flexibility and ownership of my life. Like I have a little one and I'm able to flex my schedule depending on the transition and the naps and all the things that are constantly changing, exactly Part of the reason why you have to.

Speaker 2:

We have a hard stop. I got to go get my kids from school, so it's very much. Yes, you very do that. I read in an I think it was an interview that you gave that you said one of your best leaders that you worked with allowed your mistakes and failures. How have you incorporated, like he kind of allowed you to, like, make mistakes, have space for the failure and learn from that moving forward? How have you integrated that lesson into the constant and inevitable failures of entrepreneurship, of being at the top of entrepreneurship, of being at the top, and then how do you sort of pass those lessons on?

Speaker 2:

in the curriculum and in the kind of the training that you offer. Is that too big of a question? No, I love that question.

Speaker 1:

You know, what I love about Nordstrom and T-Mobile both is that they are rooted in some very similar values.

Speaker 1:

A few of them would be, you know put the customer first always listen to your customers, always put yourself in the customer's perspective and kind of the more back office principles of fail fast, learn quickly, move on and just keep going, which is nice, because that's sort of a startup mentality that it's really important that you don't lose when you become a big company. I've also been an athlete my whole life. I played volleyball in college and lots of sports growing up and I think with that came some hard lessons and some really important lessons in communication and direct communication and communicating kindly, but always communicating. And that's really how I approach feedback as a leader. And I think that if you exist in an environment that is focused on testing and learning and moving quickly, you can't have both. You can't do that without having critical feedback really quickly, really directly, and I term that like building a culture of feedback really early on. So things are going well, things have opportunity. It doesn't have to be huge opportunity. You're still giving the feedback if something needs to improve.

Speaker 1:

So when we think about you know how have these things transitioned to my work at Nova, what we've built and into our course, it's everywhere Like I've got a small team of four or five, maybe six of us full-time now, a marketing agency and some VA help and if we are not communicating really quickly and moving really fast, we're not going to be getting done what we need to get done.

Speaker 1:

So it's just simply a core principle that we're learning, testing, failing, moving forward and always giving each other feedback. And in the course we talk a lot about how to approach situations and the emotional intelligence of the chief of staff role and testing and learning. So in module two there's six modules in the course and module two students get 20 or 30 templates and it's all about testing and learning what works for you, making things your own, adopting new practices and principles that might support your leader and if they do, great. If they don't, let's move on to something else, because we're all solving problem and the problems are all different. So it's important to have that um, you know, feel quickly, move forward, give the feedback, ask for the feedback kind of environment.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love that. Can you think of a story that kind of demonstrates that maybe, as your time as a chief of staff working, that sort of demonstrates like a big failure you had or a little failure and sort of how you dealt with that? Because I'm thinking you know, I don't know if you watch Ted Lasso, but you know he's like be a goldfish, have a short memory, you make a mistake, learn from it and move on, don't dwell on it. So I'm wondering if you can share a story that really kind of illustrates this idea and what you learned from it to move forward into something else.

Speaker 1:

Oh my gosh. Yes, let me think which one to pick, right? Yeah, let me think which one to pick right?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Exactly.

Speaker 1:

And I do think the goldfish reality is it. Hopefully we're not holding on to those negatives of failures. But yes, of course there's so many stories. You know, one that comes to mind is and it's debatable whether this was a failure, but I definitely got feedback.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, there you go.

Speaker 1:

You know, it's just the giant work effort of COVID. And then return to office. So return to office has been among us for years and we're still in it.

Speaker 1:

We're still figuring it out Still figuring it out, still mandating and I was part of the team that was helping really put together kind of return to office plans and we were in a new building at that point that had been essentially built during COVID. So employees were returning to a very capable person on my team to figure out seating for our whole organization. So we had four or five, maybe six, different leaders within um, the B2B world that I was the chief of staff for, and we had to figure out where everyone was going to sit. You'd think this was easy. We definitely took it with an easy approach of okay, well, let's see how many people are on the marketing team, how many people are on the product team, how many people are on our back office team.

Speaker 1:

Well, turns out that I thought this area over by this, by the um walkway bridge to the food, was like a really good spot and it had the perfect amount of seats for the marketing team and like all, 30 or 40 of them would fit there. Great, and we just figured out where everyone else would sit. My team was small. We were seven or eight of us on my team and like four or five on a team that we worked with very closely, so we had to sit in this one spot that only had enough desks for us happened to be by the window and by the balcony.

Speaker 1:

Well, nobody really liked that we were in charge of seating and we put ourselves by the window.

Speaker 2:

You got the best seats in the house, yeah.

Speaker 1:

I didn't realize they were the best seats because chief of staff we're heads down. I'm over in the other building with the leader anyway.

Speaker 1:

But yes, and it was a good lesson in getting buy-in before making big decisions, collaborating, um, you know, at times everybody's going to want the same thing and you still have to make a hard decision. So there's some um positioning that we can work through there and then there's also the positioning of the leader supporting you. I was tasked to do this. Of course, we had it signed off on by the powers that be, but it wasn't necessarily everybody in the organization and having them positioned for us. So I think, from you know, if we tie it back into the fail fast, move quickly, like culture of feedback. Um, have you know we had open communication about it really quickly. Um, we tried to share briefly kind of our thought process but really just wanted to move on from that point, appreciate the feedback. But this is what it is, it's been signed off on. Let's hold hands and move forward. And then what lessons can we learn next time? But truly, you're on to the next thing and can't make everybody happy.

Speaker 2:

Right, right, I imagine that trust is a big deal with a chief of staff, like not only do you have to earn the trust of the leader, but then earn the trust of everyone else because you're speaking for the leader how does trust sort of factor into? Well, maybe I'll just ask it more broadly as, like, what is sort of the philosophy, we'll say, of Nova of like how trust fits into this role? Because trust on a team is huge. I imagine for this role, specifically the chief of staff, it's even bigger because you're like a big part of your job is just getting people to trust you. And the story you just told it's like how do you, yes, move on, but trust like you have to trust me that I didn't do this on purpose, it wasn't malicious, but you know, whatever. So, um, yeah, how does? How does trust play? What role does it play in all of this?

Speaker 1:

That comes in a lot, especially in um coaching conversations like one-on-one conversations. How do I build trust? I'm new.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

And there's no easy, quick way to build trust. No, my feedback is, almost all the time that you've got to play the slow game You've got to, you know you've got to just keep at it. They will, over time, see that you are genuine, that you are um, you know, pointed in the same direction as them, that you're intending to do a good job, that you're slowly, over time, improving processes hopefully faster than slower. But in the first few months of achieve a staff role you can't just come out and make a bunch of changes. Like you said, nobody trusts you yet. You don't understand the business, you don't have buy-in.

Speaker 1:

So building trust is really important and some of the ways that I teach to do that and some of the more common ways to do that, especially in the C-suite, that I recommend are to early, early on, start having one-on-ones with every single leader in the C-suite. So if you're not in the C-suite, you're having one-on-ones with every leader on your team. If you're in a role that's impacting each of them, you are tightly connected to the executive assistant. If you're a chief of staff, you're not necessarily there to do anything else but learn about their business and offer kind of relationship building to help them understand what your priorities are and, over time, to help connect the dots on the team, which is a huge reason to build trust and network and build relationships to be more effective as a chief of staff, but it takes time.

Speaker 2:

It takes time Is the chief of staff role and I'm sure there's some statistic on this somewhere. Is this a role that people hold for a long time, like many, many years, or is this a stepping stone type of role? And I'm curious about that because of what you just said of trust takes so long to build. So is this one of those situations where you're trying to work at it for a few years and then a chief of staff is typically on to something else and starting over, or is this a role that people have for a long period of time?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I think trust can build in a few months. I think it takes three, two to four months of consistently showing up, putting in the effort, improving small things, showing that you're aligned, helping in small ways and those are have compounding results. To your question, chiefs of staff most often stay in their role, um, for about 18 months to two years. There's plenty of career. Chiefs of staff.

Speaker 2:

Right.

Speaker 1:

Um, but it is a really great role to deeply learn how a leader runs a business, um, and then to figure out where you want to go next. So maybe it's an operations role, maybe it's a marketing role, maybe it's an entrepreneurial role, maybe you want to go be the CEO eventually. So there are career chiefs of staff out there.

Speaker 2:

Gotcha. Okay, what you said about consistency is so interesting because I feel like that is, if you Google best leadership traits or something that's always on the list, like being consistent, how do you define that? Or why do you think that is an important part of being of any kind of leader? Right, like this isn't just specific to chief of staff, like why is that so important? And then part B of this question is how, as a leader, can you be consistent? Like can you track it? Can you? Are there exercises to become more consistent? How does that all happen?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love these questions. I think that consistency I really do. They're very thoughtful, thank you. I think consistency is so important because it makes people feel safe. You know what you're going to walk into. You know what to expect. You can rely on somebody, what to expect, you can rely on somebody. They're showing up in the way that they did last time, which is really helpful in a dynamic, fast-paced, always changing environment. I think that one of the most important qualities in leadership is that consistency, and it's the consistency that's tied with being approachable, the approachability that when you come to me, whether I'm extremely stressed because I'm worried about I don't know alone, or something, Right.

Speaker 1:

Or I'm on the beach on PTO that my reaction to you is the same. It might not necessarily give you the same minutes or the same amount of my time, but you know what to expect in my emotion, in demeanor and my openness to you, my kindness, my direct feedback. Again, it's the same, it's consistent, it's safe. I've worked for a leader who I never knew what I was going to get. I was an assistant buyer at Nordstrom and I had that role in a few different places so I'm not going to say any names, but a few different buying offices and in one of the buying offices I would tap the leader on the shoulder because we were all plugged in.

Speaker 1:

We were all in kind of the same office and I didn't know if she was going to turn around kind and calm and answer my question or if she was going to kind of like, pull her headphones off and say what I was like young, early 20s. I didn't know what to expect, so that's just the hardest. And then I went to. I had a different buyer who Consistent Every time I asked a question. They reproached me the same way because I'm doing the work for them.

Speaker 2:

And.

Speaker 1:

I am the most important person on their team because of that reason.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so as a chief of staff, you don't want to, don't want to be that, that Dr Jekyll and that, that flip floppy, the Mr Hyde kind of a thing. So and really it sounds like you're talking about emotional regulation and I think that you know, we know, you know being hungry and tired and all these things go into it, and as adults and as leaders, we're supposed to. You know, I'm sure you're seeing it with your little child already, but with my children it's this constant fluctuation. So how do you, how do you and I'm curious if you have anything in your course how do you help train people to be consistently emotionally regulated, if that's a giant buzzword I just coined, like consistently emotionally regulated, because we all have our days, but to not be that leader that's ripping the headphones off.

Speaker 2:

What do you want? Can you train that? Do you train that? Do you have any stories of I don't know people you've seen that are just like that leader? You just said what made that person more consistently emotionally regulated than others.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and it's way outside of work, right, these?

Speaker 1:

are just really who we are in our deepest selves work or not, and that's what's so fascinating, is there's really nothing wrong with having a bit more of that emotional reaction, of excitement or enthusiasm or sometimes anger. Those are good emotions to be in touch with. What's difficult is when you have those emotions in front of other people, maybe in a corporate environment where there's a lot on the line. So I do think some people are just built differently, and my father is the one on the side that's a little more fiery, and my mom's the even keel. She's the one in the boardrooms in higher education and I'm the one who's now CEO always cool, calm and collected.

Speaker 1:

Definitely there's a theme there, but I do think it always comes down to knowing yourself, understanding your own emotions, knowing what you need to stay regulated. I've done a lot of work in the last decade of what brings me joy and how do I do those things every single day to make me more effective, over here at work or over here at home and just coming back to them all the time. For me it's being outside in nature and walking and exercise and having enough time on my own to then be really present and regulated and available for all the things that I walk into that day.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, We've done a lot of work recently with some clients around just like naming needs Like what do you need as a leader, as a husband, a wife, a father, a whatever so that you can show up at work and your best self? And too often I think leaders don't take care of themselves, they don't have some of that self-compassion and that ability to really take care of their own needs and they feel like, especially the higher up you go, that these CEO types are these robots that they can just do everything. So I'm curious in your roles as chief of staff, working with some of these high-level people, do you have any best practices you can share about the leaders who did it right, seem to, I don't know run every morning like whatever it is, Because also their time is so limited too, so it's hard to prioritize self-care.

Speaker 1:

It's so hard and honestly like the same quality that makes you really good at just moving a thousand miles an hour. Cool, calm and collected is also the quality that keeps you from understanding your emotions and diving deep and spending the time on yourself. So it's a double-edged sword. In that way, I think that the best leaders and the best humans that I've witnessed in my time with senior leadership are deeply connected to their families. Honestly, that's the.

Speaker 2:

That's the thread Totally agree.

Speaker 1:

Really.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I mean you can't. There is no home life and work life. I mean there is, but there's like if you had a fight with your spouse in the morning or fought with your kids dropping them off from school, you're going to carry that into the next thing that you're doing. Or vice versa, if it was an morning, and so it's. It's as leaders, as adult humans, who are supposed to be managing and regulating our emotions. How do you figure out? What do you need in the car ride to the next thing to do that? So yeah, um, so how did these leaders tap into that? Or? Or, yeah, I saw boundaries.

Speaker 1:

I saw boundaries. Okay, you know.

Speaker 1:

Yes, of course there's workaholics and there's people working at night and you know, you know they're on their phone at some point. But I saw boundaries of when they went home, boundaries of when they were with their kids, attention and conversation around their families, intentional trips, intentional time, intentional time away. Just, you know, you take 20 leaders of a company who are all running a company, sure, and you know I probably knew most of them in this example, and I would say four or five. I deeply heard from them consistently about how important their family was and saw that they were taking steps to be with their family and it's so interesting how that works.

Speaker 1:

But you just see it how that works but you just see it, it's just these humans are just solid humans and they know what's important and they also love business and want to run an incredible company.

Speaker 2:

It's that constant pull and I don't even know if it's a balance. I heard a mentor tell me once it's not really balance. It's like you're on the seesaw and you're just running back and forth from either side and you're just trying not to let it like smash into the ground on the other side, Like you want to like try to keep it relatively stable.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I've heard a similar like kind of alternative to balance is the word presence.

Speaker 2:

Yes, in the train that you do, do you offer? I don't even know if it's mindfulness or or or what the term is for, but any sort of like self-reflective, like here's how you don't lose your mind as a chief of staff, Like what is, because there's the skills. Right, you have to be a good communicator, you have to build trust.

Speaker 1:

But then there's like yeah, here's how you don't lose your mind, I know it truly.

Speaker 2:

You know, we don't hit it quite on the nose that way, but through the course, we it's.

Speaker 1:

It's rooted in reflection.

Speaker 1:

So, there are probably 12, 10 to 12 different points throughout the six modules that um learners are reflecting. What do I think the chief of staff role is when? What are my competencies? Um, and I mean 10 to 12 points through the course, but probably more like 60 questions in all. What is holding me back? Where's my self-belief? Where's my confidence at this point? A lot of the things that people walk into or may prevent them from taking the next step. Trying to help them understand themselves through reflection, slowing down a bit, pausing, and then the alternate example would be okay.

Speaker 1:

Now, how do you feel about the chief of staff role and do you feel well set up? What questions do you still have? What are your sticking points right now? And so through the course we've got a lot of points like that around different topics. How do you approach finance in a new role? What are your biggest insecurities here? Because it's one of the biggest insecurities for aspiring and current chiefs of staff is I'm in this new chief of staff role. I don't know the business, so am I going to be able to hack it if I don't have a deep financial understanding of this business? The answer is yes. The chief of staff role is about breadth, not depth. You can dive deep when you need to, but you won't survive as a chief of staff if you're deep everywhere. So there's a bit of that reflection acknowledgement. What am I stuck on here? How do I move past it? And then the applicable learning comes in and helps you ideally understand the true functions of the role and how to succeed, kind of blending everything together.

Speaker 2:

That's good. It sounds like there's a uh, uh, a real understanding of like kind of knowing your limits and being okay with not knowing what you don't know. I, I I can't remember if this was in a podcast I heard you on or where I heard, but you said something about. I'm quoting you back to you. I'm just going to paraphrase Something about like you used to really strive for this perfection, but now it's more about, like embracing that vulnerability and being okay with not being, you know, perfect Nobody's perfect. Yes, I guess your ability to build trust in your team and like connect with your team specifically to build this company and essentially empower all these other people to do that exact same thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, you are well-researched.

Speaker 2:

I try, I try.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I love that. You know, I think I was an early leader so I was leading big teams. Well, I mean, on the sports, you know, courts and fields pretty early on in my teens and then in the food and beverage industry and the retail industry, on sales floors on food and beverage floors 40, 50 people in my early 20s and that is before I did the deep work of learning about myself, understanding emotions.

Speaker 2:

You had no business leading, probably right of learning about myself understanding emotions you had no business leading probably right.

Speaker 1:

No, no, I mean, I was driven. I was an achiever, I cared a lot about people, but I didn't understand, most importantly, how to communicate with myself, like what my own feelings were, and as I mentioned, kind of one of those people that can just keep going.

Speaker 1:

I hadn't realized how to understand how I was feeling truly, or how to put words to what I was feeling. So when you think about being a leader in that perspective, you know I was definitely a perfectionist, more of the mindset of I must like act a certain way so that people see me as a leader instead of show folks that I'm the same as them and still be a leader.

Speaker 1:

And so there was definitely a switch point through my life, like I, you know, went through a lot personally and um came out on the other side, had a lot of deep therapy and I had a moment where I'm like you know, I think I'm going to go back into the corporate world.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to see if it's for me, I'm going to take on this huge leadership role and we're just going to see how it goes. And, honestly, it was the most transformative leadership type of positions that I've ever been in in this. Um, it was an executive development program at T-Mobile, post MBA, post a ton of travel, um, and I I think for the first time I'd been like, truly vulnerable, truly emotional um, truly like okay, with not having all the answers and still having the confidence that I was the leader, um, and it just changed a lot. So at this point, um, you know I've been a leader for a couple of decades and um, again it's. I think one of my foundational principles is that you're just building a culture of feedback early, you're caring deeply, you're approachable, you're consistent, like those are. Those are kind of the things I lean on the most.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I don't know if you can relate to this, but I, the leaders that I respect the most either ones that I know personally or, you know, I've seen from afar are the ones that are, are vulnerable, are humble, like admit their mistakes and how they've grown from them. Yet I don't want to do any of that Right Like I don't want to like admit that I don't know something. I don't want to be vulnerable and so I don't. I don't know what it will take for us to like switch and be like, wait a second. This person I admire and respect you know boardroom sports, mute, like whatever it is like they're doing the thing that I don't want to do. That's hard. I don't know if you've read any of uh, brene Brown's work around this stuff, but there's like I think it's the gifts of imperfection. She talks about this exact thing and just how it's just a daily practice almost of like figuring that out.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, and it's like it's also. Do you know, is it the messy middle that we share? Is it the I?

Speaker 2:

learned and now I share. Where are we vulnerable? What's most helpful to everyone involved? I know, I know, and it's weird as we I'm 45 now and there's this point of like. I still feel like I'm that early 20 something person learning it out. But I'm also now working and in contact with a lot of people who are younger and like when does that shift change? We're like oh, I have it figured out and now I can pass on this wisdom. I don't think that ever really happens.

Speaker 2:

But it's just like this weird you never become the I don't know pick your metaphor, the Obi-Wan, grandmaster, Jedi, whatever. You're just kind of always hopefully going towards that.

Speaker 1:

I think we don't feel like it. But, nathan, I'm sure you are Obi-Wan to some people.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, I can't really grow a beard, but thank you, I appreciate it. I appreciate that. So, Maggie, to kind of wrap things up here, I'm curious the NovaChiefOfStaffcom who is that for? As I was looking at all of your different services, it seems like you offer training for people that want to do that, but you also offer some consulting services. So if a company like us was looking for a fractional, part-time, chief of staff type position, you also offer that. Do you have a blurb of what exactly it is the services that you provide?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So right now, our flagship offer is really our certification course.

Speaker 1:

And that's intended for current and aspiring chiefs of staff. Folks that want to be future entrepreneurs and just don't have a product yet or a company yet. Learn from a business leader is a great option, business operations folks. So that's the chief of staff certification course. We also do placement. So let's say you wanted to hire a chief of staff and you were. You wanted a full-time chief of staff instead of fractional. Um, I can help you do that. Our team can help you. Um, we do fractional chief of staff consulting. I'm hoping to consult in the spring for a pretty well-known football program. That is all I can say.

Speaker 1:

So we'll see what happens there. That would be pretty awesome to get in there. But yeah, so we do consulting and then coaching and a host of other development-focused activities for aspiring current chiefs of staff and folks looking for chief of staff support.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much, maggie, and it's NovaChiefOfStaffcom, if folks want to learn more, and there's going to be a link in the show notes. Thank you so much for chatting. I had so many notes and I'm never entirely sure where this is going to go, but it was so fun because I got to ask all of my questions, since Linda never made it. So thank you.

Speaker 1:

You're welcome. I had a lot of fun. This was great.

Speaker 2:

Wonderful. Well, thanks so much, and we'll chat with you soon.

Speaker 1:

Sounds great.

Speaker 2:

Another thank you to Maggie Olson from Nova Chifa staff for taking the time to chat. You know, you may or may not have noticed, but Brian and Linda were not on this episode. They had a scheduling conflict and some technical difficulties and so it was just me, and I was so delighted to have this conversation with Maggie because I felt like we went beyond just here's what Nova, chief of Staff does into more of like what she has learned and how she is taking that learning from her own experience and putting it into this online and in-person training to then help others. And so, when you think about the way that we all try to multiply our influence and our leadership, I think this is just such a cool, just such a cool thing. So thank you for listening to that.

Speaker 2:

You can learn more about Nova, chief of Staff, at novachiefofstaffcom, and if you want to learn more about the work that we do at leadership vision, you can go to leadership vision consultingcom. And thank you, listeners, for listening to the leadership vision podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture for more resources, about developing your strengths the strengths of your team or the strengths of your entire organization. You can click the link in the show notes go to leadership vision consultingcom. Follow us on the socials. Join our free email newsletter. There's a host of ways that you can connect with us, but, most importantly, if anything in this episode or any of our other past episodes or other resources resonates with you, we'd appreciate it if you would pass this on to someone that you think could benefit from this material as well. My name is Nathan Freeberg and, on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.