Margaret Graziano: Helping to Change Workplace Culture

Meet Margaret Graziano, CEO, and founder of KeenAlignment which works to transform organizational culture as a reset for companies that have been around a long time, or with start-ups that are looking to grow to the next level. Margaret Graziano has been in the human relations/talent optimization industry for more than 25 years. She began her career as a recruiter and moved her career forward to executive search, then organizational development, then executive coaching, and all of that along with 20-year volunteerism in the human potential industry. She integrates human potential, organizational development, change management, and talent optimization to inspire and catalyze organizational culture.

Margaret Graziano spends over 250 hours on her professional development each year. She works diligently to have clean relationships and communicate what needs to be communicated. Margaret is completely committed to delivering outstanding results for the clients her company serves, and actively practices and lives the ‘work’.

Transforming Organizational Culture

At KeenAlignment, Margaret Graziano and her team are transforming organizational culture as a reset for companies that have been around a long time, or with start-ups that are looking to grow to the next level. There’s typically some inflection point in the organization where they need to break through the ceiling of what’s possible, and they realize that the way to do it is through creating a high-performance, healthy, and intentional organizational culture. That’s what Keen Alignment does. Margaret Graziano and her organization’s vision is to forever liberate the human spirit at work, and its mission is to shape a high-performance, healthy and intentional organizational culture. Margaret Graziano and her team do that by working hand-in-hand with the executive team to integrate the espoused culture, what they want, and what they’re committed to with how people work, communicate and accomplish goals.

The company provides a carefully curated and strategically sequenced Culture Blueprint, a road map to its clients and they guarantee breakthrough results.

• Ideal / Actual Culture Diagnostic: It gives sound and current data on which to make balanced decisions for intentional and healthy organizational change
• Organizational Culture Alignment: It creates the conditions for proactive, inspiring, and collective change to occur from the inside out.
• Leadership Development: It creates outstanding leaders, who can move the strategy forward with passion and alignment.
• Talent Optimization: It shapes a healthy, empowered human system where people put their highest and best use of themselves to work.

Liberating the Human Spirit in the Workplace

As a Leader in Talent Acquisition for more than 20 years, Margaret Graziano witnessed firsthand why people leave companies. 70% of the time, they were the wrong person for the job. The other 30% of the time it’s because there’s no vision or structure for how people are led. So, people are frustrated, feel unappreciated, or feel undervalued. Over and over again, with more than 10,000 people, she got to see how dysfunctional the “human system” in most organizations is. Then, as she got into the human potential movement, volunteering in a myriad of different organizations, and participating in large group empowerment workshops, she saw how misaligned people are with the work they chose to do. Most are working for a paycheck with little to no self-awareness about what work-life fulfillment means to them. Somewhere along the line they lost themselves and forgot who they really are and what’s really important. Then, after realizing that life is fleeting and 70% of their waking hours are spent working, one day they wake up and they realize they are unhappy. It is the first instinct to point to the job because most people think their happiness comes from the outside. Sometimes it really is the job or the leader, and most of the time it is a case of missing purpose and passion from the inside out. It’s never solely about the job or people they’re working with. People just recreate the same situation at companies, because inside they’re missing something. They’re missing a touchpoint with their highest and best self about where they should be spending their time, and what they should be doing. So, they’re looking for a job to fulfill a need that the job can never fulfill. If they’re unhappy it is easy to point outside yet the answer is always within.

Both of those experiences encouraged Margaret Graziano to become part of the workplace empowerment movement. She spends the majority of her time teaching, writing, designing programs, and working with Executive teams. Her work keeps her busy and utilizes her passions, strengths, and interests. She is grateful for her humble roots in recruiting, she often refers to those days as the MBA school of hard knocks.

Satisfied Clientele

Margaret Graziano says, “Our clients are small to mid-sized organizations who want to do good in the world or who are already doing good in the world.” These clients are entire to creating a high-performance, healthy and intentional organization that can do good in the world with more peace, freedom, and ease. Typically, they have between 50 and 650 employees, or they have a plan to get there in the next few years.

They may be a company that is growing exponentially and starting to see that their unintentional culture, the culture that was created based on behaviors of the most influential people, is not working for them. So, they want to realign and set the stage for fast growth, with a high-performance, healthy and intentional culture. Or, they’re an organization that’s been around a long time and handed from one generation to the next. The new generation sees that the way things were done and how culture has morphed over time is not effective for where they need to go, and who they need to be now.

In another scenario there might be companies that are doing good and new leadership comes in and that new leadership’s values are not being reflected throughout the organization. Instead, what gets espoused is entangled behavior of wills, that is causing stress, breakdowns, confusion, and volatility. The new leader then says this cannot be, this is not a healthy way to run a company. So, they say they need to hit refresh as Satya Nadella did at Microsoft.

Those are the 3 situations where a company would work with Keen Alignment. It delivers more than promised and makes sure not to take on any clients who don’t want to do the work from the inside out. Keen Alignment only focuses on what it can deliver outstandingly, and if they want the company to do things that it doesn’t have expertise in, it says no to projects that are distractions.

Picture of the Future

Margaret Graziano is most excited about his new book that’s coming out, which is about cultural transformation from the inside out. One of her goals for the company is to create a certification program for practitioners, where they can learn how to do the cultural transformation from Keen Alignment’s blueprint. She is also excited about new people joining the organization who are aligned with the mission, vision, and values. Margaret Graziano and her team are excited about transforming the world of work and creating a world of work that works for everyone where people don’t have to feel like they have to get the hell out of work every day just to be happy, but they can go to work and be happy.

Margaret “Magi” Graziano, Peak-Performance Culture and Leadership Coach

Recognized as one of Silicon Valley’s Top 100 Women Leaders, Magi’s groundbreaking work is driven by her power to uncover and catalyze human potential. Pioneering the leading edge of Leadership Training, Organizational Culture and Strategic People Operations, she brings:

• Proven success transforming organizational culture with more than 25,000 lives impacted
• Over 25 years of experience in unlocking the wealth of talent, human spirit and capacity in organizations
• Methods that increase employee performance, ignite passion in teams and deliver up to 10x return on program investment.