Keeping your core values with Heather Marquez

Heather Marquez joins us to talk about why keeping true to your core values during change is necessary and important for keeping your company on track. Not only is she passionate about making sure teams are on track but also doing change better. Change can be hard and we know that.

Where you can find Heather:

• Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathermarquez/
• Her Website: https://actioncoach.com/

Full Transcription below (may contain typos...):

[00:00:00] Heather: [00:00:00] we took the team who was in a lot of conflict and strife. We identified some of the core values that the company had. the values that the team felt were very broken. And we did a 10 week study on those values where we. Talked about those values. And every week, everybody committed to taking particular actions in favor of living out those values more fully.

and that was about three years ago. And to this day they still, every week post one of the values posters in their office and they rotate it every week and that's continues to be a piece of their language [00:01:00] 

Keerstyn: [00:01:00] welcome Heather Marquez.  do you want to give us a brief bio or intro of how you got into work?

and then what you do now? 

Heather: [00:01:09] Sure. so I started my illustrious career as a 16 year old kid in retail, a cashier with a large retailer and, worked in retail for about 25 years, doing a variety of things, including. Leading teams running a $20 million business unit in the last 10 years, I was also in addition to running my store, I'm involved in all of the executive onboarding, all the continuing education for our executives and found that I really had a passion for that.

And so when I decided to make the break from retail, I broke off into creating my own company around leadership development. And then I layered in the business coaching side of things because leadership development is a passion, but it wasn't really utilizing all of my skills [00:02:00] around operations, things like that.

So now I. Work with leaders, business owners and their teams, and help them really maximize the potential of their teams while protecting the vision of their organization and making better decisions to move in the direction of that vision. Yeah, 

Keerstyn: [00:02:19] absolutely. Absolutely. So when your clients come to you, what are some of those things that they are struggling with in terms of whether it's the operation side or the leadership side?

What does that look like? 

Heather: [00:02:32] it really comes down to three categories, time team or money, pretty much everything can fall into one of those categories. And that's really where we spend a lot of our time on depending on where they're at with things in their business. Okay. 

Keerstyn: [00:02:48] Cool. And then what are some of those things that you bring them to?

Those almost like heaven spots, where they are thriving and not struggling anymore. What are some of those and how do you get them 

Heather: [00:02:58] there? [00:03:00] Yeah. one of the things that I love about what I get to do every day is I have a variety of certifications. And resources and tools that I use, to really customize solutions for the business owners I work with.

And although we really start by creating a strong foundation with getting really clear on their vision, where is it that they're going, what do they want out of their company? The ultimate goal is to work towards a commercial profitable enterprise that. Works without them. and so a lot of that is really just digging in and helping them get clear on, for example, we'll take the time aspect, where are they spending their time?

How are they utilizing it? And what are the things that are really requiring their skill versus others. And that tends to lead us quite a bit into the team side of it, because what I often find is there are business owners out there that love what they do, And they love the hands-on part, but the higher [00:04:00] level leading the organization, dealing with the operations isn't necessarily what they went to school for or what they were passionate about.

And so that's out of their comfort zone, first of all. So they tend to go back into the things they're comfortable with, but two, they haven't learned to delegate well enough and in an appropriate manner so that it empowers their team to take things off their plate so that they can really spend time working.

On the business versus in the business. And, at the end of the day, it's really about helping that business owner get back to the reason that they started their business to begin with and then have time for the hobbies that they've probably forgotten they even had. and in time for their family, I don't necessarily think that there's such a thing as the perfect balance.

Between work and life. I think we all have instances where something is required of us. In a manner that we have to spend more time on one versus the other, but it's a matter of having whole life balance. And [00:05:00] when I work with business owners, we really focus on getting them to a place where they can feel good about taking the weekend off and spending it with their family or being done in 40 hours a week.

Versus the belief that a lot of business owners hold of. If I'm not working 60 or 70 hours, then I must not be a good business owner. That's not what it's about. It's about. Tapping into your team and building a team that can help you so that you don't have to be working that. Yeah, 

Keerstyn: [00:05:28] absolutely. Absolutely.

so one thing that I want to jump into is can you talk a little bit more about those certifications and those different tools that you bring to the table in terms of helping these people build up solutions, to be able to have that 40 hour work week and of that 60 hour work week or. being able to spend time with their families.

What does that look 

Heather: [00:05:47] like for you? Yeah. part of it starts with an assessment of where they're at, and assessing their team. So I use a lot of assessments around discs, Mo disc motivators, [00:06:00] values, emotional intelligence, those kinds of things. And then we have a really cool tool called the performance gap indicator, where we can measure where an organization is on five.

Nonfinancial key performance indicators. And once we get a level base of where we things out, we can start to hammer out the vision. And part of that is addressing what pops up with the assessments. So if the vision is to have this high performing team, that's getting along and there's reduced conflict, then we go back to the assessments and we start educating the team on things like.

Communication and personality styles. What does that mean to work well together? And how do you communicate in a way that you're heard? it might be having a team that is transitioning from managers to leaders, and there's a lot of different leadership tools that I would use in that case. and one of the things that I do, that's really the most.

Fun I think is we start off doing a planning and strategy [00:07:00] session where we do just a big brain dump. And so I'm a certified mind map instructor and, that's a tool where you can use it for creativity planning, just doing a brain dump, thinking through things. When I'm giving a speech, I plan all of my speeches and workshops using a mind map.

And, that allows us to see everything in the owner's head and then to prioritize all of that and then start to break it...