E13 - Conscious Culture: Interview With Natasha Wallace from Conscious Works.

In this episode, I interview Natasha Wallace, the author of The Conscious Effect: 50 lessons for better organizational wellbeing. Natasha is also the founder of Conscious Works, a coaching company that helps leaders to lead consciously. Today we discuss conscious culture in more detail.

You Can Read the Transcript of Our Interview Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome to the Making Business Matter Podcast. Currently, we're meeting niche leaders and change-makers. Those exciting people that are helping to make business future proof. Today we're going to be speaking to Natasha Wallace from Conscious Works. So a little bit about Natasha, we've got her blurb here, her bio.

Nathan Simmonds:

A lady with a particular interest in what causes leadership discomfort. She recognizes that ladies are time poor and under pressure. Natasha is helping them to focus on who they are and where they need to be. Allowing them to achieve the best results for themselves and their teams.

Nathan Simmonds:

With a career in high HR leadership and organizational development, roles across a range of sectors, and her most recent role was as a people and development director, which is blessed her with a depth of practical experience for building cohesive and impactful teams. And now her work is all about sharing this with other people.

Nathan Simmonds:

Welcome Natasha. Really great to be interviewing you. First and foremost, I want to find out a bit more about you. We've had a bit of a conversation already.

ConsciousWorks - coaching company

I want the people listening to this to find out a bit more about you. So, who are you and why do you do what you do?

Natasha Wallace:

Okay. I've spent my career working in HR. Predominantly in organizational development roles. I've always led HR teams. But I've always had a particular passion for how you create great cultures. And how do you optimize the performance of business whilst keeping people happy? Because I've always believed that those two things should sort of work in synergy with each other.

Natasha Wallace:

My career has seen me manage culture change projects. I've lead the development of leadership development programs and co-design, co-facilitate those. I do a lot of work around talent management and career management. I spent 10 years in professional services up until starting my own business.

Natasha Wallace:

That was quite interesting actually. Being with an organization for so long because it's about how do you sustain the performance? How do you put things in place that are actually going to work for the long term? And I worked as part of a partnership. Our whole modus operandi I guess was, well we called ourselves a ‘Succession partnerships’. We were developing people for the future.

Natasha Wallace:

So we wanted to put as much into people and get them as I guess, developed as we could because we would hope that some of those people would take over the running of the business in the future. I was immersed in a world where sustainable performance was really, really important.

Natasha Wallace:

And that's part of what I do now is; how do you help leaders to work in a way and operate in a way, run their businesses in a way that they can achieve performance? Because that's ultimately what we are trying to do in organizations, but without sacrificing wellbeing.

Natasha Wallace:

Then I burnt out myself. I didn't achieve high performance without sacrificing wellbeing, so that was my own personal experience. That was a real wake up call to me. So about three years ago I hit the wall, so to speak. It was a real surprise for me because given that in my mind I was somebody who understood how to achieve sustainable performance and also had to take care of people.

Natasha Wallace:

I guess part of the role of the HR professional is making sure that you are taking care of ...