Nicki Straza has utilized her extensive knowledge and professional experience to build better workplaces by developing progressive leaders, increasing psychological safety, and strengthening communications between intergenerational workforces.
Straza, who is a Brantford-based certified flourishing coach, manages her company, Straza Solutions, to provide the necessary programs and tools to help organizations excel by creating stronger work cultures.
“I have worked in corporate and non-profit organizations over the course of my career, and as I have worked to develop my myself…I found gaps in my own leadership, [and] also experienced the impact of gaps in other people’s leadership and how that affected the culture of the different organizations,” said Straza. “Culture is one of those things you can’t really put your finger on. It isn’t like a sales process or a manufacturing process or a product that you can figure out [in] what’s working and what’s not working. Culture is this cocktail of all these soft skill ingredients [and] when you know the right combination of ingredients it really makes for a great cocktail. And when you have those ingredients together that aren’t working, it becomes very toxic and poisonous.”
However, for Straza this is something that is important to acknowledge in order to start building a better and more productive culture especially with multiple generations working together.
“I have experienced [where] people who are very close to me get eaten alive in cultures that are toxic because leadership didn’t have the courage to make decisions or to develop their people. So having lived through some of those experiences [and now] having adult children who are entering the workforce, I have begun to see the role that generational diversity plays in culture and how different generations think differently and are shaped by different skills and perspectives,” she explained.
Straza herself has been working in various professional settings for over 25 years, and explained the importance of quality relationships in fostering a better life.
“I’m a firm believer that the quality of my relationships is what makes the quality of my life, and I think that’s true for myself and for everyone else. In fact, there’s a Harvard Longitudinal Study that has been going for over 85 years [where the] key theme is that happy [and] meaningful lives are influenced by quality relationships,” said Straza.
However, Straza has excelled at youth leadership coaching as well. She has effectively utilized the LeadYoung Training Systems for almost 15 years.
“I’m the Canadian lead trainer and distributor for all LeadYoung resources…it’s an executive-level management and leadership training program for kids from ages ten to 13. I’ve done a lot of leadership training….I have also used this program with a slight variation with my adult clients because it’s that good in terms of teaching leadership,” she said. “There are 16 kinds of qualities or competencies of effective leaders, eight that are character rooted, and eight that are competency rooted. And we really focus on exploring and understanding the nuances of that through experiential learning [which] is when we experience something [and] our physiology, our bodies, our emotions, and our cognitions are involved…and that’s when we create better memories [to help us] drive impact and ensure change.”
Straza has also recently become a certified flourishing coach; offering the community opportunities to help in their personal and professional growth.
“The science of flourishing took positive psychology and mixed it in with neuroscience and a strength-based lens…so this idea is that we start from what we’re good at, rather than where we are struggling or where we’re broken. Many people think a flourishing life is simply that everything’s going well. But another way to look at a flourishing life is as a resilient life [which] means that I have the skills, the support networks, the habits, and the tools to bounce back from whatever life throws at me and that I have the ability to grow,” Straza explained.
Straza’s approach has helped many people throughout the years, however, there was one particular success she discusses.
“I’ve worked with a manufacturing business for over two years. They originally reached out to me because they were really experiencing a lot of conflict between their seasoned technicians-turned-supervisors and their incoming Gen Z apprentices. What was happening was that the skilled laborers-turned-supervisors weren’t provided with a ton of leadership or coaching skills themselves, so they had learned the trade through their own school of hard knocks…[and] they paid their dues,” she described. “They took what they knew and they were passing it on…teaching these young people in [a] very similar fashion [which] the young people didn’t like…as a result, the company was experiencing high turnover…and they were having a real struggle retaining some of their younger students once they had finished their apprenticeship.”
While assessing the situation at the manufacturing company, Straza implemented varying strategies to build a better understanding amongst the leadership and young staff.
“I started working with the supervisors and lead hands, and I started working with the staff, and together, we would talk about psychological safety, coaching skills, emotional intelligence, leadership, [and] all of these different components, but I would contextualize it for each group. So, for the young people, I taught them self-awareness, generational diversity [and] how they might interpret behavior and language and what they how they see it from the different generations in their workplace…I worked with them and gave them skills for communication and resilience,” Straza said. “I would then work with the supervisors and help them understand the different perspectives and interpretations of the word respect…I began to give them coaching skills, and emotional intelligence skills, and help them strengthen their self-awareness. I would do these tandem workshops so we would talk about similar things, but it would be contextualized for their specific job roles. Then over the month, they would work on that together and practice those skills together in the shop.”
Straza said the specialized training has paid off, truly resonating with its leadership.
“About six months ago the manufacturing manager told me that one of the gentleman who was one of the hardest people for the young people to work for has now become the favorite trainer amongst them,” admitted Straza. “The transformation in some of these supervisors to be able to mentor, train and coach these young people and give them what they need and meet them where they’re at has been absolutely profound.”
However, Straza stresses the importance of working closely with Generation Z as well as the next generation to fully understand their needs in the workplace.
“I think workplace toxicity is really coming to the forefront. Gen Z is highly intolerant of workplace toxicity, and older generations think it’s just because they don’t want to work, but that’s not the case…they are some of the hardest-working people out there. But they are not open to trading work for abuse, and they expect to be developed, to be invested in, and to be mentored,” she said. “Generation Alpha, who’s hot on Gen Z’s heel, are going to be different as well, and we as business owners and leaders have to support and evolve our skills, or we’re not going to have a workforce. The truth of the matter is as adults we have a job to prepare them [Gen Alpha who are in grade school right now] for jobs that do not exist yet…they are going to need skills in resilience, adaptability, flexibility, and communication, and the ability to take care of themselves, no matter what’s going on in the world.”
