Maggie Olson Walks Through the Nova Chief of Staff Course

Speaker 2 · 0:05

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident, game-changing leader assistants.

Jeremy · 0:20

Are you tasked with ordering food for your office? Let me tell you about Easy Cater. With over 100,000 restaurants to choose from nationwide and 24-7 customer support, Easy Cater helps assistants like you and me succeed at work and makes our lives easier. Visit easycater.com/leaderassistant to find out more. Hello, friends. Welcome to Episode 255 of The Leader Assistant Podcast. It's your host, Jeremy Burrows. And as a friendly reminder, you can check out the show notes at leaderassistant.com/255, leaderassistant.com/255. Today is a very special conversation, extra conversation with my friend Maggie Olson. Maggie was in Episode 231. For those of you who did not listen to that or would like a refresher, you can go to leaderassistant.com/231 to listen to my initial conversation with Maggie Olson. But I'm very excited for round two. So Maggie, welcome to round two of having to put up with me for a few minutes.

Maggie · 1:36

Happy to be here. Thanks, Jeremy.

Jeremy · 1:39

And so Maggie is in Omaha, Nebraska or Lincoln, Nebraska or some other Nebraska. I can't remember.

Maggie · 1:47

You got the Nebraska part right. Lincoln, Nebraska.

Jeremy · 1:49

Lincoln.

Maggie · 1:50

Just a little bit north of you.

Jeremy · 1:52

Great. Nice. And so lots of cold weather right now for both of us in the Midwest. Fun times. And Maggie, you launched a very fascinating course, Chief of Staff Certification Course, and we talked about this in Episode 231. However, a lot has happened since then. And so give us a quick little rundown of who you are, why you started the course, and then what has happened since we've last spoken. And then today we're going to walk through a little bit more in-depth of the outline of the course and what assistants have benefited or how they've benefited from the course.

Maggie · 2:34

Yeah, I would love to. And I think we should spend some time, too, just talking about what a chief of staff is. We spoke, gosh, seven months ago, maybe now, maybe five, six, a long time ago. And I was just kind of starting on the journey of Nova Chief of Staff. Honestly, I left my corporate career, my corporate background. I've always been employed by businesses, not by myself, until this moment. And I basically, let's see, left thinking, oh, I'm going to go do some fractional chief of staff work. And there's this big gap. We need some chief of staff education. I'm going to build a course and we'll do that on the side. Oh, no, this chief of staff course has become my front and center. I do still do chief of staff consulting fractionally. I'm coaching as well, new and aspiring chiefs of staff. But this certification course has just taken off. And partly, Jeremy, you are a global recognized name and brand, which is super cool. I'm always in awe when I hear someone from Nairobi, Kenya, heard about the course through Jeremy Burrows' podcast. So really, hats off to you for that. That's so cool. I'm going to pause there and just recognize you for a minute. Yeah, yeah. But a lot's changed since then. And truly, the course has become this front and center thing for me. And one of the things I've realized is just the mysteriousness of the Chief of Staff role. So I do think we should spend some time talking about, again, just getting into what is a Chief of Staff, how does it differ from an EA, what kind of CEO needs a Chief of Staff, how does it differ from a COO, Chief Operations Officer. But I'm happy to get into my background first here. So I have spent quite a bit of time working through different companies that are very focused on customer and employee experience. So Starbucks was the first, you know, initial early company I worked for. Absolutely put the customer at the heart of everything they did. Nordstrom. I worked at Nordstrom for five, six years. I was a buyer, buy planner, moved through the ranks there in different buying offices. That was an incredible experience. Nordstrom puts the customer at the heart of every decision they make. And T-Mobile. I loved the synergies between Nordstrom and T-Mobile because they both care so much about the employee and the customer. So I say that because that just runs deep in my veins and it showed up for me now being a business owner with Nova. It's like I put the student experience at the heart of everything I do. So, you know, happy to get into that a little bit more. But background, several companies finally found myself in the Chief of Staff role. Towards the end of my corporate experience, this was after I'd gotten my MBA and after I'd worked at Nordstrom, I'd moved into an executive development program at T-Mobile. I was out in the stores running a bunch of like a district of stores. And then I was back at corporate working in retail strategy. And then that is the very first time I ever heard about the Chief of Staff role, which is just shocking to me now. So I don't think I'm alone in that. I talk to people. I'm here at a co-working space now where I work. And I've talked to CEOs, business owners every day who don't know what a Chief of Staff is. So yeah, that's a little bit of my background. I basically was a corporate Chief of Staff to a leader at T-Mobile who ran a $14 billion business and had 5,000 employees. And he'd never had a Chief of Staff, and I'd never been one. And I was given the privilege, really, the honor of building a full team of people working for me, doing Chief of Staff responsibilities. So some of those things are business planning and engagements, like executive engagements and events and communications, and kind of driving efficiencies and filling gaps in employee culture and returning to office, that big effort that we all have still been going on in the world after COVID. But yeah, so after that, I thought, you know, I want to work for myself. I want to work with mission-driven for-profit startups as a consultant doing Chief of Staff work. And I'm going to start this course and let's see how it goes.

Jeremy · 7:14

Wow, that's amazing. So then how, yeah, so how has it gone? How has it gone so far?

Maggie · 7:19

You know, I have been truly blown away by the hunger for this resource. I knew there was a gap. That's why I was sitting there like a year and a half ago now talking to my mom on her couch in New Mexico saying, you know, I can't believe there's no place to learn how to do Chief of Staff work. Like, where can I build a brief for practice presenting? I didn't do that in my MBA program. I didn't do that like leading up to Chief of Staff work. I had to learn that on the job and I had to teach my team that on the job. How weird is that? Why doesn't that exist? And she goes, why don't you build it? So thanks, mom, for that. She connected me with somebody in the digital design learning microcredentialing learning group at New Mexico State University where the course is hosted. And we built the course, but it's going really well. We have 230 or so students in the course now. We're just kind of at the beginning of January here. And 82 students enrolled in the month of December. They got in there right at the end of the end of the year. We're getting phenomenal reviews and testimonials. People are walking away telling us that they have built confidence and been validated that they can do the Chief of Staff job. And that just gives me goosebumps. That's exactly why I built the course because I really believe that hands-on practice leads to the ability to sit in your boss's office or sit in an interview and say, I can do this job. Here's how I'm going to start. I've done it before. So I'm happy with the results. We're doing great. We've got a lot more to come, some new things on the horizon. That'll be fun. So, yeah, thanks for asking. It's going well.

Jeremy · 9:06

That's great, Maggie. Congrats. And I know you've put a ton of work into this. And it's, you know, just even just hearing from my assistant community, who, like you mentioned, are hungry for ways to level up and just being able to point them to your resources has been great.

Maggie · 9:26

Thank you.

Jeremy · 9:27

So let's let's dive into the course itself then. Why don't you walk us through maybe an outline or a bullet outline of what is in the course? I know we talked briefly from kind of a high level the last time we spoke, and I know it's evolved and it's ever evolving. And you're always looking to improve it and add more great content to it. So, yeah, walk us through the walk us through the course. And, yeah, we would love to love to hear more.

Maggie · 9:56

Yeah, absolutely. So we I should start by saying that students have lifetime access to this course. So in a world of subscriptions and memberships and re-certifications, we decided to just give students lifetime access. So what that means is as we refresh content and keep things relevant and bring in guest authors of assignments, which, spoiler alerts coming soon, we're launching a an assignment very soon with a guest expert in the space that a lot of you might know his name. But essentially, you will have lifetime access to the course. And that is important to me to always offer wherever the course lives in whatever state that it's in, students get lifetime access. With that, I kind of like to explain that the course starts out in module one. There's six modules. It's self-paced. You can start, stop, continue at any time. It's all online. But this course starts out with a really intense focus on like deepening your understanding of the Chief of Staff role. And that's because, like we talked about earlier, the Chief of Staff role can be very mysterious. It can look a lot different for a lot of different reasons, whether it's the maturity of the role, like kind of more junior level or senior level, whether it's the product or industry that the company's in, your own strengths and weaknesses, your leader's strengths and weaknesses. Part of the difficulty with talking about what a Chief of Staff does is that it looks very, very different depending on the role. And it can be titled differently than a Chief of Staff. There's like, I think, at least 25 titles that I've heard from people actively doing Chief of Staff work that is not titled under Chief of Staff, which makes it even more confusing. Yeah, yeah. So the course starts out with basically like trying to really set a great foundation of the actual responsibilities of a Chief of Staff. And then the rest of the course takes a turn and looks different and dives into giving students hands-on practice doing the things Chiefs of Staff do every day. So we go through building briefs and building strategic recommendations and throwing a complex offsite and filling gaps like employee culture and ghostwriting. You practice presenting, you practice building skills in PowerPoint, digitally. There's probably 20 to 30 hands-on assignments that are scenario, like real life based doing the things Chiefs of Staff do every day.

Jeremy · 12:42

Awesome. So it's lifetime access. If I'm like, hey, I've got a free weekend and I just want to crash through this thing and just cozy up to some hot chocolate and crank out this course this weekend, is that doable? And then is it, do you have recommendations? Is it just all based on your learning style? What do you think as far as the time it might take to crank out the course?

Maggie · 13:15

Yeah, that's a good question. It's about 50 to 60 hours of content. Most graduated students, let's see, we've got about 25, 30 graduated students at this point. And it's taking the average graduate about 10 to 12 weeks. Some, especially those, there's a few people who are not employed right now, and they're using this as a great thing to fill their time while they're out there on the hunt for a role. They're finishing the course in four to six weeks. If you wanted to cozy up by the fire with the hot chocolate all weekend and just cram through, you absolutely can. I'd probably say give yourself two weekends. It's a lot of content. It's meaty. You want to let it digest. It is sequential, so you have to move sequentially through the course. The material really builds on itself, which is kind of why we have it set up that way. And then at the end, you walk away with a digital badge to post on LinkedIn and wherever you'd like to, a certificate of completion, a ton of templates. You get templates very early on in the course. Everybody loves a good template. We give you like 25 or 30 different templates around agendas and rhythm of business and calendaring and project management. But yeah, you walk away with your portfolio of completed work too, which is very valuable to be able to speak to that.

Jeremy · 14:32

And then what about like case studies of these students that have gone through it? And, you know, what's your favorite comments or feedback or testimonials that you've heard from students that have gone through it?

Maggie · 14:52

Yeah, you know, I am humbled to read the reviews. We ask for feedback after every module and at the end of the course, and there's an option and an opportunity to provide a testimonial. And it's probably one of the favorite parts of my job is reading those because I just feel good about what people are walking away with. I have a little review here. Let me pull it up from a woman named Maria who just finished the course. She said, This course is exactly what I've been looking for for a long time. As someone who was not able to finish college years ago, this course has made an impact in my career already. Being an EA for many years, I've taken on a lot of responsibilities and I've been growing sideways. Now by taking this course, I feel that I can move upward. This is a personal career growth of mine and it really means a lot. So thank you. It means a lot. This woman is based in Mexico.

Jeremy · 15:54

And then what's the biggest thing that you've learned as you've built the course, presented the course, worked with students going through the course? What's maybe your top thing that you're like, man, I'm learning a lot through this process.

Maggie · 16:16

Oh my gosh. I'm learning so much. I mean, truly, like figuring out how to talk about the role and how to be an educator out in the space, like here with you or on LinkedIn, realizing that the role is kind of like hard to understand the role of chief of staff and the different the differences between chief of staff and EA and figuring out how I can be a resource to people. I think I didn't walk into this thinking that I would be out there publicly at all. I thought I'd be consulting and running a course on the side. And it's been interesting to learn how to kind of share the knowledge that I have and what people want to hear and that it's actually been really helpful to folks. Just learning how they can do their job better in their current state or with, you know, kind of aspiring to that Chief of Staff position. In the course, we've got out of the 230 people or so, I'd say another big learning is just the hunger for the resource from the EA space specifically. At least 40 to 50 percent of the students in the course are EAs. And of that group, so let's say that's, you know, 100 people, about 50 of those EAs are really, really happy and content in their current job. They're just looking for new ways to build skills and add different strategic value and, you know, pick up some resources. But they love being an EA and they don't want that to change. And I think that's wonderful. There's truly nothing better than like that career alignment. And then the other half, they're looking to promote, they're looking for the next thing, the stepping stone role or, you know, a Chief of Staff position or title differently. So I think I've just had a lot of learnings around like what the space looks like in general and like the people out there and what they need.

Jeremy · 18:12

That's great. Well, I'm really excited. Thank you so much for sharing a little bit more about the course. And again, for those listening, if you missed my first conversation with Maggie, you can check out episode 231 at leaderassistant.com/231. However, if you're just wanting to jump right in to learn more about the course, I will link to Maggie's course and the show notes leaderassistant.com/255. Or you can jump right ahead and just go to leaderassistant.com/nova, N-O-V-A, leaderassistant.com/nova to check out the course and learn more about it and reach out to Maggie if you have questions, of course. And yeah, I'm really excited. So, you know, Maggie and I are really looking forward to chatting more on the show over the coming months and we're going to be diving into specific topics. And so this is just kind of a high level overview of the course, but we're going to jump into different topics like networking and how to level up from EA to Chief of Staff, how to navigate the relationship between an EA and a Chief of Staff. I've talked to many assistants who are like, oh, there's a Chief of Staff on our team and it's very difficult communicating with them or we're, you know, stepping on each other's toes, those kinds of things. We'll talk about, you know, financial acumen. We'll talk about leading and managing executive engagements, building confidence in your role. So we're going to get really do some topical series, if you will, of just diving into these topics that are covered in the course. But we want to kind of extrapolate from Maggie's wisdom and the course into these bite-sized topical episodes. So really looking forward to doing that over the coming months with Maggie and hope you all will stay tuned for future episodes. But yeah, any last words for this round, Maggie?

Maggie · 20:20

No, I mean, just thanks for having me and I'm excited to keep the conversation going.

Jeremy · 20:25

Awesome. Sounds great. Thanks again for being on the show and we'll talk to you next time.

Maggie · 20:30

Sounds good. Take care.

Speaker 2 · 20:42

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