Discover
Understand the strengths, patterns and perspectives already shaping how people lead and contribute.
About Aster Advisory
Better leadership starts with understanding people.
Aster Advisory helps leaders understand what makes people exceptional—and turn that understanding into stronger leadership, more aligned teams and performance excellence.
Founded by Malia Marcell, Founder & Leadership Consultant, Aster brings together strengths-based development, positive psychology and practical leadership application to help people and teams perform at their best.
Schedule a Conversation →Our story
Aster began with a simple belief: people perform better when they understand what makes them exceptional.
After years building a successful career in enterprise technology, I became increasingly interested in a different kind of performance question:
Not simply what makes people successful—but what allows different people to do exceptional work in the first place.
Why does one person thrive in a role that drains someone else? Why do talented people approach the same challenge completely differently? Why do some leaders bring out the best in their people while others struggle to unlock potential that is clearly there?
That curiosity led me deeper into positive psychology, strengths-based development and the science of human potential.
And eventually, it led to Aster Advisory.
Aster was created to help leaders understand people more deeply—not so they can put them into categories, but so they can lead them with greater clarity and intention.
Because when people understand what they naturally bring—and leaders understand how to recognize, develop and apply it—individual strengths can become something much bigger:
Collective performance.
Start with what's strong.
Build what comes next.
Understanding your strengths is the beginning—not the destination.
Aster's approach is grounded in positive psychology and strengths-based development: the idea that meaningful growth doesn't begin by asking people to become someone they're not.
It begins by understanding what's already there—how someone naturally thinks, contributes, connects and leads—and developing the awareness to use those patterns more intentionally.
But great leadership requires more than self-awareness.
Your natural approach won't be the right approach in every situation. Different people need different things from their leaders. Different moments call for different responses.
That's why Aster helps leaders move beyond simply knowing their strengths to asking:
- What do I naturally bring?
- What do the people around me need?
- What does this situation require?
- How can I lead more intentionally because I understand the difference?
That's where strengths become leadership—and where individual potential begins to translate into collective performance.
The Aster framework
Discover. Align. Lead.
Everything we do follows a simple progression.
Align
Create greater clarity around what the individual, team or organization needs—and where greater intention can make a difference.
Lead
Apply that understanding to real conversations, relationships, decisions and ways of working.
Performance Excellence
Stronger leaders. More aligned teams. Better conditions for people to do exceptional work.
Founder & Leadership Consultant
A career built around performance. A new chapter focused on people.
Before founding Aster Advisory, I spent years in enterprise technology, building my career in fast-moving, high-performance organizations including Okta, Zoom and Citrix.
That experience gave me a front-row seat to the realities of modern organizations: ambitious goals, constant change, talented people with very different ways of working, and leaders responsible for bringing all of it together.
Over time, my curiosity about people and performance became more compelling than the career path I was already on.
I stepped away from a successful career in technology and invested more deeply in the work I found myself increasingly drawn toward: positive psychology, strengths-based development, leadership and human potential.
That work became Aster Advisory—a practice built to help leaders understand people more deeply and translate that understanding into stronger leadership and collective performance.
Today, my work is centered on helping leaders and teams define what they naturally do best, develop it intentionally, and apply that understanding to the real work of leadership.
Because I don't believe exceptional leadership comes from becoming someone else.
I believe it comes from understanding who you are, understanding the people you're leading, and knowing when and how to adapt.
Malia Marcell
Founder & Leadership Consultant
Aster Advisory
Gallup-Certified Strengths Coach
Positive Psychology • Strengths-Based Leadership • Leadership & Team Development
Performance excellence begins with people.
Aster combines a strengths-based understanding of people with practical leadership application—helping insight become something leaders can actually use.
A personal note
Curiosity isn't only part of the work.
It's also part of how I live.
My family and I are currently worldschooling—living, learning and traveling together while experiencing different cultures and communities around the world.
It's been an exercise in curiosity, adaptability and choosing a path intentionally rather than simply following the one in front of us.
Those ideas show up in my work, too.
Understand what matters. Recognize what you bring. Be intentional about what comes next.
Build stronger leaders. Create higher-performing teams.
Whether you're developing a leader, strengthening a team or thinking about what your organization needs next, the conversation can start there.
Schedule a Conversation →