The confidence gap that holds women back in leadership doesn't start in the workplace. It starts around age 14, and most organizations spend years trying to coach the symptom without ever naming where it began.

That's the throughline Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, and guest Jilyne Jarvis follow in this episode. The hesitation leaders see in capable women, the reluctance to take the role, raise the hand, or apply before meeting every requirement, traces back to a middle-school pattern that never got named. Jilyne diagnoses it from the inside: she was a ski racer who looked unshakable on the podium and had no idea what she was worth the moment she stepped off it.

Jilyne is a seven-time NCAA All-American and retired U.S. Ski Team member. In 2014 she founded ZGiRLS to teach girls 11 to 14 the same mental tools elite athletes use to handle pressure and self-doubt, delivered by Olympic, collegiate, and professional women athletes who admit, out loud, that they feel fear too.

WHAT YOU'LL DISCOVER

► Why confidence is a skill you build through action, not a trait you're born with

Jilyne Jarvis: "When I was standing on the top of a podium, I did. But when I wasn't, I had absolutely no idea what my value was in the world. All my self worth was wrapped up in achievement."

Kim Bohr: "We're doing a lot of these things as women leaders and not even recognizing it."

Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders build the organizations they wish existed through trust, transparency, and the willingness to challenge what no longer works. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, the show brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about leading people through real complexity. Subscribe wherever you listen: https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/

Trust is the one thing every leader says they want more of, and the one most are quietly getting wrong. The instinct is to build it through competence or charisma: prove yourself, earn people's confidence, move on. Then the team goes quiet, the executive room gets political, and the organization stops believing what leadership says.

Executive coach Andrea Butcher has spent years inside executive and leadership teams watching this play out. The breakdowns she sees most often are not dramatic betrayals. They are unmet expectations, unspoken assumptions, and leaders too caught in the grind to notice the small moments where trust slips. Her reframe is direct: every communication, every email, every text, every Slack message is either building trust or eroding it.

Andrea Butcher is the founder of Abundant Empowerment and host of the Being at Work podcast. Her work centers on the being of leadership rather than the doing, and on the difference between predictive trust and the vulnerability-based trust that actually builds connection. In this episode, Kim Bohr continues a conversation that began when she joined Andrea on Being at Work to discuss SparkEffect's organizational trust research, this time focusing on how trust gets built.

Andrea Butcher:

“Every communication, every email, every text, every slack, everything I put out there is either building or eroding.”

Kim Bohr:

“When I think back in my own career, I've grown the most" from the more challenging situations. That's where I tell people that sometimes when they're going through those situations... this is where you're growing the most.”

Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders are building the organizations they wish existed through trust, transparency, and the willingness to challenge what no longer works. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/.

Most organizations say they care about employee wellbeing. But when your therapist's office hours don't fit the windows your employer leaves open, when you're the only person trained to run a Friday report so you can never actually take a Friday off, when the word "accommodation" makes you feel like a problem before the conversation even starts, the message your people receive is different from the one you think you're sending. 

Sarah Harris is a licensed clinical social worker with more than two decades of clinical practice who still sees therapy clients every week. That experience is what drove her into workplace culture consulting. She kept watching her clients learn new coping skills in session and then walk back into workplaces that made those skills nearly impossible to use. Her book, The Culture Garden, gives leaders practical, script-ready tools they can read at their desk and use in their next conversation. 

In this episode, Sarah joins Kim Bohr to explain the neuroscience of perceived threat in the workplace, why one word swap changes whether someone feels safe enough to ask for help, and how the smallest, free changes often produce the biggest gains in productivity and trust. 

What You'll Discover: 

Sarah Harris:

Kim Bohr: 

Courage to Advance brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about the work of leading people through real complexity. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe at couragetoadvancepodcast.com. rPoG2nGNhym8y5OjgRjF

Most culture problems don't surprise anyone. That's the uncomfortable truth at the center of Scott McInnes's research - a study of Chief People Officers across Ireland that set out to identify what's actually blocking progress from the culture organizations have to the one they need. When Scott debriefed a group of respondents on his findings, the room didn't react with shock. They responded with wry smiles. Same stuff, different year.

Scott founded Inspiring Change in Dublin in 2017 after 25 years working in internal  communications and organizational culture across Ireland, the UK, and Europe. His clients include Boots Ireland, the FAI, Enterprise Ireland, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland. He's also the host of the Building Better Cultures podcast, with more than 150 episodes on culture, leadership, and engagement.

In this episode of Courage to Advance, Scott and host Kim Bohr compare what his Irish CPO research found with what SparkEffect's own US-based research is surfacing - and the overlap is striking. Geography changes very little. The five challenges Scott named are just as present in American organizations as in Irish ones.

What You'll Discover:

Scott McInnes: 

"I might not know your values. But I can see your behaviors."

"Trust isn't a value. It's an outcome of us doing the things that we say we'll do."

Kim Bohr: 

"Most organizations know they have a culture problem long before they do anything about it. And the longer they wait, the more it costs them in talent, in performance, and in trust."

"If we can reframe difficult conversations as developmental conversations or support conversations, it changes everything about how people show up."

Courage to Advance is hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, and explores how leaders are building the organizations they wish existed. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe and listen at https://couragetoadvancepodcast.com

Most leadership advice assumes everyone on your team is okay.

That gap between caring deeply and not knowing how to help is where most leaders live right now. Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer names what’s underneath it. Leaders aren’t undertrained on strategy. They’re undertrained on what to do when the people they lead are struggling. Many try to skip straight to healing without first stabilizing the team. Others mistake ongoing wear and tear for a one-time crisis and treat it as such. 

Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer is a Harvard-trained psychologist, author of Journey Through Trauma, and co-founder of the Center for Trauma and Leadership. She has spent two decades helping organizations including the CDC, hospital systems, forest service firefighters, and Alaska Native communities lead through the kinds of seasons most leadership programs don’t prepare anyone for. 

In this episode, Gretchen and Kim Bohr talk about the difference between trauma and moral injury, why community is the antidote leaders keep missing, what real vulnerability sounds like in a one-on-one, and why the survival strategies that get people promoted are often the same ones that hold them back as senior leaders. 

What You’ll Discover: 

Dr. Gretchen Schmelzer: 

“Moral injury is not a psychological disorder. It is a wound of identity. It’s when I don’t get to behave in a way that’s congruent with my values and with who I believe myself to be.” 

Courage to Advance brings senior HR and business leaders into honest conversation about the work of leading people through real complexity. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. Subscribe for new episodes weekly at couragetoadvancepodcast.com. 

Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect and host of Courage to Advance, sees it all the time: leaders who don’t think about professional visibility until they’re forced to. A layoff, a reorg, a pivot they didn’t plan for. And suddenly they’re trying to build a presence from scratch on a platform they’ve been ignoring. That’s not just inconvenient. That’s starting from zero when the stakes are at their highest.

The common pattern is to treat professional presence as someone else’s job. The marketing team handles the brand. The company page is there. But the reality is simpler than that: people trust people, not logos. Company pages generate almost no real engagement. And a leader who only shows up when they need something is working from the same deficit as someone who only calls a friend when they need a favor. You feel the difference. So does everyone else.

In this episode, Kim sits down with Nina Froriep, a visual storyteller, Emmy-winning producer, and LinkedIn content strategist who spent the early part of her career producing for Oprah and winning awards in documentary filmmaking. When the industry shifted, she turned that storytelling skill toward helping business leaders show up authentically through her firm, Clockwise Productions.

“If we create a void, it will be filled with conjecture. So give them something about you personally.” — Nina Froriep

Courage to Advance is where we talk to leaders who are building the organizations they wish existed. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month

Most companies treat employee motivation like a personality trait. When engagement drops, the default assumption is that the employee isn't driven enough or doesn't care enough. But what if the problem isn't who you hired? What if it's what you never asked them? Host Kim Bohr sits down with Daniela Tancau to unpack where the disconnect starts.

That's the pattern Daniela has spent 18 years diagnosing. Across thousands of interviews with employees and candidates, she's watched organizations reduce HR to two functions (hiring and administration) while ignoring the tools that actually shape whether people stay and produce. Companies run anonymous surveys that can't identify individual motivational drivers. They train employees based on company needs, not employee goals. They assume a shared mission means shared motivation.

Daniela founded Improve Work to close that gap. Based in Romania and serving entrepreneurs and team leaders across the U.S. and Western Europe, she developed a structured interview methodology organized around seven factors that affect employee motivation, from task alignment and manager relationships to salary expectations and career development. Her program is available as both a consulting engagement and a self-paced online course.

What You'll Discover:

"You have to show care before you ask for the employees to care about your company and about your goals. So it's a two way street." – Daniela Tancau

Courage to Advance is hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, and explores how leaders are building the organizations they wish existed, sharing the real decisions, setbacks, and strategies behind meaningful change. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month.

Most leadership development programs don’t fail because the content is wrong. They fail because of what organizations do, and don’t do, the moment the program ends. 

Richard Mirabile, PhD, is a leadership development researcher and practitioner with more than 30 years of applied work across organizational psychology, corporate environments, startups, and consulting. He is the creator of SparkEffect’s Leadership Development program, a 16-module facilitated development experience built from decades of research on what genuinely changes how leaders lead. 

In this episode, Mirabile and host Kim Bohr examine the gap too many organizations miss: the difference between doing leadership and being a leader. Most programs address the doing side: results, output, metrics. His argument is that the being side (how you show up, whether you listen, whether your team trusts you enough to tell you the truth) is what truly determines whether a leader holds up under pressure. And it’s rarely addressed in standard development programs. 

What You’ll Discover: 

“If the trust isn’t there, it almost doesn’t matter what else you do.” — Rick Mirabile, PhD 

About Courage to Advance: Hosted by Kim Bohr, President and COO of SparkEffect, Courage to Advance features researchers, executives, and practitioners doing the hard work of building organizations where performance and trust aren’t in conflict. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts at couragetoadvancepodcast.com. 

What does it actually look like when a CEO spends years intentionally handing over the reins, and both leaders are willing to tell the whole story? 

This episode of Courage to Advance is different from any we’ve done before. There’s no outside guest. Instead, Kim Bohr sits down with Mike Humphries, her colleague, predecessor, and the leader who shaped Waldron for decades before the 2023 merger that created SparkEffect, to walk through their succession story together. 

From the sudden loss of co-founder Tom Waldron in 2017 to a pandemic that hit three weeks into Kim’s tenure, to a merger that brought two established firms together in 2023, to the moment Kim officially stepped into the CEO role in April 2026. This conversation covers the real decisions, the hard conversations, and the trust that had to be built and rebuilt along the way. 

In this episode, you’ll hear: 

If you’re a business owner thinking about when to start this process, or a leader who’s been told succession planning can't wait, this one’s worth your time. 

About Courage to Advance: Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect, each episode features leaders who refuse to accept that business has to be dehumanizing. Based on SparkEffect’s Trust Performance Index research. New episodes every Tuesday. 

Learn more: couragetoadvancepodcast.com 

SparkEffect: sparkeffect.com 

What if the most important skill for leading a technology transformation has nothing to do with technology?

A background that runs from music education to Fortune 500 leadership development to multi-million dollar ERP implementations taught him that people don't change because of a business directive. They change when the leader driving change has earned enough trust to ask for it.

Bob brings head and heart into every engagement interviewing vendor teams for fit, not just capability, setting honest expectations about the hard parts before they happen, and making sure HR has a genuine seat at the table rather than a notification after the decision is made. His measure of success isn't a smooth go-live. It's walking out the door knowing the internal leaders he developed don't need him anymore.

Website:SparkEffect

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimbohr/