The fastest way to get overlooked? Tell only half your story.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Niki McKinnell, a marketing executive who has spent two decades walking into companies that were operating reactively and building something proactive out of it. She calls herself a story builder, and the definition is not what you would expect. It has very little to do with content or messaging and everything to do with finding what is missing. Including, for years, in how she told her own career story.

Twenty years across state agencies, B2B SaaS, supply chain, and health tech, and when she walked into private sector rooms she talked about the parts she thought people wanted to hear. It took a mentor pointing out what she was doing for her to see what she had been cutting out. Not just a chapter of her resume. The reason companies kept hiring her in the first place.

She shares one example of a product that would not sell, and where the answer turned out to be hiding. It was not in the data. It was not in the research. It was sitting with someone who had been in the room with customers the whole time and had no idea what he was holding.

We also get into why hiring for the mold is costing companies the ideas they say they want, what actually happens in the room when teams discover they have been arguing over the same position in different vocabulary, how to get found now that buyers are searching through LLMs instead of Google, and the marketing rule Niki wants retired for good.

This is a conversation for marketers, founders, and anyone who has been told their background does not quite fit.

About Our Guest

Niki McKinnell is the VP of Growth at Curbside where she leads marketing, sales processes, customer success infrastructure, and the GTM systems connecting it all. She is also the Founder of MCKINNELL Marketing Consulting. She has built and led global and regional teams across B2B and B2G SaaS, DaaS, supply chain, HealthTech, GovTech, and data providers, in both the public and private sectors.

Her career started in press offices for state agencies and associations, running crisis communications and press conferences in an environment where nearly everything happened after the fact. That is where the pattern began. She kept finding what an organization was not saying and building the program around it, first with no funding and a camera she found in a supply closet, and later leading marketing departments through growth, rebrands, and product launches on the private sector side.

Her specialty is scaling marketing departments and building unified strategies that blend AI, brand, demand generation, product marketing, and communications. Her expertise spans GTM strategy and execution, ABM, product and lifecycle marketing, brand positioning, buyer journey mapping, demand generation, pipeline growth, and SEO, SEM, GEO, and LLM optimization.

What makes her perspective worth an hour is that she has built in rooms with no budget and rooms with real budget, and she can tell you exactly what carries over between them.

You can connect with Niki on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikimckinnell/

Someone on your team is excellent at their job. So you promote them. That is how it works, and almost nobody questions it.

Then things start to fracture. Deadlines get tighter. Processes multiply. People stop feeling included in decisions they used to be part of. Six months later you have a retention problem and a leader who is exhausted by a job they were never wired for.

Cari Kenzie can show you exactly where that broke. And she can do it without anyone in the room having to make it personal.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Cari Kenzie, founder of Kinza Collective™, a strategic advisory firm that works with founders on leadership alignment, operations, and finances so their businesses hold real enterprise value. Cari built a trade show and event marketing firm into a multi-million dollar company and then sold it in 45 days, off a text message she was not expecting, a year to the day before COVID hit. What she did not have going into that sale is most of the reason she does this work now.

Her work starts with a question most organizations never think to ask. Not whether someone is capable, but whether the seat they are sitting in is one they can hold without breaking.

Using Predictive Index, she can answer it. And what the data says about a struggling team is rarely what the leadership above them believes is happening.

This is a conversation for founders and executives who have a team that is not working and have been treating it as a people problem.

About Our Guest

Cari Kenzie is a keynote speaker, leadership advisor, and former CEO who built and sold a multi-million-dollar agency in an unplanned exit.

That experience revealed the gaps most founders don’t see — when the business isn’t fully ready, and neither is the leader.

Today, as the founder of KINZA Collective™, Cari helps high-capacity women design businesses that thrive beyond them, leadership teams that execute with conscious awareness, and exits that protect both wealth and legacy.

Known for blending strategic clarity with soul-led leadership, she is committed to ensuring no founder has to walk the exit road alone.

To connect with Cari, you can email her at [email protected]

To learn more about Kinza Collective™, visit: www.kinzacollective.com

We have been measuring leadership wrong for decades. Headcount managed. Teams grown. Revenue expanded. These are the numbers that build careers, pad resumes, and get leaders promoted. And almost none of them tell you whether the people underneath those leaders are actually thriving.

Shirah Huff is back on Leadership Recalibrated and this time she is taking on the entire incentive structure that shapes how organizations hire, reward, and develop their leaders.

In this episode, Shirah draws a distinction that most leadership development programs never touch — the difference between leadership and stewardship. Leadership, as most organizations practice it, is about direction, control, and growth metrics. Stewardship is something entirely different. It is about creating the conditions for people to reach their highest potential. And according to Shirah, until organizations start rewarding the second thing instead of the first, the dysfunction most leaders are managing is not going to change.

Shirah does not just diagnose this from the outside. She walks into organizations, audits how information flows through every layer, and finds exactly where the environment is either supporting or sabotaging the people inside it. What she finds almost every time is that the problem is not the people. It is the structure.

We get into why resistance inside organizations is almost always structural rather than individual failure, why the questions on leadership resumes are measuring the wrong things entirely, what a stewardship audit actually looks like and what it reveals that traditional leadership reviews never surface, and the one book that changed everything about how Shirah thinks about what it means to lead.

This is a conversation for anyone who has ever suspected that the leadership playbook they inherited was built for the wrong outcomes. And for anyone who is ready to build something better.

About Our Guest

Shirah Huff is the creator of the Kinetic Method, a 90-day intensive program she developed after years of studying productivity frameworks, leadership tools, and organizational systems, and then building a structure that allowed her to achieve stronger results while maintaining balance and clarity.

Since her first appearance on Leadership Recalibrated in Season 1, Shirah has continued to evolve the Kinetic Method and expanded her work into organizational consulting — helping businesses turn their vision and strategy into execution plans that people can actually carry out. She audits how information flows through every layer of an organization to find where the environment is either supporting or sabotaging the people inside it.

Her work is grounded in a simple but powerful belief: it is not as hard as we think it is. The gap between where organizations are and where they want to be is almost always structural, not personal. And closing that gap starts with asking better questions.

The Kinetic Method is currently available through Kickstarter with a September 3rd deadline. Shirah is also hosting a webinar on September 10th, focused on helping businesses find the profit leaks that happen while defining vision and the steps to get there. Register at: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_plZETm1MT_KuG14vhjBhBg#/registration

Support her Kickstarter - kickstarter.com/projects/kineticplanner/the-kinetic-planner/description

Contact Shirah through her website: huffblueprint.com

Dinah Davis spent eight years at BlackBerry, first as a software developer, then leading the team that built cryptographic protocols nobody had built before. She has a master's degree in cryptography and the patents to prove it. None of that stopped her from being told, at different points in her career, that she wasn't technical enough. Or, from different people, that she wasn't strategic enough. Same person, two opposite verdicts, and a pattern more women in tech will recognize than most companies would like to admit.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, Dinah traces her path from the bleeding edge of mobile security to founding Code Like a Girl, and talks candidly about the parts of corporate leadership she never got good at, and why she's not sorry about it.

This is a conversation about the standards that get invented after the fact, the cost of caring too much in a system that doesn't reward it, and what happens when you stop trying to win a game you never agreed to play.

About Our Guest:

Dinah Davis spent 20 years in tech, from writing cryptographic protocols at BlackBerry to leading engineering teams as a VP, most recently at Arctic Wolf. She holds a master's in cryptography and multiple patents. In 2016, she founded Code Like a Girl, a publication amplifying women's voices in tech, which she now runs full-time. She writes about careers, leadership, and the parts of the industry nobody puts in the recruiting brochure.

Connect with Dinah: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinahdavis/

Subscribe to Code Like A Girl: https://substack.com/@codelikeagirl

Subscribe to She Writes AI: https://substack.com/@shewritesai

Most women navigate menopause the same way they were taught to navigate everything else — quietly, alone, and without complaining. Our mothers did not talk about it. Our grandmothers did not talk about it. And so when the symptoms arrived, we pushed through, wore the mask, and told ourselves it was just part of getting older.

Lisa R. Triggs did that too. For years.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Lisa, known as The Menopause Queen, to talk about what happens when you stop letting menopause control you and start making choices that change everything. Lisa managed her own journey without medication — using visualization, meditation, journaling, and a mindset shift that she now teaches through her coaching practice, bestselling book, and speaking work.

What she has to say is going to reframe the way you think about this chapter of life entirely.

We get into why the story we have been told about menopause is the thing making it harder, how the hormonal changes of midlife bring buried things back to the surface and what to do when that happens, why the strength that women in leadership wear as armor is often a mask for the vulnerability underneath, what it looks like to grieve who you used to be while building someone even better, and the one rule Lisa wants retired from the old playbook about what women are capable of at this stage of life.

This one is for every woman who has ever felt like she was disappearing inside her own body and needed someone to tell her that the other side of this is worth fighting for.

About Our Guest

The Menopause Queen, Lisa R. Triggs is a certified menopause coach, motivational speaker, best selling author and podcast host.  With a deep love for personal growth, Lisa has spent nearly 20 years navigating the rollercoaster of menopause; an experience that ultimately transformed her life.

In her bestselling book, The Menopause Mindshift: How I Unleashed My Inner Queen, And You Can Too!, Lisa shares her story to inspire other women to take back control, prioritize their well-being, and step into their power.

Today, she stands as a voice of hope, showing women that menopause doesn’t have to be a struggle—it can be a powerful awakening. Her mission is to help others awaken their inner Queen, embrace self-love, and redefine what it means to thrive in this life phase.

Connect with Lisa

Website: https://themenopausemindshift.com

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

Buy her book: https://www.amazon.ca/Menopause-Mindshift-Unleashed-Inner-Queen-ebook/dp/B0DJG47FS8

Most of the technology shaping our world right now was not built with women in mind. The algorithms deciding who gets hired, who gets promoted, and whose ideas get amplified were built largely without us, trained largely without us, and are now being deployed at a scale that is moving faster than most of us can keep up with.

The numbers are sobering. 86% of jobs most exposed to AI automation are held by women. Women make up less than 25% of the workforce actually building AI. And the World Economic Forum estimates it will take 123 years to close the gender parity gap worldwide. In 2026, women are still making 83 to 86 cents for every dollar a man earns for the same work.

But today's guest is not here to talk about the problem. She is here to talk about what we do about it.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Miri Rodriguez, Founder and CEO of Empressa.ai, the groundbreaking AI platform built on women's lived experiences, trained on women's knowledge, and designed to close the very gaps the technology industry has spent decades widening. After 13 years at Microsoft, where she became one of the company's most recognized storytellers and published the award-winning bestseller Brand Storytelling, Miri left one of the most powerful platforms in the world to build something the industry had never seen before.

We get into why AI is either the most powerful tool women have ever had access to or the fastest way to permanently hard-code today's gaps into tomorrow's opportunities at scale, what it actually means for an AI to be built on women's lived experiences and why that changes everything about how it responds, the Empressa Imperial Council and the model that pays women royalties for the knowledge they contribute, how to start closing the gap today, and the rule Miri wants every woman to rewrite before she walks into her next room.

This one will fire you up. And it is supposed to.

About Our Guest

Miri Rodriguez is the Founder and CEO of Empressa.ai, a groundbreaking AI company reshaping the future of work for women. With 13 years at Microsoft, where she evolved from communications and marketing into one of the company's most recognized storytellers, Miri built and led work that changes how organizations connect with people. That body of work became her bestselling book, Brand Storytelling, published by Kogan Page, translated into four languages, and recognized with multiple awards worldwide.

Now she is channeling everything she built at Microsoft into something the market has never seen before. Empressa is an AI platform built on women's lived experiences, trained on women's knowledge, and designed to close the very gaps the technology industry has spent decades widening.

She is also the author of the book The Women of Microsoft, an advisor to Ragan's Center for AI Strategy, and one of the clearest, most urgent voices on what it is going to take for women to stop adapting to systems that were never built for them and start building the ones that are.

Connect with Miri

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/mirirod

Website: https://empressa.ai

Every leadership team is talking about AI right now. The slide decks are full of it. The board presentations reference it. The press releases announce it. And on the ground, the people actually responsible for building and delivering are quietly panicking because nobody gave them the time, the tools, or the training to actually do it.

That gap has a name. And it has a cost.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Heather Gawel, founder of Momentum Product Co. and former VP of Product and Design, to talk about what AI adoption actually looks like inside organizations right now versus how leadership is talking about it. Heather has spent the better part of two decades leading product teams managing portfolios of over $100 million and earlier this year left the corporate seat to go deeper — building an enablement practice specifically around the AI gap she kept running into everywhere she turned.

What she is seeing is not what most leaders think is happening on their teams.

There is a bell curve playing out inside most organizations right now. At the top, urgency is high. In the middle, leadership is building slide decks and attending demos. And at the IC level, people are on their own time trying to piece together a skill set their organization demanded but never equipped them for.

This is a conversation for anyone in leadership who has announced an AI strategy without building the conditions for their people to actually execute on it. And for anyone on the ground who is tired of being told to learn AI without being given the time or support to do it.

About Our Guest

Heather Gawel is the founder of Momentum Product Co. and a practitioner at the intersection of AI, product, and execution. She started her career in mechanical engineering, moved into product management, and spent the better part of two decades leading product teams across hardware, software, and B2B SaaS — most recently as VP of Product and Design at a San Francisco-based scale-up managing a portfolio of over $100 million.

Earlier this year Heather made the move from the corporate seat to consulting, co-founding Momentum Product Co. to fill the AI enablement gap she kept running into — first inside her own organizations and then in every discovery call she took when launching the business. Through Momentum, she runs hands-on AI workshops and enablement sessions for product managers, founders, and cross-functional teams across Waterloo, Toronto, and the US.

What makes her perspective different is straightforward — these are not frameworks she read about. These are workflows she uses every day. She is passionate about creating on-ramps for people who want to build with AI, especially women who are new to the AI community.

Connect with Heather:

Website: momentumproductco.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/heathergawel

Build With AI: Tech Worker Edition

Heather is running an in-person, hands-on Build with AI workshop in partnership with Communitech on Thursday June 18th in Kitchener, Ontario.

• Register here: luma.com/08m5ihzd
• Use promo code RECALIBRATED at checkout to get $50 off of registration.

Sustainability is not just about the environment. It never was. At the heart of every climate policy, every economic model, every sustainability report is a deeper question — whose voice is centered, whose leadership is legitimized, and whose values are prioritized. And right now, in 2026, the answers to those questions are moving in the wrong direction.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Supriya Verma, Founder of Sustainability X Magazine and author of the newly released book Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: Leadership Lessons in an Age of Resistance. Supriya has spent a decade at the intersection of sustainability, women's leadership, and systems change — building a platform that brings together the conversations most people keep in separate rooms, and shining a light on the women who are leading through some of the most complex and consequential challenges of our time.

This book arrived at exactly the right moment. As DEI commitments are being rolled back, climate accountability is being deprioritized, and a generation of young women is entering a workforce that feels more hostile than the one that came before it, Supriya chose not to be quiet about it. And that decision changed everything about what this book became.

This is a conversation for anyone who has felt defeated by how quickly progress can be reversed. And for anyone who needs a reminder that the women who came before us faced resistance too and kept going anyway.

About Our Guest

Supriya Verma is the Founder of Sustainability X Magazine, a platform she launched in 2016 to bring together environment, economy, society, and politics through dialogue and storytelling. What began as a digital sustainability magazine evolved into a broader space for visibility and recognition, most notably through the Global 50 Women in Sustainability Awards, now celebrating its fifth annual cycle as Sustainability X marks its 10th anniversary.

Over a decade of listening to extraordinary women across climate, governance, finance, advocacy, science, policy, and social justice, Supriya began to see patterns that demanded more than celebration. They demanded documentation. The result is her debut book, Bold Women, Sustainable Futures: Leadership Lessons in an Age of Resistance, published in March 2026 during Women's Month and available worldwide wherever books are sold.

She is one of the most urgent and necessary voices on what bold, sustainable, and human-centered leadership actually looks like in a world that is actively resisting it.

Get Involved:

• The SustainabilityX® Magazine - sustainabilityx.co
• Buy the book on Amazon, Indigo, Friesenpress & 50,000+ global retailers.
• Subscribe to the newsletter for book and tour updates

Most business transformations fail. Not because the strategy was wrong. Not because the budget ran out. Because nobody wrote anything down and nobody was talking to each other.

That is not a dramatic oversimplification. That is what Jessica Caresse White walks into every single time.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Jessica, CEO & Managing Director of her own transformation consulting practice and a woman who built her career inside some of the most demanding organizations in the world — starting with McKinsey, where she learned what it means to be obsessive about the details everyone else dismisses, and continuing through Cisco, Hitachi, and beyond.

What makes Jessica different from every other consultant in the room is that she has never been interested in transforming the business alone. She is in the business of transforming hearts and minds. And she has spent her entire career proving that you cannot have one without the other.

Jessica does not sugarcoat what transformation actually requires — the people decisions, the AI reality, and the corporate habits that quietly sabotage even the best-laid plans. She has seen it all from the inside and she is not holding back.

This is a conversation for anyone leading a team through change right now who suspects the problem is not the roadmap. It is the people. And what happens when no one is paying attention to them.

About Our Guest

Jessica Caresse is a visionary leader, transformational coach, and the driving force behind J.Caresse & Company, a consulting firm that not only transforms businesses but also transforms hearts & minds.

With a wealth of experience across industries, Jessica has built a career on the principles of integrity, innovation, and unwavering determination.

Her work at industry giants like Cisco Systems, Hitachi Solutions, and McKinsey & Company was marked by her ability to turn challenges into opportunities and lead teams through complex, high-stakes projects.

She is a master at streamlining operations, driving strategic change, and creating environments where both businesses and people can thrive.

Connect with Jessica:

• Website: www.jcaresse.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-caresse
• Connecting The Dots Podcast: https://www.jcaresse.com/podcast
• Book a call: https://calendly.com/jcaresse/connect-with-jessica-caresse

The hiring process is sending signals to women long before the first interview. In the job posting. In whether the salary is listed or conspicuously absent. In how flexibility is framed or not mentioned at all. Women are reading every one of those signals and making decisions based on what they find. Or more often, what they don't.

And the data backs it up.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Alexandra Tillo, Senior Talent Marketing Consultant at Indeed Canada, who has spent nearly a decade sitting at the intersection of employers and job seekers translating labour market research into insights that the people making hiring decisions need to hear. What she is seeing right now when it comes to women in the Canadian workforce is equal parts progress and friction. And the friction is persistent.

This is a conversation for every woman navigating the job market right now, for every leader who wants to understand what their hiring process is actually communicating, and for anyone who believes the only way to change outcomes is to change the system creating them.

About Our Guest

Alexandra Tillo is a Senior Talent Marketing Consultant at Indeed Canada, where she has spent nearly a decade working at the intersection of employers and job seekers. In her current role, she serves as Indeed Canada's market-facing voice — speaking at industry conferences, executive briefings, and events, and translating labour market data and talent trends into actionable insights for HR and talent acquisition leaders across the country.

Before stepping into thought leadership, Alexandra built her career on the front lines of enterprise sales managing national accounts at Indeed with some of Canada's largest employers including Walmart, McDonald's, and Gordon Food Service, and earlier at Oracle where she led bilingual account management across enterprise and mid-market segments in Eastern Canada.

Alexandra brings a global perspective to the Canadian hiring market and a clear-eyed ability to connect what the data says with what employers and job seekers are actually experiencing on the ground.

She is one of the most informed voices on what the labour market data says about women in the workforce right now. And in this episode, she is not holding back.

Connect with Alexandra

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandra-tillo/
• Indeed: https://www.indeed.com/
• Indeed article: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/news/women-flexible-work-benefits-gap