Leadership Recalibrated™

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

You have been in the room. You have done the work. You have delivered the results. And somehow you still walk out of meetings feeling like you left something on the table.

That is not a you problem. That is what happens when high-achieving women are handed a leadership playbook that was never written for them.

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated™, I sit down with Lynsey Mulder — keynote speaker, certified coach, and former SVP at a Fortune 100 company — who spent over two decades inside corporate America before leaving to do something about the leadership advice gap that keeps so many women stuck.

Lynsey does not do recycled. She does not do watered down. She comes with frameworks, data, and the kind of honest conversation that most leadership training skips entirely.

We get into the invisible work tax that women absorb without even realizing it is happening, why only 20% of people actually know their superpower and what it costs when you are not one of them, the BANK framework and how cracking your own communication code changes everything about how you lead and how you are heard, why no is not a problem to manage but a strategy to master, and what it actually takes to stop conforming to a mold that was never built for you and start leading in a way that is fully, unapologetically yours.

This is a conversation for women who are done surviving the room and ready to own it.

About Our Guest

Lynsey Mulder spent over two decades rising through corporate America to reach the level of Senior Vice President at a Fortune 100 company, and what she learned along the way is that most leadership advice handed to women is either recycled, watered down, or written by people who've never actually been in the room. So she left to change that.

Today, Lynsey runs multiple businesses. Her favorite being working with high-achieving women, business owners, and executives who are ready to lead on their own terms. She is a keynote speaker, certified coach, podcast host, and the person your leadership team calls when they need real talk, not a motivational poster. Her frameworks help leaders get clear on what they stand for, how they communicate, and what they refuse to compromise, so they can stop surviving the room and start owning it.

Connect With Lynsey

Website: https://lynseymulder.com

Lead With Spark Podcast: https://lynseymulder.com/podcast

Everyone's telling women to use AI. Learn it, embrace it, or get left behind.

So women do. And then they get penalized for it.

In this episode, I dig into the research and I came with receipts. Most importantly, I share some positive stats we don't hear about.

If you are a first-time manager trying to figure out how to lead with AI, or a senior leader who's done waiting for the system to catch up, this one is for you.

Her Executive Ascent Leadership Programs: https://community.herexecutiveascent.com/pages/program-offerings

The Research

• LeanIn
  • https://leanin.org/research/ai-women-gender-gap-data
  • https://leanin.org/education/what-is-attribution-bias
• HBS
  • https://d3.harvard.edu/the-gender-divide-in-generative-ai-a-global-challenge
  • https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=66548
• HK / Peking University
  • https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5255039
• Monday Girl
  • https://itbrief.ca/story/canadian-women-report-greater-anxiety-over-ai-at-work
• UNESCO
  • https://www.unesco.org/ethics-ai/en/articles/tackling-gender-bias-and-harms-artificial-intelligence-ai
• Dev Barometer:
  • https://www.bairesdev.com/blog/dev-barometer-q1-2026-ai-accountability
• Deloitte:
  • https://ceo-na.com/technology/women-and-generative-ai-the-adoption-gap-is-closing-fast-but-a-trust-gap-persists/
• UN Global Compact
  • https://unglobalcompact.org/compactjournal/silicon-ceiling-how-ai-risks-rewiring-workplace-inequality
• Nature
  • https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/10/ai-llms-age-bias-older-working-women-research
• ILO
  • https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/ai-gender-parity-womens-history-month-jobs/

We've all been handed the same playbook — eat less, move more, push through. And most of us have followed it faithfully while still feeling exhausted, disconnected from our bodies, and no closer to actually feeling well.

Joana Castro has a different theory about why that is. And the answer isn't another supplement, another diet, or another wellness trend.

Joana is a food therapy expert and founder of My Own True Balance, who sits at a rare intersection of nuclear medicine, biomedical engineering, and traditional Chinese medicine.

After spending years inside the corporate world while quietly rebuilding her own health — following years of being dismissed by the medical system — she built a practice that merges Eastern and Western science in a way that most people in either field haven't managed to do.

In this episode, we talk about why the way most women have been eating their entire lives has been working against them, what traditional Chinese medicine understands about the female body that Western medicine is only beginning to catch up to, and why real healing was never supposed to be fast. It was supposed to be steady.

This is a conversation about food as medicine, about learning to understand your own body's makeup, and about what it looks like to stop chasing fixes and start owning your energy.

About Our Guest

Joana Castro is a creative polymath and food therapy expert bridging science, TCM, and holistic health. With a background in nuclear medicine, biomedical engineering, and TCM food therapy; she turned personal health struggles into a mission: helping people to achieve balance through food, so they can truly own their energy. 

As Founder of My Own True Balance, Joana helps busy professionals reclaim vitality through food therapy. She specializes in female health (menstrual & menopause), burnout recovery, energy/focus, and digestion—fueled by science, ancient wisdom, and real results.

Connect with Joana

• Linkedin Profile: linkedin.com/in/joanadscastro/
• Website: https://myowntruebalance.com
• Food Therapy Session: https://myowntruebalance.com/food-therapy-consultation
• Use promo code: TAKE10 to receive a 10% discount, valid on your first purchase, on the My Own True Balance website.

Most of us were taught to solve problems alone. To carry the weight of our careers on our own shoulders. To wait until we had the perfect answer before raising our hand or reaching out.

But what if that instinct is exactly what's keeping you stuck?

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Saeideh Fard, CFO at Introhive and one of the most intentional network builders I have had the pleasure of meeting. Saei has spent 25 years in executive finance roles across some of North America's most ambitious growth-stage technology companies. And she credits a significant part of that success not to technical expertise alone, but to a concept she calls the Power of Three.

The idea is simple. The impact is anything but.

This is a conversation for anyone who has been playing small, waiting to be discovered, or solving everything alone when the network they need is already two steps away.

About Our Guest

Saeideh Fard — known as Saei — serves as CFO at Introhive, a B2B SaaS organization bringing client intelligence, data and automation solutions that drive growth in North America and Europe's top legal, accounting, and consulting firms. 

Previously, Saei was the SVP, Finance at PointClickCare, the leading Electronic Health Record technology partner to North America's senior care industry; CFO at Tulip Retail, a SaaS technology leader in retail store associate mobility and a Kleiner Perkins and Salesforce Ventures portfolio company. Earlier, she served as Group CFO at Traveledge and Kensington Tours, overseeing teams across luxury leisure, corporate, and technology divisions across Canada, US and Bermuda. Her C-Suite career spans transformation roles focusing in high organic growth and M&A environments. 

Saei started her career as a CPA with PwC. She holds both Canadian and US CPA designations, and is an alumni of the Queens (Smith) School of Business. Her championed causes include helping women, youth and immigrants achieve their leadership potential.

Connect with Saei on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/saeidehfard

Learn more about Introhive at introhive.com

You built the business from the ground up — and for a long time, being at the center of everything worked. But somewhere between steady revenue and real scale, that same drive starts working against you. Decisions stack up, the team stalls, and the operation gets messy. Sound familiar?

In this episode of Leadership Recalibrated, I sit down with Nana Obeng, Strategic Operations Partner and Fractional COO, to talk about the critical — and often painful — mindset shift every scaling founder eventually has to make: stepping out of the role of operator and into the role of architect.

Nana breaks down why high-achieving women are particularly susceptible to becoming the bottleneck in their own businesses, what the warning signs look like before they become a crisis, and how to build the kind of decision infrastructure that lets your business grow without everything running through you.

They also get into the role of AI in modern leadership — how to use it to accelerate your thinking and pressure test decisions without letting it replace the executive judgment that no algorithm can replicate.

If you're leading an established, revenue-generating business and starting to feel the friction of your own growth, this conversation will meet you exactly where you are.

About Our Guest

Nana Obeng is a Strategic Operations Partner and Fractional COO for women CEOs leading established, revenue-generating businesses navigating the shift from steady growth to structured scale. She helps founders strengthen how their companies operate so growth becomes intentional, disciplined, and sustainable.

With over 15 years of experience across engineering, corporate strategy, and entrepreneurship, she brings systems thinking and executive-level judgment to complex growth decisions. After starting her career in structured corporate environments, she realized she wanted to see more direct impact where strategy translated quickly into results.

After earning her MBA and co-founding a consumer brand, she saw a consistent pattern. Ambitious women were building exceptional businesses while also carrying significant responsibilities outside of work. What they needed was not more tools. They needed the right operational partner.

Today, she partners with women CEOs leading established, revenue-generating businesses to reduce operational noise and scale with clarity, financial discipline, and operational leverage.

Connect with Nana

• Website: https://www.highpointconsulting.online/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nana-obeng/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hipt_consulting/

Most companies build Employee Engagement teams when what they need first is an Empowerment team.

Yvonne helps growth-stage companies tackle scaling challenges—and one of the biggest gaps she sees is companies trying to fix engagement without first creating empowerment.

In this episode, we explore the difference between engagement and empowerment, why companies default to measuring engagement (and why it doesn't work), what empowerment actually looks like at scale, and how to build systems that empower people to do their best work.

This is for leaders at growth-stage companies who are watching engagement scores drop and wondering why their initiatives aren't working.

About Our Guest

Yvonne Jackson is a strategy, talent, and AI governance advisor who works with leadership teams navigating organizational misalignment and rapid technological change.

She helps executives clarify decision authority, align talent and strategy, and build operating systems that allow organizations to execute during periods of growth, transformation, and disruption.

Her perspective is shaped by leadership roles at Apple Inc. and Whirlpool Corporation and an MBA from the University of North Carolina.

She is also the creator of EDEN (Ethical Decision & Engagement Norms), a framework exploring how AI and digital systems reshape power, governance, and human autonomy inside modern organizations.

Through this work, Yvonne helps leaders identify emerging organizational risks and design decision systems that support ethical, human-centered transformation in the age of AI.

Connect with Yvonne

• Website: www.socialedg.com
• LinkedIn: linkedIn.com/in/yvonnejackson
• Book a discovery call: calendly.com/socialedg/discovery