Your Working Life

Christie Garcia is a Leadership Coach, Speaker, Facilitator, Contributor to Forbes Coaches Council, and Founder of Mindful Choice Leadership Academy. She has 19 years of experience in sales, recruiting, and leadership development. For the last decade she has worked with current and upcoming leaders from fast growing organizations including Airbnb, Twitter, Movement For Life, Sunrun, and Oakley. Christie builds programs that help individuals and teams maximize their impact through self-awareness, ownership, communication, alignment, and accountability.

One of Christie's super-powers is helping her clients identify and manage their Ego in real time. Her clients build authentic confidence so they can communicate more effectively and maximize their impact within their professional teams and personal relationships. This is a modern approach that is designed to be simple. You just have to choose to be 1% better every day.

Jenna Fisher is committed to finding transformational leaders who can guide companies forward in a changing world. Over the past 20 years, she has developed strong relationships with a broad cross-section of global business leaders and the companies they shape. Having completed more than 400 CFO and board searches, she has a deep understanding of what professional and personal experiences, as well as the personality traits, are needed at the top. She knows that the most successful companies—in terms of any metric—are led by diverse teams who understand and reflect their products, services, employees, and audiences. She is also the author of To the Top: How Women in Corporate Leadership Are Rewriting the Rules for Success

In the United States, women account for 51% of the population and 70% of high school valedictorians. Yet, only 9% of the largest 100 companies in the S&P500 index are led by women. The math does not add up. So, what's causing the disparity?

In her book, TO THE TOP: How Women in Corporate Leadership are Rewriting the Rules for Success, Russell Reynolds Associates' leadership advisor Jenna Fisher identifies the roadblocks that stop women from reaching higher levels of career success while emphasizing the need for a fundamental shift in how organizations understand leadership.

Combining cutting-edge research with the stories of powerful women executives at the top of corporations today, including Nike, Visa, IBM, Salesforce, Atlantic Records, and more, Fisher provides a data-driven roadmap for both current and aspiring leaders of all demographics to achieve greater levels of success in an evolving workforce.

Fisher explores ways in which the world of work is changing—and how this opens up new opportunities to accelerate the path to parity—while offering detailed descriptions of what leaders and organizations are actively doing to retain, attract, and build high-functioning teams of capable, diverse leaders.

Leigh Anne Taylor Knight is a resourceful, future-focused leader who currently serves The DeBruce Foundation in Kansas City as Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer. A teacher at heart, Leigh Anne has also served as a K-12 assistant superintendent, advised learning institutions across the nation, and led a bi-state consortium providing powerful tools for data-driven educational research to inform practice and policy.

The DeBruce Foundation is a national nonprofit foundation based in Kansas City, Missouri. The Foundation's mission is to expand pathways to economic growth and opportunity.

The DeBruce Foundation just released a first-of-its-kind report on employment empowerment. The research shows that careers with higher salaries, increased job security, better benefits, and more can be built with two factors: career literacy and network strength.

In the study, individuals who were rated high in career literacy and network strength:

○ earn 55% more in annual salary

○ 26% more of them are currently employed

○ they consider 17% more jobs outside their current career path

The DeBruce Foundation offers access to career literacy resources at Agilities.org. We invite you to take the Agile Work Profiler ahead of the interview. It's a 15-minute, online assessment that helps you identify your skills and interests in the workforce. As of this month, it has been taken more than 100,000 times by people of all ages and stages across the nation!

Raising your game as a communicator is the best way to make a difference in your career and relationships, but it takes courage to find your voice, open up, and invite others to open up to us. As a life-long communication coach and top gun in her field, Michelle Gladieux has discovered four obstacles keeping us from becoming the best communicators we can be:

· Hiding: Fear of exposing our supposed weaknesses

· Defining: Putting too much stock into our assumptions, being quick to judge

· Rationalizing: Leaning on pessimism to shield yourself from taking chances, engaging in conflict, or doing other scary but potentially rewarding actions

· Settling: Stopping at "good enough" instead of aiming for something better in interactions

Improved communication requires taking smart risks to question our beliefs, take a leap of faith, and build our bravery to make a greater impact in our professional and personal relationships. Communicate with Courage helps readers confront psychological blocks and gives us the tools, Pro Moves, and exercises we need to become more fearless and peerless communicators.

Her book, Communicate with Courage: Taking Risks to Overcome the Four Hidden Challenges

Cancel culture. Wokeness. Privilege. When did talking to each other get so…. complicated? The good news: it doesn't have to be this way. New York University scholars—and experts on tough conversations—Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow have literally written the book for people who are terrified of saying the wrong thing in conversations about our differences.

In SAY THE RIGHT THING: How to Talk about Identity, Diversity, and Justice, Yoshino and Glasgow—who together direct NYU School of Law's Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging, and have years of experience working with business and cultural leaders on these topics—offer seven research-backed, guidance-filled chapters about how to tackle tough topics with neighbors, friends, family members, co-workers, and anyone else you're close to and care about.

"Ours is a pivotal moment in history," the authors write. "Whether our societies advance toward an inclusive future or backslide toward an unjust past is up to us…. Our own answer is to begin not on some grand scale, but in our local spheres of influence—families, friendship circles, neighborhoods, social media platforms, educational institutions, and workplaces. It's to hear those who speak of the inequalities in our world, and to raise our voices as allies in the quest for justice. It's to say the right thing not in the sense of obeying the rules of etiquette, but in the sense of speaking up for what's right. We've seen again and again that silences can find words, that words can become conversations, and that conversations can change lives. You have to start somewhere."

Colin Coggins & Garrett Brown discuss the power of influence and redefining what it means to sell. Their book is, THE UNSOLD MINDSET: Redefining What It Means to Sell"

Colin Coggins & Garrett Brown are authors of The Unsold Mindset, to be published by Harper Business on February 21, 2023. Thy are longtime sales leaders, practitioners, teachers, and best friends. They met at software startup Bitium, which they helped lead to an acquisition by Google. They teach the popular course they created, Sales Mindset for Entrepreneurs, at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. They are also investors, corporate advisors, and co-founders of Agency18, a firm that helps mission-driven companies adopt the Unsold Mindset. Sought-after as keynote speakers and guest lecturers, they love connecting with audiences from diverse industries, professions, and backgrounds and showing them that it's possible to successfully sell without being someone you're not.

Jhaymee Tynan is an award-winning strategist, culture leader, and wellness champion. She is a board-certified healthcare strategy executive and thought leader known for her values of empathy and kindness in the workplace. A former Assistant Vice President of Integration at Atrium Health in Charlotte, NC, she is currently an active member of Egon Zehnder's global Health Services, Public and Social Sector, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion practices in Washington, DC. Her book is, INCLUSIVE SPONSORSHIP: A Bold Vision to Advance Women of Color In The Workplace

Tynan is the Creator and Founder of 100×2030, an initiative aimed at increasing sponsorship for women of color in healthcare over the next decade. Tynan is dedicated to amplifying the voices of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) to change the narrative on diversity in senior leadership. She believes that her fundamental responsibility as an executive is to champion the next generation of diverse leaders. Her thesis is that the lack of diverse representation in C-Suite roles is due to lack of active sponsorship for underrepresented groups.

Susan Drumm shares another important tool in her ongoing quest to help leaders be their best in both their professional and personal lives. Her book is, "The Leader's Playlist: Unleash the Power of Music and Neuroscience to Transform your Leadership and Your Life"

Susan Drumm is on a mission to inspire and guide leaders to heal what holds them back and help them develop the capacity and mindset to lead in today's increasingly disruptive environment. She has personally coached billionaire CEOs, high-profile political figures, prominent Fortune 100 executive teams as well as incredible entrepreneurs that set out to disrupt the marketplace.

She is CEO and Chief Empowerment Officer of her own firm, Meritage Leadership. She is also the host of the podcast and YouTube channel The Enlightened Executive, where she interviews founders and CEOs on the most cutting-edge programs, assessments, apps and techniques in personal and leadership effectiveness.

Sharlee Lyons shows you how to boost your coaching and mentoring success with emerging leaders to help bridge the leadership gap. Her book is, "Average to All-Star: Equipping Young Leaders to Start Strong and Go Further Faster"

Sharlee Lyons is a multi-dimensional professional whose entire career has focused on developing others. A former Division 1 athlete, Sharlee brought her love of leadership coaching to the corporate and non-profit, and higher education sectors, serving more than twenty years as an expert in developing authentic emerging leaders and leadership teams. She is a Certified-Certified Strengths Coach, a Master Consultant with Growing Leaders, a Fascinate Certified Advisor and an accredited coach by the International Coaching Federation. Sharlee serves as a speaker, coach, teacher and consultant with a passion for working with individuals and teams to develop future leaders in all settings. www.sharleelyons.com

Dr. Ella Washington talks about the need for transparency and bolder action for DEI initiatives in companies around the world. Her book is, "The Necessary Journey: Making Real Progress on Equity and Inclusion"

Dr. Ella F. Washington is an organizational psychologist who finds inspiration through the intersection of business, diversity, and leadership. She has global consulting experience in financial services, sports and entertainment, oil and gas, higher education, and government and is the Founder and CEO of Ellavate Solutions. Both her research and client work focus on structural barriers to inclusion for diverse groups in the workplace and working with organizations to build inclusive cultures. She also works one-on-one with leaders to develop their inclusive leadership skills. Previously, Dr. Washington worked at Gallup as a Diversity and Inclusion subject-matter expert, where she provided insight to clients on issues of inclusion, culture, strategic diversity, and engagement. Dr. Washington is a on the management faculty at Georgetown's McDonough School of Business. She earned her PhD in organizational behavior from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and BA in Psychology from Spelman College.