Help your leaders identify what’s actually driving workplace strain
Keynotes, workshops, and training for conference stages, leadership retreats, and in-house teams.
Tell Me About Your Event
Organizations I’ve worked with
What Stays After I Leave
Every session introduces a diagnostic lens: organizational stress as the interaction between human experience and system conditions. Participants leave with language for what they’ve been observing, a map of the seven stress domains they can test against their own work, and a way of asking questions that produces different answers than the ones they’ve been getting.
You’ve likely paid for the fix already. A leadership training, because the problem read as a people problem. A process redesign, because it read as a structural one. Each one aimed at half of the problem, and it came back on schedule. Your team leaves able to see both halves at once, which is what keeps you from buying the third version of the same fix.
Engagement Formats
Each session runs 45, 60, or 90 minutes, in person or virtual. Book one on its own, or combine several into a series.
Talks
Keynote
For conferences, summits, and all-hands events where the room is large and the clock is fixed. Your audience leaves with a different question to ask about the problems they walked in carrying, and language for the parts they’ve been watching but couldn’t name.
Fireside Chat
For events built around conversation rather than presentation. A moderator drives, the audience asks, and the format earns its place when the questions are messy and the honest answer is that it depends on conditions nobody has mapped yet.
Open Forum
I present for the first 15 minutes. The audience sets the agenda for the rest. The room generates the insight and I keep the direction useful, which works when your people already know something is wrong and haven’t had a place to say it out loud.
Working Sessions
Workshop
For a leadership team or HR cohort working on something specific. The group brings a live situation and maps where the pressure is generated and who’s been covering for it. Works best under 40 people, since the value depends on everyone being in the conversation.
Training
For organizations building capability that has to hold after the session ends. Delivered across multiple sessions with application work in between, so managers test the material against their own context and come back with what didn’t work.
Session Topics
Every session is customized. These are the territories I work in most.
The Organizational Roots of Stress
Stress gets generated where what the organization requires and what people can sustain stop matching. This session maps where that mismatch concentrates across seven organizational stress domains, and why locating it changes which interventions are worth funding.
What Business Growth Exposes
More people, more hours, more locations, more volume. Growth pressure lands on whatever was already thin and whoever was already covering for it. This session maps which conditions take the hit first and who gets handed the difference.
What HR Is Actually Subsidizing
HR covers the gap between what the organization promises and what it has built to deliver, and that invoice never shows up in HR’s budget. This session names the patterns, gives teams language for them, and separates what HR can fix from what has to go to whoever owns the lever.
Manager Resilience and Sustainable Leadership
Managers sit between strategy and the people executing it, and they personally cover the parts that were never designed. This session covers what they can carry, what they should escalate, and how to tell the difference in the moment.
Psychological Safety as a System Condition
Speaking up costs something, and the design sets the price: who reviews the work, how errors get handled, what happened to the last person who raised a flag. This session covers which of those a leadership team can change directly, and why culture work alone rarely reaches them.
The Reassurance Habit That Costs You Trust
Reassurance you can’t back up reads as spin the moment conditions catch up, and trust rebuilds slower than it breaks. This session covers what credible leadership sounds like when the answer is genuinely unknown, and what people need from you in the gap.
Monica’s session on stress and difficult conversations at work has become a fixture in our programming. Her command of the material and ability to engage the room is why we’ve brought her back year after year.
J.G., Vice President, Other Voices, Greensboro Chamber of Commerce
Ready to Explore a Session?
Tell me about your event, your audience, and what you want them to leave with. I’ll share honest thoughts on format and fit.