My mother was my first experience with a leader.
Since then, I have had many other opportunities to work with, observe, experience and be a leader myself. I have seen strong leadership, absent leadership, and ineffective leadership. I have helped leaders with their struggle to be successful and experienced my own challenges and epiphanies as a leader.
I have always had a fascination with why some people realize their potential, while others give up on it. Given many experiences with 'incompetence', I wondered if there was some secret to performance that wasn't yet understood. Was it our nature, or how we were nurtured that determined our success?
It has been that curiousity that has taken me on a path from a business degree at Ivey School of Business (University of Western Ontario), to designing performance-based systems, to working with leaders and entreprenuers who are frustrated by an inability to achieve the performance they can imagine.
As an entreprenuer, I had first had experience with working through the barriers to performance within my own organization (my mother's influence at work here!) and my own patterns of behaving that both supported my success and got in the way of my business.
In 1998, a few years after our reunion, I partnered with Dr. Anne Dranitsaris, my biological mother and a leading expert in behavioural change, to bring the psychological perspective into my work and to further explore personality dimensions and psychodynamics in the context of business and performance. The company, Caliber Leadership Systems, flourished and became the largest independent leadership & human resources consulting firm in Vancouver. The growth of the company throughout this time resulted in recognition from Profit 100 and Business in Vancouver over consecutive years.
Caliber provided both of us with the opportunity to develop and apply our models and theories about personality style, relationship positions and the role of our 'mothers' (conditioning) on our businesses, careers and relationships. It also provided great insight into incompetence and the power it has in our personal and professional arena.
Throughout my 20 years in consulting practice, I have worked with the executive and senior leadership teams as well as entrepreneurs in over 100 organizations representing a broad mix of industry, size and stage of evolution. These leaders varied in their style, level of competence, fears, impact and degree of success achieved. Their teams and organizational cutlures varied in their dyanimcs. I have guided clients to shift out of dysfunction, passivity, aggression, family dynamics and more on the way to achieving higher levels of performance and realizing potential at the personal, team, leader and organizational level.
I have literally dozens of stories to tell. I have experiences to share that offer unique insight. I entertain. I educate. Most of all, I help each person to step closer to realizing their own potential.
I have my own brand of humour that audiences love. As a single working mother of 2, a female entreprenuer and someone who has 2 mothers, including one I work with closely, (oh, the stories!), I bring a unique perspective to each speaking engagement and a thorough commitment to leaving my audience with the tools to transform their lives.
