Jenni Catron

I lead a company called the Foresight Group, and we do executive leadership coaching and organizational culture consulting. I've been running my own company for 10 years this year, but I've been doing leadership and culture work for about 25 years in total. My first decade of work, I was in the music business as an artist and brand manager. I did marketing and sales for artists working in the music business, but what I discovered is I really loved working with the people and the teams. So I thought I was doing music business because I loved that work, and what I discovered was I actually really loved the leadership and team-building dynamics. From there, I went into the nonprofit space and was an executive director for almost another 9 years. That passion for developing leaders, developing great teams was the thread that ran through that work, and so that's what ultimately led me to starting my own company to focus exclusively on that. My main area of expertise now is helping leaders build great organizational cultures, building environments that create engagement, that help attract and retain talent, just building teams where people are thriving and the organization is better equipped to accomplish their mission. A typical day for me varies - I'm either traveling to speak or to be with a client, or I'm in the office doing coaching calls with clients or meetings with my own team. I'm a speaker and a USA Today best-selling author, so I'm usually writing content, whether it's for long form or for socials as well. The most defining moment that inspired me to get into this field was when I went through a corporate merger in my late 20s. I went from loving my job, loving my work, loving my team, and thriving, to overnight my experience went from amazing to awful. It was the first memorable moment that the environment leaders create shapes people's experience. I was a very engaged, overachiever, high-contributing employee, and then when we went through the merger, I was really disengaged, doing the bare minimum, quiet quitting as we now call it. I realized it was the wake-up call for me of like, what is happening to me? This is not who I am, this is not how I behave, this is not how I show up. I realized that the environment in the organization, the culture of the organization, was not engaging me the same way that the previous one had. It made me really curious about what makes cultures different or better, or why do some employees thrive and some don't, and so that just made me super curious and wanted to figure out how to help leaders create environments where team members thrive.