The Questions People Ask Me When No One Else Is Listening.

Anyone who works for someone else and wants more say in what happens to them next. That is the Standard track, and it is built for every professional, at any level, in any industry.

The ENRICH track is for professionals whose Ethnicity, Nationality, Race, Identity, Culture or Heritage puts them outside the group the organization was built around. Same skills, plus the variables nobody else will name.

Most of the questions on this page did not come to me in a workshop. They came afterwards, in an email, or from the person who stayed on the Zoom call after everyone else had dropped off, because the question was not one they could ask in front of the group. If yours is not here, send it to me.

That depends on how close the problem is.

It is happening this week. A meeting tomorrow, an email you have to answer tonight: open the AI Companion built for that moment.

It keeps happening and you cannot say why. Take a Behavioral Assessment Profile first. You can't fix what you don't know.

You want the whole system. Start with the books.

You want a person in your corner on one specific problem. Book a session.

Whichever you pick, pick one problem. People who try to fix their entire career in one go usually end up fixing nothing.

I am an Organizational Effectiveness Consultant, executive and leadership coach, corporate trainer and author, and the Principal of DKA Toolkit Inc. in Brooklyn, New York. For more than seventeen years I was lead Corporate Trainer for Baruch College's Corporate and Executive Training Division, and I have served as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Baruch College (CUNY), teaching in the MBA immersion program run with ISG Business School and the International School of Management in France.

I hold an MBA in Management with a concentration in Organizational Behavior from Pace University, and in 2006 I received Baruch's first Outstanding Instructor Award. I have trained executives and senior managers from AIG, Bellevue Hospital, National Grid, the Port Authority of NY/NJ, the Agricultural Bank of China and a long list of New York City agencies.

I have also stood at the podium of my own classroom while someone walked in and asked which one of us was the professor. The credentials tell you I know the theory. That moment is why I stopped trusting the theory on its own.

No, and if you only read one answer on this page, make it this one.

ENRICH stands for Ethnicity, Nationality, Race, Identity, Culture and Heritage, and identity is wide. It is your class background, the school you did or did not go to, your accent, your faith, your sexual orientation, your pronouns, the way you dress, what you believe. Race is one door into it. It is not the whole house.

My position is simple. None of those things can be separated from your ability to lead people, communicate, work on a team, get promoted, or get demoted. Every leadership model I teach works: Hersey and Blanchard's Situational Leadership, Graen's leader-member exchange, emotional intelligence as Daniel Goleman popularized it. Every one of them also quietly assumes everybody started in the same place. ENRICH is what you hold over the top of them so they actually hold up.

So when someone tells me a framework did not work for them, I do not doubt the framework. I ask whose ENRICH nobody accounted for.

I understand why it can look that way, especially if the workplace has mostly worked for you. Most of us assume other people are wired the way we are: explain it once, train them, and they should get it.

Hold on to that assumption and here is the consequence. You will keep losing people and not understand why. Leadership is influence, getting someone to do what you need because they want to. You cannot make someone want anything if you do not know what matters to them, and what matters to them was shaped long before they got to your team.

And look at what the material actually asks people to do. Victims wait. Every chapter, every companion, every session I run ends with a move the person makes themselves. You do not have to adopt my framework. It is still in your interest to understand it.

Yes, two ways.

First, there is a Standard edition of every companion, assessment and course, and How Do I Get My Boss To...? was written for every professional who has ever needed something from a boss who was not obliged to give it.

Second, if you manage people, the ENRICH material describes the experience of people on your own team, the part of the picture you are least likely to see from where you sit. The leaders who tell me they do not need it are often the ones whose best people are already interviewing elsewhere.

A professional whose Ethnicity, Nationality, Race, Identity, Culture or Heritage marks them as an outsider in an institution that was not built with them in mind.

I chose the word on purpose. To enrich is to add to. You will not find "marginalized" or "underrepresented" in my books, because those words describe what you lack, and the point is what you bring. Being outside also means you notice what insiders stopped seeing years ago. That is the asset. The work is making sure it gets counted.

The extra, unpaid labor an ENRICH Outsider does to get what others receive automatically. The meeting rehearsed in the car on the way in. The email rewritten four times so the tone cannot be misread. The proof you keep in your back pocket in case your competence gets questioned. The composure you are never allowed to put down.

None of it shows up on a performance review, which is exactly why nobody accounts for it. Write it down for a month. Once you can see every charge, you get to decide which ones you are going to stop paying.

The requirement to demonstrate your competence over and over, when a peer demonstrates it once and is believed from then on. Yesterday's win does not travel with you. Every new room, every new boss, every new project starts your credibility back near zero.

The practical answer is to stop relying on anyone's memory, including your own. Short written summaries of what you delivered and what it changed, sent at the time, to more than one person. A record travels when a reputation will not. Keys 11 and 16 in Volume 2 go deep on this.

Two sides of the same bind.

The Agentic Penalty is the backlash for displaying the very behaviors that get other people promoted: directness, ambition, authority. The same sentence reads as "decisive" from one person and "difficult" from another.

The Proactivity Penalty is what happens to initiative. Somebody else takes the lead and it is called leadership. You take the lead and it is called overstepping.

The trap is that the safest-looking response is to shrink, and shrinking removes you from exactly the behaviors leadership gets promoted for. You do not stop taking initiative. You change how it is packaged, which is what the Partnership Preframe further down this page is for.

The difference in how fast trust builds, and how fast it collapses, depending on who you are. For ENRICH Outsiders it accumulates slowly, one small deposit at a time, and it can drain in a single bad week that a colleague would be forgiven for.

That changes how you handle mistakes. You cannot afford to let one sit. Name it early, fix it visibly, and put the fix in writing before someone else tells the story for you. Key 16 in Volume 2 is built around this.

Hostility from people at your own level. Credit taken in a meeting you were not invited to. Information that somehow never reaches you. A peer who smiles at you and briefs against you.

Everybody warns you about the boss. Far fewer people warn you about the colleague at the next desk who sees your success as a threat to theirs. Document the pattern, not the feeling: dates, what happened, who else was there. And build relationships across other teams, so one peer is never the only route your reputation travels through.

The belief that if you just work hard enough and deliver well enough, for long enough, the system will eventually have no choice but to recognize you.

It feels like integrity. It is mostly a waiting strategy. Excellent work that nobody with power can see is still invisible work. You still have to do it. You also have to make sure the right people know you did it, which is the whole subject of Key 11.

Managers holding back direct, developmental feedback from ENRICH Outsiders because they are uncomfortable, afraid of looking biased, or unsure how it will land across a cultural line. What you get instead is vague praise.

Vague praise feels safe. It is not. It is the reason a colleague's development plan has three specific things to work on and yours says "keep doing what you're doing," right up until someone else gets the promotion. How to get past it is answered further down, under getting honest feedback.

Most of them come from my books, Leading Up While Standing Out, Volumes 1 and 2, and they stand on the work of scholars who studied what so many of us live: Claude Steele on stereotype threat, Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality, Derald Wing Sue on microaggressions, Patricia Hill Collins, and others. Where an idea belongs to someone else, they get the credit.

I am not asking you to memorize any of them. Naming a thing gives you some power over it. The full list, with where each idea comes from, is in the ENRICH Outsider Lexicon.

Start with what it did to you, not with what they meant. If it landed on you as a microaggression, then that is what you are dealing with. Their intent matters far less than the impact, and you are not obliged to protect it.

That does not mean you have to build a court case. It means you start paying attention. Is this the first time, or the third time this quarter? One person, or the whole room? Does the same comment get made to anyone else? Time tells you a great deal if you are watching.

And when you do address it, talk about how the comment landed on you, not about what kind of person they are. You will be heard. Practice the conversation first with The Strategist or its ENRICH Edition.

Usually not. Freezing is common, and the moment passing does not close the door. Going back a day later, calm and prepared, often goes better than reacting in the heat of it.

The rule is not to point. Open with "you did" or "you said" and you have turned an assertive conversation into an aggressive one, and now you are the problem. Try: "The comment in yesterday's meeting about my accent stayed with me, and I wanted to tell you directly how it landed." Specific, calm, face relaxed, eye contact.

What I would not do is let it go entirely. Things you swallow tend to build, and then they come out sideways at the worst possible moment, in a voice that sounds like a punishing parent. Nobody wins that one.

First, do not complain about it, not to your boss, not to your peers. That is Key 3, and it exists because complaining makes you the problem in the story.

Build what I call the Visibility Bypass instead: routes to recognition that do not depend on your boss passing your name along. Write executive summaries your boss can forward word for word, with your name already on them. Send short status updates that copy the people who need to know. Keep a written record of decisions and who made them. You are not asking for credit. You are making it very hard to remove.

Then watch what happens. If you have done all of that for months and your name still disappears every time, you are not looking at a communication problem anymore.

Before you react, one question: less qualified by whose measure? Yours, or the one the decision was actually made on? You need to know which.

So go and ask the person who decided, and ask in a way that cannot be answered with a compliment. "If I am the candidate next time, what three things will you have seen me do?" Specific, observable, written down afterwards and sent back to them.

Then look at recency and frequency. Is this the first time, or the third time in a few years? Once is information. The same outcome after you have closed every gap they named is information about the organization, not about you. At that point your next promotion may well be somewhere else.

I am not going to tell you to take it to HR, and I am not going to make that decision for you either. What I tell every client is this: it is a step with consequences you cannot take back, so you take it with your evidence in hand, not before.

Start a record today. After every incident, email yourself: the date, the time, what was said, who was there, what happened next. Your own email gives you a timestamp nobody can argue with.

Then read that record the way a stranger would. What does it actually show? Who could act on it? And what happens to you after they do? Know those answers before anyone else knows there is a question.

Most of the time, say something. It is rarely the saying that does the damage. It is how it is said.

When you are genuinely unsure, run the 4R Filter from Key 14:

Risk. What is at stake if I say this, and what is at stake if I do not?
Relevance. Does this affect the outcome, or just how I feel about it?
Relationship. Do these people trust me enough to hear it from me?
Readiness. Is this the moment, or will it land on defensive ears?

Three yeses and you speak. Fewer, and you pick a better moment, because the same truth said at four-thirty on a Friday to a tired room is just wasted breath.

With what my book calls the Partnership Preframe: you signal inclusion before you act. "I'm seeing a problem developing with the vendor timeline. I have a couple of ideas. Can I run them by you for fifteen minutes?" Then you act, and then you report back.

You are not asking permission. You are making your boss part of the decision, so your initiative serves their goals instead of reading as a challenge to their authority.

Is it fair that you have to do this when others do not? No. It is a cost, and you are entitled to weigh it. But if you package your initiative this way consistently for six months and it is still called overstepping, the problem was never the packaging.

Ask questions that cannot be answered with "you're doing great."

"If I were being considered for promotion next quarter, what three things would you need to see?" "What is one thing I do that costs me with senior leadership?" "What would you do differently if you were in my role?"

Ask the same question every month. Write down what you hear and send a two-line summary back: "Thanks. My takeaway is that I need to do X and Y before Q3." Once it is in writing, "keep doing what you're doing" stops being an acceptable answer, for both of you. Key 12 is built around this. The Insider will rehearse the conversation with you.

Sometimes it is a real gap. Sometimes it is bias wearing a nicer suit. You find out which by asking for evidence.

"Can you give me two or three things you would see me do differently in a meeting if I had it?" If they can name observable behaviors (how you open, how you handle a challenge, how briefly you make your point) you have coaching you can use. If they cannot get past "presence" and "polish," the word is doing work it should not be doing, and it often means "does not remind us of us."

Either way, measure it before you argue about it. The Executive Presence Profile gives you a baseline in both editions.

Inner circles tend to form around similarity. People trust whoever reminds them of themselves, and they do it without noticing. Chemistry that grows by itself for your peers is something you will have to build on purpose.

Start with an Ecosystem Map. List the five people your boss trusts most, how you know they are trusted, and where you already connect with each of them. Then find the shared ground that is not the obvious one. A project, a problem you can help with, an interest you actually have in common.

And build outside the team too. Credibility from other departments and from outside the company travels into rooms you are not in. That is extra work. It is also the work that decides who is in the room when your name comes up. Key 17 covers it, and so does The Right Hand.

First I want to know what happened in between. Was there any interaction, any incident, anything at all between you raising the issue and the consequence arriving? If there was, we look at it honestly.

If there was nothing, then you have your answer. You raised a problem professionally, which is all a confrontation is: "I have a problem and I am making you aware of it." What they did next was never in your control. You are in control of you, and you did the right thing. A punitive response to a professional conversation tells you how this organization handles truth.

Keep the record, but do not stop at the record. Start building your exit strategy now, quietly and deliberately, while you still hold the job. Leaving because you chose to is a very different negotiation from leaving because you had to.

I do not tell people to leave lightly. I do not know your finances, and for an ENRICH professional the next job is often harder to land than it should be.

What would make me say it is when the job starts showing up in your body and your home. Are you sleeping? Is your health changing? Is it in your marriage, in how you are with your kids? Is it standing between you and the life you say you want? That is when it stops being a career question.

Even then it is not "walk out." It is "what steps are you taking this month?" And the standing advice: look for a job while you have one, even when you are happy in it. You have the most power when you do not need the offer, and the people interviewing you can tell which candidates do.

I get it. I know what that weight feels like when you have carried it for years.

Take the moment. Be angry, be tired, feel sorry for yourself for a day. Then let's be honest: the institution is very unlikely to change on your schedule, and waiting for it to is a decision too. So the question becomes what you are going to do with the years in front of you. Stay and get strategic, or plan a move on your own terms. Either one is a real answer. Staying exhausted and hoping is not.

If your feedback is honest, specific, behavioral and based on merit, there is very little reason to be worried. So let me turn the question around. Why do you expect it? Has it happened before? Once, or more than once? If it is a pattern, we should look at the pattern. If it never has, what is the baggage in your head that is producing the fear?

Then audit yourself. Are you giving this person the same quality of feedback you give everyone else? Developmental as well as critical? Or are they getting "great job" while their colleagues get development plans?

Because withholding feedback is not kindness. It is how you stall someone's career and call it being sensitive. The Feedback Coach will help you script the conversation.

You hired me for honest feedback, so here it is: maybe, but probably not yet.

Run the business math first. Turnover goes up. You recruit, rehire, and retrain from the beginning, directing, then coaching, then supporting, before you can delegate anything. All of that comes out of your time, which you are supposed to be spending on your own job. It is nearly always cheaper to keep someone and fix them.

So: did you set this person up to succeed? Did you train them the way they learn, not the way you learn? Not everyone learns at the same pace. Be completely sure they cannot do the job before you start any process. In my experience, these conversations very often end up being about the manager.

Keep the leadership models you already use. Situational Leadership, from Hersey and Blanchard, asks you to match your style (directing, coaching, supporting, delegating) to each person's readiness. Good. Now add the question the model leaves out: what do feedback, authority and initiative mean where this person comes from? A direct instruction lands as respect in one culture and as an insult in another.

Then stop guessing and look at the evidence. Who speaks in your meetings and who gets interrupted. Who gets the stretch assignments. Who gets promoted, and who leaves after two years. Ask people directly what helps them do their best work.

The numbers will tell you what the engagement survey is too polite to. The Architect is built for exactly this.

Honestly, I am in two minds about this, and I change my mind more often than I would like to admit. So here are both readings.

Chester Pierce, the psychiatrist who coined the term in 1970, was describing the everyday racial slights aimed at Black Americans, and that framing does not extend to the dominant group. Derald Wing Sue's later, broader work describes slights aimed at people because they belong to any marginalized group, and under that reading a white colleague who is, say, an immigrant, gay or disabled can absolutely be on the receiving end.

Where I come back to every time is power. Microaggression, at its core, is about power. So whatever definition you prefer, ask who holds the power in that room when the comment is made. That answer usually tells you more than the label does.

Something. Silence from the people who saw it is part of what the microaggressed person absorbs.

But check with them before you act on their behalf. Privately: "That comment in the meeting did not sit right with me. Do you want me to say something, or would you rather handle it?" It is their experience, and they get to decide how public it becomes.

If you do speak to the person who said it, talk about the impact, not their character, and do it one-on-one. You are much more likely to change behavior than to start a fight, and changing the behavior was the point.

A coaching tool for one specific kind of moment, built on my frameworks. There are 15 topics, each in a Standard and an ENRICH edition, so 30 companions in all: microaggression, feedback, emotional intelligence, delegation, visibility, your first leadership role and more.

It answers exactly as I would. Same directness, same positions, same habit of going after the question underneath the one you asked. It is like having me available 24/7: insight into what is really going on, awareness of your own part in it, advice on what to do next, and coaching through the conversation you have been dreading.

Every reply ends with three short cards. The Read says what is really going on. The Move says what to do. The Principle says why it works. No download and no app. Just your access code and a browser. See all 30.

ChatGPT gives you something close to the average of the internet, and the average of the internet is mostly the advice that already did not work for you. "Assume positive intent." "Speak up more." "Bring your whole self."

My companions give you me. My positions, my frameworks, the way I read a situation: the 17 Keys, the HBWE framework, the ENRICH lens and, in the ENRICH editions, the research on identity, bias and power behind my books. So you get the parts the average will never say. I will not tell you to assume positive intent. I will ask whether this is the first time or the fifth, what happened in between, and what part you played in it.

Ask ChatGPT and you get an answer. Ask mine and you get my answer.

No. This is strategy. The companions are leadership strategy tools, not therapy, counseling or legal advice, and I am an organizational consultant and coach, not a therapist or an attorney.

If what you need right now is to be heard and looked after, a good therapist will serve you better than I can. If your situation is affecting your health, see a doctor or a licensed professional. If what you need is to change an outcome at work, that is my job.

Yes, it is private, and that holds no matter who paid for it.

Your conversation is used only to generate the replies in that session. Nothing you type is stored or retained after the session ends, so there is no transcript sitting anywhere for anyone to read. Not me, not your manager, not HR. You will see that stated on the screen before you begin.

That includes access your employer arranged for you, through an EAP, a coaching benefit, an ERG or a company license. Your organization pays for access. It never gets your conversations, because once you close the session they no longer exist.

Even so, describe the situation rather than typing a colleague's full name. That is a good habit with any tool, and the advice comes out exactly the same.

They cost the same, $147 each, so price is not the deciding factor.

Choose Standard when you need straight workplace strategy for the situation in front of you. Choose ENRICH when identity is part of what is going on: you are the only one, you suspect the same behavior from someone else would be read differently, or bias is in the room and nobody will say so.

If you have already caught yourself asking "would this be happening if I looked different?", you have your answer.

One companion: $147, one-time, yours for life. Buy it from the companion's own screen and your access code arrives by email. Enter it there and you are in.

Membership: all 15 Standard companions, or all 15 ENRICH companions, for $49 a month or $490 a year. All 30, both editions, for $79 a month or $790 a year. Open any companion and sign in with the email you paid with.

Organizations: annual licenses, from $1,497 a year for a single companion for up to 25 users. Full price list on the companions page. Discount codes exist for the ENRICH community, ERGs and nonprofits. Email me and ask.

Use a companion for the moment: the email you have to send tonight, the meeting tomorrow at nine, the conversation you want to rehearse three times before you have it for real.

Book coaching when the problem has been running for months, when your job is genuinely at stake, or when you need someone to push back on you in real time. A companion will tell you what I think. In a session I can also hear how you say it, and notice what you leave out.

Yes. It is AI, and it only knows what you tell it. It gives you strategy and frameworks, not guarantees, and every workplace has facts it cannot see.

Treat what it says the way you would treat advice from someone sharp who has only heard your side of the story. Test it against what you know. Which, while we are being honest, is exactly how you should treat advice from me.

Yes, and you should. Take your Behavioral Assessment Profile, then bring your key scores into the companion that matches the problem and ask what they mean for the situation you are in right now. The report tells you where you stand. The companion helps you decide what to do about it this week.

A self-assessment that measures one area of how you operate at work: leadership, emotional intelligence, communication, conflict, influence, resilience, career readiness and more. There are 38 of them, in Standard and ENRICH editions.

Each takes roughly 15 to 55 minutes, and your report is ready the moment you finish: an overall score, a score and written analysis for every scale, your strengths and development areas, targeted advice tied to your lowest scores, and a print-ready PDF. They cost between $47 and $147, and the ENRICH edition is the same price as the Standard. Browse them all.

Because otherwise we are both guessing. You cannot develop what you have not measured, and most people's picture of themselves at work is built from feedback that may have been filtered through someone else's bias.

Every coaching option includes one, chosen in our first conversation to fit your goal. The report does not decide anything. It gives us something more reliable to work from than your memory of your last review.

Same assessment, different reading. The ENRICH edition interprets your results through the ENRICH Tax, the Prove-It-Again bias, the Agentic Penalty and the Trust Velocity Differential, and it separates two things a standard report cannot tell apart: a skill you have not developed yet, and a structure that would produce the same score in anyone.

A low self-advocacy score could mean you have not built the skill. It could also be an accurate reading of what advocating has cost you where you work. Those need completely different fixes, and only one of them is about you.

Not on its own, and I would be suspicious of anyone who told you it could. No questionnaire measures your workplace. It measures you.

What the ENRICH edition does is refuse to read your score as if the environment were neutral. It tells you what the number probably means given the dynamics you are working inside. That is more honest than a standard report, and more useful. The rest is what coaching and the companions are for.

Only if you want them to. You can have a copy of your report sent to your coach automatically when you finish, so your next session starts where the data ends. The PDF is yours to keep either way: one purchase, permanent access.

Start with How Do I Get My Boss To...?, the handbook. It lays out the 17 Keys for every professional and is the foundation the rest builds on.

Then Leading Up While Standing Out, Volume 1 (Keys 1 to 9) and Volume 2 (Keys 10 to 17). They take the same keys and add what mainstream leadership books leave out: the research on bias, real coaching vignettes, strategies by industry, and in every chapter, a framework for deciding when leaving is the strategy.

All three are on Amazon. See the books. If you want to sample first, subscribe to The Outsider's Toolkit and the Introduction arrives free.

Seventeen ways to build the credibility to influence your boss:

1. Lead and manage yourself exceptionally well. 2. Accept the reality: your boss is your boss. 3. Never complain about your boss. 4. Make your boss look good. 5. Think and act like the owner. 6. Take initiative and make your boss's job easier. 7. Always keep your boss in the loop. 8. Don't feel and act entitled. 9. Offer solutions, not just problems. 10. Be prepared and organized. 11. Make your accomplishments visible. 12. Seek honest feedback from your boss. 13. Be willing to do what's necessary. 14. Know when to speak up and when to stay silent. 15. Be proactive. 16. Prove that you're trustworthy. 17. Get into your boss's inner circle.

They look like they are about your boss. They are really about influence. Learn to lead up and you have learned to lead down.

The books change how you think. The courses change what you do on Monday morning.

There are 14 self-paced online courses, $525 each with permanent access, covering leadership, emotional intelligence, inclusion and communication. Each one works through real scenarios, self-reflection, assessments and an action plan. If you have time for only one, read first, then take the course on the key you keep getting wrong.

Not at all. Every course is built for any professional who wants to get better at the work. ENRICH sections are being added course by course, so the identity layer sits alongside the core skills. You can ask to be notified as each one goes live.

Plenty. The Outsider's Toolkit on Substack is free: strategies, scenarios and straight talk for ENRICH professionals, and the Introduction to Leading Up While Standing Out arrives as soon as you subscribe. There are short videos on YouTube too. Start there if you are not sure yet. You will know quickly whether the way I think is useful to you.

One problem, and you need to move this week: a Single Session, $600 for 90 minutes.

A problem one session will not settle: the 4-Session Package, $2,000. The first session is 90 minutes, the next three are 60, all within four weeks.

You have been to a training or read a book and want to apply it to your own situation: a "What's Next?" Session, $600 for 90 minutes.

A team, cohort or group of colleagues facing the same challenge: Group Coaching, $250 a person, two hours, five to ten people.

Every option includes a Behavioral Assessment Profile, and every session is on Zoom, so I work with clients worldwide. Details and booking.

Four steps. We agree what we are changing and how we will know it changed. You complete an assessment matched to that goal. We go through the results against what is actually happening at work. And we finish with a development plan you can act on.

Expect more questions than you planned for, mostly the one underneath the one you came in with. My goal is to turn a 45-minute conversation into ten useful minutes, so we get to the real problem fast and spend the rest of the time on what you are going to do about it.

Not unless you are. A coach is only worth paying if they have no reason to flatter you.

Sometimes the honest answer is that the organization is the problem, and I will say so plainly. Sometimes it is that you are part of what is going wrong. If the same conflict has followed you through three jobs, the common thread is you. Both answers are useful. Only one of them is comfortable.

Yes. People who arrive certain they already know everything and want me to confirm it. Close-minded and condescending is the only disqualifier.

Your title, your background and your identity are never the issue. A senior leader from the dominant group who genuinely wants to learn is someone I will happily work with. Openness is the price of entry. Everything else we can work on.

I do. I design and deliver workshops in leadership, emotional intelligence, inclusion and team effectiveness, customized to your organization and available as half-day, full-day or multi-session programs. Topics include Influence Without Authority, Managing Workplace Conflict, Manager to Coach, Planning and Managing Organizational Change, and Effective Office Politics. Most of my training now runs live on Zoom, and in-person work is something we can discuss.

Organizations also license the full course library and the AI Companions for leadership cohorts, ERGs and whole teams. Past clients include AIG, Bellevue Hospital, National Grid, the Port Authority of NY/NJ, DLA Piper and several New York City agencies. See corporate training.

Often. ERG sessions usually work through the 17 Keys with the ENRICH lens, and many groups pair a live session with companion licenses so members have the strategy on hand afterwards. Discount codes exist for ERGs.

I will also usually raise something with ERG leaders that the organization may not: who is doing the company's diversity work for free, on top of their actual job, and what it is costing their careers. That is a conversation worth having early.

Call it whatever your organization can hear. There is nothing wrong with the term DEI, and the idea that it hands people jobs they did not earn is simply inaccurate. But the label has become a fight in a lot of workplaces, and I would rather your people walk into the room than argue about its name.

What does not change is the content. People learn how influence, trust, feedback and identity actually operate where they work, and leave with something they can do differently the next morning. Done properly, everyone in the building comes out ahead.

Safe to be honest, yes. Safe from discomfort, no, and I would be wasting your budget if I promised that.

A lot of what gets called psychological safety is really politeness: nobody says anything that might offend anyone, so nobody says anything true. In my sessions people are safe to be direct, safe to say the clumsy thing, and safe to be told it was clumsy, because you cannot fix what nobody tells you about. What is said in the session stays in the session. That is what makes the honesty possible.

Email Duane@DKAToolkit.com or call 1-212-920-6393. Tell me in a few sentences what is going on. I will tell you which option fits, including when the honest answer is a $147 companion and not a $2,000 package.