She didn’t study broken workplaces. She survived one.
How a Fortune 500 layoff became the mission that’s reshaped culture for half a million leaders and counting.
For 22 years, Jill Christensen did everything corporate America asked of her. She climbed. She delivered. She rose to lead Global Internal Communications inside Fortune 500 companies close enough to the top to see how decisions were really made, and close enough to the floor to hear how employees really felt.
Then, in 2009, the same system she had given two decades to handed her a layoff.
How do you lay off a serial high performer? I was blindsided. In hindsight, it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Jill Christensen
The shock didn’t last. The clarity did. Jill had spent years watching organizations treat people like numbers and now she had become one. So she named the thing few leaders want to say out loud: most workplaces aren’t broken by accident. They’re broken by neglect. Leaders inherit a culture, are never trained how to lead, manage around it, and hope for the best.
She refused to hope. She built a company instead.
Since 2009, Jill has pursued one stubborn goal: that no one should dread going to work.. She turned her own worst day into a methodology, and that methodology onto more than 375 stages worldwide.
I funneled my shock into a mission: to help fix every broken culture I could reach.
Jill Christensen
Employees don’t quit jobs. They quit management experiences.
Seventy-seven percent of employees do the bare minimum, and Jill is blunt about why. Millions of managers were handed a title and a team, but never taught what people actually need to do their best work. That isn’t a people problem. It’s a leadership one… and it’s fixable.
Her belief is simple: productivity isn’t a mood, it’s a number. When leaders get deliberate about culture, people choose to give 110%, and the results show up in retention, performance, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth.
You can’t leave your culture to chance. Well, you can. But it’a not going to be pretty.
Jill Christensen
The credentials are real, but they aren’t the point. The point is what they add up to: a methodology that works in any industry, on any stage.
- Top 200 Global Thought Leader to Watch
- msn.com Top 10 Self-Made Women in 2026
- Top 101 Employee Engagement Influencer
- Best-selling author of “If Not You, Who?”
- Award-winning blog ranked alongside Apple and Microsoft
- Six Sigma Green Belt
- Former Fortune 500 executive
Real — the same word her audiences and her friends use.
A dual U.S./U.K. citizen, Jill grew up on the move: a new state every few years, studied in New York, and now calls Arizona home. That constant relocation taught her early what she now teaches for a living: people don’t need perfect conditions to thrive. They need to feel seen.
Off the clock, you’ll find her at an NFL football game, a rock concert, or a pickleball court and across a Mahjong table she takes more seriously than she will admit. Warm, direct, a little edgy. Exactly who she is on stage.
Ready to build a workplace people can’t imagine leaving?
Let’s make your next event the one they talk about all year.