About Stop Meeting Like This
Stop Meeting Like This is a professional services firm that believes work can be both joyful and productive. We work side-by-side with optimistic, forward-thinking leaders to unlock the capacity of their organizations through better collaboration. Whether we’re developing the skills of individuals, designing new operating models, enhancing the health and effectiveness of teams, or coaching leaders, we help companies catalyze new ways of working that produce better business outcomes and enhance the human experience of work. We are based in Chicago but serve clients all over the globe.
Shani Harmon, Founder and CEO
Shani Harmon is the Founder and CEO of Stop Meeting Like This. As CEO, Shani’s job is to inspire corporate leaders to reimagine how work gets done and then partner with them to realize that aspiration. For over 20 years, Shani has consulted with Fortune 500 companies across the globe, helping them design and implement effective operating models, decision-making processes, and collaboration practices. She’s an expert at unraveling the complex problems that hold leaders and their teams back from achieving joyful productivity.
Shani has an MBA and Master’s of Education from Stanford University and a BA in English from Harvard University. She hails from the hills of West Virginia but now calls Chicago home.
Speakers - Program tracks
This fall, Stop Meeting Like This is partnering with like-minded organizations to hold The Work Summit, a two-day event designed to help senior-level leaders and HR professionals improve collaboration, elevate dialogue, build resiliency, lead with kindness, and aim for balance. Learn more about SMLT and the experts who are joining us below.
EJ Burton & Associates supports executive leaders in clarifying their beliefs and values about expected employee behavior. As experts on workplace culture, they facilitate learning that transforms individuals and organizations in their relationship with one another. The result is improved employee engagement scores, less “quiet quitting” and improved brand attraction to potential employees.
Ellen Burton, Founder
Ellen is an executive coach, an international business and leadership lecturer, and a subject matter expert on workplace culture. I am also the author of the Amazon Best Seller, The Civility Project: How to build a culture of reverence to improve wellness, productivity, and profit. In her 27 years as an executive coach and consultant, Ellen has supported C-suite executives, executive directors, and business owners in establishing and exceeding their goals.
Ellen is an avid golfer and a huge fan of the Michigan Wolverines! But she still happily works with Buckeyes.
The Center for Trauma and Leadership supports organizations that face trauma as a routine part of the workday. Our resources and learning programs offer practical, easy-to-use tools that help leaders and teams move forward while navigating trauma. We partner with leaders and teams across sectors, including first-responders, government agencies, health and social services, journalists, and nonprofits.
Carolyn Murphy, Co-Founder
Carolyn is an expert in helping individuals discover how to lead authentically and making collaboration work for even the most complex teams. Throughout her decades of coaching, facilitating, leading teams, teaching, and working as a psychotherapist, Carolyn has embraced the “paradoxical theory of change” — change occurs when an individual becomes what they are, not when they try to become what they are not. Carolyn has 25 years experience working in corporate roles, including as Director of Operations at Cisco Systems. She has coached and consulted with all levels of leaders in over 30 client systems across tech, finance, pharma, biotech, government, and nonprofit organizations. She is a master at creating engaging, professional, and highly applicable learning programs. Carolyn holds a clinical master’s degree in Counseling Psychology and is certified by the International Coaching Federation.
She splits her time between Northern California and Western Massachusetts and loves hiking with her husband and their dog, Roxy.
Gretchen Schmelzer, PhD; Co-Founder
Gretchen is a licensed psychologist, executive coach, and consultant who has worked for 25 years with the complex issues of trauma, integration, and behavior change across every level of system from individuals, to groups, to large systems and countries. She is the author of Journey Through Trauma, published by Penguin Random House. Her expertise in long-term trauma was used to inform the design and delivery of a four-year, large-scale intervention for the UN in Cambodia working with survivors of the Khmer Rouge in a leadership initiative to strengthen the country’s response to HIV/AIDS. She is currently a faculty member in the Medical Education Masters Program at UPENN GSE, and faculty in the Executive Education Program at the Brookings Institute. She was recently featured on CNN with Anderson Cooper and Working from Home with Richard Quest.
Gretchen recently moved to Western Massachusetts from Philadelphia where she is surrounded by friends and books.
How Does She Manage is a women-led community offering tools, support, and strategies for achieving career success and balance. Led by two former corporate leaders turned executive coaches -and proud moms. HDSM and her team provide self-paced classes, a resource library, and a Facebook community designed to help ambitious moms manage time, set boundaries that actually work, build confidence, and connect with like-minded women
Val Jennings, Founder
Val Jennings is a certified executive coach. Over the past decade, she's helped over 1,000 professionals, many of them working moms, achieve balance in both their careers and family lives. As a mom of three, stepmom of two, grandmother to two, a former corporate leader, and now a CEO, she knows firsthand the challenges of managing it all without burning out. Val has over twenty years of leadership and management roles in supply-chain operations, customer service, sales, engineering, and human resources. She's a native of the San Francisco Bay Area and calls Sonoma County home.
Cindy Peterson, Executive Coach
Cindy is an executive coach and consultant with over 20 years of experience working in and with leaders and organizations from Fortune 500 companies to startups. She's navigated the pressure of working in the C-suite at a startup while pregnant, being a corporate leader with two small kids, and building her own business all while being a mom.
Currently, Cindy coaches and trains leaders and executives with a focus on women in leadership, all while being a mom to two active teenage girls. Cindy lives in Montana, where she loves practicing yoga, gardening, and exploring the outdoors with her family.