Michelle Smeby
International bestselling author, speaker, trainer, consultant
Transform Change from a Disruption to Your Greatest Competitive Advantage
With over 25 years of experience leading business and technology transformations across more than 70 countries on 6 continents, Michelle Smeby is a powerful voice in change management, leadership, and transformation. As an international author, trainer, public speaker, and consultant, she is known for her ability to overcome resistance, align people, and deliver meaningful, lasting results.
Michelle has worked across highly regulated industries including banking, health insurance, and finance, as well as global brands in retail and manufacturing. Her expertise lies in streamlining operations, creating sustainable organizational practices, and helping leaders navigate complexity with clarity and confidence.
As the founder of wHolistic Change, Michelle is on a mission to teach others how to lead successful change. She equips leaders and teams with the skills to influence, adapt, and create real impact, ensuring change is not just implemented, but sustained.
Through her global work and speaking, Michelle empowers individuals to embrace change as an opportunity, not a challenge, building cultures that are agile, resilient, and future-focused
What is a Tenacious Leader?
A #TenaciousLeader is a persistent and determined professional who drives teams through adversity, change, and burnout.
This mindset is highlighted in the bestselling book "The Tenacious Leader: Your Map to Overcome Change Fatigue"
The Tenacious Leader: Streamlining Operations to Make Change Happen
People don’t change overnight. Neither do organizations. People adapt to change at different rates and with varying degrees of ease or comfort.
As a leader, understanding the change curve and being able to coach our people (and ourselves) through it is critical to successfully deliver today’s complex business and technology projects.
Regardless of how well we design our approaches, there will be resistance to change. How we handle this resistance can make the difference in whether we achieve our objectives or not.
What will attendees gain from this session?
- Understand how people react to change (the change curve)
- Understand the root causes of resistance to change
- Gain tactics how to lead people through change to achieve the goal
Win-Win-Win: How Leaders Break Down Silos to Build Change-Ready Cultures
Too often, change efforts fail not because the strategy is wrong, but because the culture around the work rewards competition, protects silos, and makes collaboration harder than it should be.
Explore what it takes to move from win-lose dynamics to a win-win-win culture, one where leaders, change practitioners, and cross-functional partners work together more effectively to support change. Drawing on decades of transformation leadership and executive coaching experience, Michelle will share how leadership behavior and team culture shape whether people speak up, bring their best ideas, and work across boundaries to achieve lasting change.
What will attendees gain from this session?
- Learn how win-lose dynamics show up inside organizations and quietly undermine collaboration, trust, and change efforts
- Understand how leadership behavior and team norms influence whether people speak up, align, and work through change together
- Gain practical ways for creating a more collaborative environment where people and teams can succeed together
You Are a Superhero. Let's Discover Your Superpower so You Can Use it for Greatness
What if the key to unlocking your team's full potential already exists within them? We all have a superpower—an innate talent that others naturally rely on. When individuals discover and leverage these unique strengths, workplace relationships transform. This inspiring presentation explores how recognizing and valuing diverse superpowers motivates people to bring their authentic selves to work, boosting morale and driving collective success.
What will attendees gain from this session?
- How to discover your superpower
- What to do if your manager doesn't value or tries to suppress your unique gift
- How to unleash your superpower to inspire the people around you
- How to start seeing superpowers around you, to build the best teams
Leading a Multigenerational Workforce: Motivating and Engaging Every Generation
Too often, AI and digital transformations fail—not because of faulty technology, but because of human friction. The ultimate hurdle isn’t data rationalization; it is aligning four distinct generations who speak entirely different workplace languages.
Each age group brings unique motivations, tech learning curves, and communication barriers to the table. When leaders design changes with only one generation in mind, misunderstanding breeds resistance.
Drawing on decades of transformation leadership and executive coaching experience, Michelle reveals how leadership behavior can bridge this generational divide.
Attendees will learn how to cultivate psychological safety, inspire cross-generational collaboration, and ensure that every employee brings their best ideas forward to achieve lasting, tech-driven change.
“Your storytelling, practical examples, and willingness to be vulnerable created a genuine connection with everyone in the room. It was engaging, inspiring, and one of the most impactful sessions we’ve offered this year.”
“Thank you for sharing your expertise, your authenticity, and for sparking new ideas that our members can immediately put into practice. Your message challenged us to think differently and gave us practical ways to lead with greater intention.”
Book excerpt
Employees look to you for setting the vision, creating the organizational culture, building opportunities for growth and development, and supporting them through the change curve. To attract and retain the best talent, you must know how to unlock your people’s superpowers. You need to understand your organization’s culture and its impact on whether people speak up or silently keep their great ideas to themselves. You also need to understand how to lead people from different generations with different experiences and motivations to achieve the changes you want.
I know some of these techniques will make you uncomfortable, because it’s scary to step out of our comfort zone and try new things. The reward of achieving your future state vision along with better employee engagement will make the risk worthwhile. You owe it to your team to read this book because nobody else can make change happen but you.
Change is hard. Convincing others to change is even harder. You can do this! Prepare to test your perseverance, resilience, and willpower to continue through being vulnerable while you master these new skills. As we go, you will become adept at handling the ever present resistance to change.
Welcome to the journey of becoming a tenacious leader!
