A practitioner-scholar helping leaders turn connection into transformation.
I have spent my life chasing a single question: what actually makes a great leader, and can it be taught? The answer became a body of research, a coaching methodology, and a calling.
The teacher who saw something first.
Every leader can point to the person who saw them before they saw themselves. For me, it was a high school music teacher everyone called Mr. R.
On an ordinary afternoon, headphones on, riding the school bus home, I was told I had been chosen to lead our show choir. It was a small moment with a long shadow. Someone had seen something in me, named it, and handed me the responsibility to live up to it.
Mr. R's lessons stuck: dream big, stay loyal, work hard, lead with precision. They settled into the values I still lead by, and they planted a conviction I have never let go of: the right kind of belief, offered at the right moment, can change the entire arc of a person's life.
Five values, in order.
Nearly three decades building teams.
I built my career in the life sciences, leading sales, marketing, medical, and operational teams across the pharmaceutical industry and pharmaceutical litigation. I learned, hands on, what it takes to create, build, and nurture teams that perform.
But somewhere in a hard season of leadership, I hit the limit of instinct and experience. The usual playbooks were not producing the kind of trust and growth I believed in. There had to be a better way to lead and coach. Most people would have filed that frustration away. I went looking for the answer.
So he went and got the science.
Drawn by a love of learning and a willingness to bet on myself, I enrolled in a PhD program in Management at Case Western Reserve University. The goal was not the title. It was a more sustainable system for coaching, one that could build deeper, more meaningful relationships between leaders and their teams.
Over four years I deconstructed hundreds of studies, completed more than twenty graduate courses, leaned on my background in neuroscience, and ran four original research studies on coaching, engagement, and performance inside the leader and team-member relationship.
Co-created with Braintrust founder Jeff Bloomfield, NeuroCoaching turned a career's worth of intuition into something teachable, repeatable, and grounded in evidence. The dream I started chasing in a hard season became a framework now used by leaders around the world.
Three chairs, one mission.
I help people communicate with more purpose, power, and impact, on the stage, in the classroom, and on the page.
The Practitioner
As Chief Coaching Officer of Braintrust, I lead the work of turning neuroscience into a practical communication methodology that drives change and lifts performance for clients worldwide.
The Professor
At the Farmer School of Business, I teach change management and leadership coaching across undergraduate, MBA, and executive programs, and serve as Assistant Director of the Isaac & Oxley Center for Business Leadership.
The Author
Author of NeuroCoaching and NeuroSelling 2.0, I am preparing to release my next book, The Dream Leader, on what it takes to lead in a way people never forget.
Still singing after all these years.
The work I am proudest of has always been the quiet kind: encouraging people, and helping them find and chase their own purpose. That has come to matter more to me than any title or org chart.
Home is the Cincinnati area, with my wife Amy and our three children, Abby, Drew, and Kayla. I am an avid runner and unapologetic Peloton junkie, a lifelong musician, and a devoted theater fan. And all these years after that bus ride with Mr. R, yes, I am still singing.
It has all been about one dream.
A teacher once dreamed bigger for me than I dared to dream for myself. Decades later, that idea finally has a name and a book. The Dream Leader is my case for the kind of leadership that sees something in people and gives them the courage to chase it.
Explore The Dream Leader →Bring me to your team, stage, or classroom.
Keynotes, leadership programs, and coaching grounded in the science of how great leaders connect.