Learning for Today’s Workforce
Meet Our Facilitators
Thresette Briggs
An author and award-winning consultant, Thresette is the Founder and Chief Performance Officer of Performance 3 (P3), a certified M/WBE/WOSB and national leadership development firm that builds high performing leaders through keynotes, training, facilitation, consulting, coaching, and assessment services. Headquartered in Indiana, for over 12 years P3 has served a diverse client base in over 10 industries, including small business and global companies with up to 10,000 employees and over $20 billion in revenue.
Thresette holds multiple honors and certifications including the 2022 Great Lakes Women’s Business Council Indiana WBE Role Model/Mentor of the Year, Keynote Speaker and Mentor for University of Notre Dame’s McKenna Center South Bend Entrepreneurship and Adversity Program (SBEAP), Starkey Entrepreneurial Woman Finalist, and Great Lakes Award of Distinction. She’s been featured on billboards, in commercials, and on radio, and is an author in the book, Sacred Promise: An Anthology.
Thresette received her BBA from Wichita State University, her MBA from Indiana Wesleyan University, and is a graduate of Leadership Indianapolis. She serves in leadership roles including the National Board of the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO), and owns two services for accelerating high performance that are registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Lesley MacKellar
With more than 25 years of business experience on three continents, Lesley works with individual leaders and organizations to address their critical business challenges and improve overall results. To support these efforts, Lesley works with leaders to identify the changes they need to make personally or with their teams to ensure organizational change is sustainable.
These may include challenges with personal effectiveness such as managing a career transition,developing executive presence, dealing with work life balance, or resolving conflicts. Or these may include challenges with organizational effectiveness such as developing strategy, leading change,engaging employees, and creating high performing teams.
Lesley knows first-hand that what makes someone a valuable individual contributor is not the same skillset needed to lead a team or a division. In addition, the skills needed to thrive in upper management are often quite different from those needed in first level leader positions. Lesley’s expertise perfectly positions her to assist leaders with the critical transitions from leading others to leading leaders and onto the highest levels of organizational leadership.
Lesley was born in Zimbabwe and lived in Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom before settling in the United States more than 30 years ago. For the past 5 years she has been leading her own executive coaching and leadership development practice. She has worked with over 300 executives in a variety of industries and frequently focused on developing emotional intelligence capabilities. Previously, she worked for over 20 years at a large pharmaceutical company in global sales leadership development where she developed strategies and learning interventions to meet the priority needs of first and second level sales leaders around the world. Prior to that, she was a Training Manager for aLloyd’s insurance broker in London, U.K. where she developed and delivered a variety of technical and leadership training to new and existing employees.
Liesel Mertes
Liesel Mertes is an acclaimed workplace empathy expert. Having experienced her own loss and struggle, Liesel emerged with a deep understanding of what employees need to feel supported at work after a disruptive life event. As the Founder of Handle With Care Consulting, Liesel works with groups that want to boost employee satisfaction as well as attract and retain better talent.
Liesel works with companies spanning industries, from RV manufacturers to diplomats to tech companies, both locally and internationally. Her favorite clients are forward-thinking organizations who know the value in supporting their employees with empathy and compassion.
Her expertise is broad—loss, returning to work, cultivating resiliency, compassion fatigue, how empathy impacts the brain—and no disruption is considered less significant. On these topics, Liesel is a dedicated speaker, writer, consultant, and host of the Handle With Care podcast.
Liesel earned a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and a Master’s degree in Business Administration. She has worked in Nairobi, consulted in Fiji and led cohorts in Ghana. Her adventures brought her to Indiana, where she is a proud mother, wife and lover of time spent on the water.
Through her actionable strategies, real life stories and passionate commitment, Liesel helps people survive, stabilize and thrive in the aftermath of adversity.
Joni Goodman
Joni is the Principal at JDGAdvisors. She collaborates with her clients: employees, sales professionals, leaders, and executives and together with them boosts learning initiatives, sales, and leadership, to achieve development goals! Joni is known for creating safe spaces where leaders can put down their armor and lean into growth. She strives to make a difference in the lives of others by tapping into and igniting them in their potential and greatness. Joni is a captivating speaker, an engaging facilitator, a success-oriented sales training expert, a sales meeting and event planning executor and a game changing executive coach. She has over 20 years in the learning and development space where she has delivered DE&I workshops, DISC/PIAV behavioral styles instruction and Situational Leadership curriculum. Joni is a Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD) and was selected and trained by Brené Brown to be a Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator (CDTLF).
Joni is the past president of the ATD Houston chapter, an Annual Leaders Conference Planning Advisory Committee chair (ALC PAC), and a past National Advisor for Chapters (NAC). She is also a published author in: “The Book of Road Tested Training Activities”, “Association for Talent Developments (ATD) Training Toolkit application”, and “101 Ways to Make Training Active”. Joni has been a featured speaker for the HR Houston Gulf Coast Symposium, ATD ICE, ATD Houston, ATD San Antonio, Gulf Coast Diversity Council, and Texas Executive Women (TEW) to name a few.
Amy Snow
Amy is passionate about building into teams and organizations so they thrive in their sphere of influence, and she truly believes that happens through leadership development. Grow your people and you will grow your team and organization to greater heights. As a certified coach and leadership trainer with Maxwell Leadership, she has had the honor of working with teams around the country and has seen how powerful and transformative investing in leadership can be when individuals and teams fully engage in the process.
As a former Division I soccer player and lifelong participant in sports, Amy loves what being an athlete has done for her in every aspect of her life. In fact, she believes it actually helped prepare her for life. While she imagined the transition from her sport would be hard, she didn’t know how hard…until she got there. That is why she is also passionate about helping college and professional athletes move from their sport to their new career. Helping them to create a game plan, challenging them to push themselves in new ways and ultimately getting them to their goals faster than they could on their own is incredibly rewarding and energizing!
Amy graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor’s in Statistics and Biometry and a Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.). She captained the varsity soccer squad her junior and senior years, was named Ivy League Rookie of the Year her freshman year and earned multiple All-Ivy honors and Athletic Academic All-American status during her tenure there. She was also inducted into the New York State Girls Soccer Hall of Fame in 2018.
