Coaching with Clarity: How Jackie Lauer Turns Values into Performance

Jackie Lauer is a seasoned workplace culture expert and executive coach known for building healthy, high-performance organizations grounded in trust, emotional intelligence, and intentional leadership, with two decades of hands-on change work and a science-backed methodology at the core of her practice. As CEO and President of her consulting practice, she blends neuroscience, positive psychology, and practical coaching to help leaders and teams align values, strengthen relationships, and sustain results from the inside out.

Editorial lens

As chief editor of The CXO Time, the evaluation focuses on depth of expertise, clarity of method, verifiable impact, and originality of thought in the leadership and culture space, particularly for growth-stage technology environments and C‑suites navigating complex transformation. Lauer’s profile stands out for integrating research-informed coaching, lived enterprise experience, and repeat client-led growth, which collectively suggest both rigor and resonance with operational realities. Recognition as a featured profile in a 2025 impact list adds contemporary validation and reach, aligning with readership interests in proven, scalable leadership practices.

Origin story and inflection points

Lauer began as a change management consultant more than 20 years ago, observing repeatedly that sustainable transformation hinges on culture and leadership rather than on plans and processes alone, a conviction that ultimately defined her practice focus and client engagements. A formative moment occurred in 1999 while leading at Nortel when a team member’s feedback after a coaching program reframed her trajectory, catalyzing a multi-certification journey and a commitment to coaching as a lever for enterprise performance and human potential. The subsequent arc includes founding and expanding a leadership and culture consultancy that serves high-growth companies, with most new clients arriving through referrals, a practical signal of perceived effectiveness.

Philosophy: conversation as the change unit

A central belief in Lauer’s work is that performance and change happen one brilliant conversation at a time, a principle that reframes culture building as the design and practice of better conversations that create safety, clarity, and commitment across teams and functions. This conversational lens pairs with a focus on trust as a neurobiological and relational construct, translating abstract cultural goals into teachable skills that leaders can practice and repeat under pressure. By treating conversations as the relationship itself, her programs move beyond messaging to shape how leaders listen, inquire, and respond, turning every interaction into a culture moment that compounds over time.

Methods and modalities

Lauer’s toolkit blends science-informed frameworks with applied leadership development, including certifications in change management, multiple coaching disciplines, conflict mediation, the neuroscience of trust, and emotional intelligence, enabling tailored interventions across executive, team, and system levels. Her design emphasizes neuroplasticity for skill adoption, stress-aware decision practices, and structured self-awareness to surface triggers and biases that often impede alignment and execution in complex environments. Programs commonly integrate real-time EQ skill building and feedback-rich practice, creating muscle memory around empathy, regulation, and courageous candor that leaders can deploy in high-stakes settings.

The neuroscience and EQ engine

Teaching leaders how the brain learns and decides is a bedrock of Lauer’s approach, especially for embedding new habits and unlearning counterproductive ones through deliberate practice and context-aware reinforcement. Stress physiology is treated as an operational risk variable, with breathing, mindfulness, and recovery techniques positioned as performance enablers rather than wellness add-ons, helping leaders maintain clarity under pressure. Emotional intelligence development runs throughout, emphasizing assessment-driven self-awareness, role-play for empathy building, and social skills training that translates into improved collaboration and trust at scale.

Building resilience in turbulent times

Lauer’s resilience training draws from neuroscience and positive psychology to help leaders metabolize shocks and navigate what author Bruce Feiler calls lifequakes, equipping executives with frameworks to steady teams and maintain momentum amid disruption. The intent is to normalize adaptive growth cycles and embed practices that make recovery faster and learning more durable across the organization. By framing resilience as both personal and systemic, the work connects leader capacity building with cultural norms that make resilience repeatable, not just inspirational.

The Heart of Culture platform

Lauer’s Heart of Culture concept encapsulates years of change work into a cohesive philosophy that prioritizes engagement as the performance multiplier and positions culture management alongside financial discipline. Offerings span assessments, strategic and vision facilitation, conflict mediation, and leadership development, with a throughline that happier and more engaged employees are good for business and must be measured and managed. The platform’s traction with startups and growth companies reflects its emphasis on clarity, cohesion, and alignment, which are decisive in fast-moving markets with shifting priorities.

Executive coaching with a systems view

One-on-one coaching in Lauer’s practice is not isolated from organizational dynamics but nested within strategy, team cohesion, and culture objectives to ensure leadership growth translates into enterprise outcomes. Directness, warmth, and humor frequently appear in client testimonies, pointing to a style that blends candor with care to sustain behavioral change without diluting accountability. The coaching portfolio supports alignment across C-suite agendas and leadership layers, narrowing the gap between espoused values and everyday behavior through repeatable, relational practices.

Signature practices leaders can use

• Listen to connect by approaching conversations with curiosity to reduce judgment, signal interest, and spark trust, which in turn creates conditions for innovation and high-quality problem solving.
• Create psychologically safe spaces that encourage candid feedback and learning, enabling teams to experiment, adapt, and sustain performance under changing conditions.
• Practice stress-aware leadership through micro-recovery, breath work, and mindful pauses to protect decision quality and reduce reactivity in moments of consequence.
• Embed EQ drills such as perspective taking and emotional labeling in team routines to strengthen collaboration and reduce friction before it escalates.
• Facilitate alignment conversations that surface competing commitments and clarify shared goals so that execution benefits from coherent intent and mutual understanding.

Credibility and community validation

Lauer’s client-driven growth and repeated testimonials speak to consistency in impact, highlighting her ability to simplify complexity, unlock potential, and support leaders through competitive environments. External recognition in a 2025 industry list and cover profile further signals peer awareness and positions her as a reference point for contemporary coaching and culture transformation. Public sharing of this recognition across professional networks indicates active engagement with the leadership community and a commitment to amplifying evidence-based practices.

For boards and executive teams steering transformation, Lauer’s work targets three leverage points that determine whether strategy turns into results: clarity of shared intent, leader behavior under stress, and the strength of relational trust across the system. By aligning values and goals with the human dynamics of teams, her programs reduce friction, increase execution speed, and improve the organization’s capacity to learn faster than competitors. The approach is particularly relevant to technology-led growth where rapid role shifts, new operating cadences, and cross-functional dependencies require resilient leaders and trustworthy cultures.

Looking ahead

Lauer’s stated vision for the next five years centers on deepening impact at scale through the Heart of Culture platform and her leadership consulting and coaching practice, with an emphasis on global reach and amplified outcomes for leaders and teams. The expansion plan aligns with a continued investment in neuroscience-informed curricula and EQ development that is responsive to post-pandemic leadership norms around compassion, candor, and well-being as performance drivers. This strategic arc suggests sustained relevance for organizations seeking reliable, human-centered levers to navigate uncertainty while preserving momentum and morale.

Jackie Lauer exemplifies a modern leadership coach and culture strategist whose work is both principled and practical, bringing together rigor from neuroscience and EQ with a lived understanding of how organizations change under real constraints. Her focus on conversation quality as the linchpin of culture, combined with stress-aware decision practices and assessment-driven self-awareness, equips executives to convert values into visible behavior that compounds into trust and performance at scale. For growth-minded CXOs, especially in technology contexts, Lauer’s blend of credibility, clarity, and conversion of science into action makes her a compelling choice for building cultures that are not only healthy but also measurably high performing.