A Modern Approach to Developing Leaders for the AI Era
Why do some leaders create clarity and value under pressure while others become overwhelmed? In today's environment of constant change, competing priorities, and uncertainty, leadership requires more than experience or expertise—it requires conditioning.
Join President of the SHRM Center for Inclusion & Diversity Carolynn Johnson for an engaging discussion featuring Melissa Dawn Simkins, founder of Athleadership® and CEO of Velvet Suite®, alongside Charlie Batch, 2X Super Bowl Champion and former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback. Together, they'll introduce Leadership Conditioning, a modern approach to developing the mindset and habits leaders need to perform at their best when the stakes are highest.
Inspired by elite athletics, neuroscience, and human performance, this interactive session explores why the leaders who thrive under pressure aren't necessarily the smartest or most experienced, they're the most prepared. Charlie Batch will also share lessons from elite sports on how preparation creates confidence and execution when it matters most.
Learning Objectives
- Discover the principles of Leadership Conditioning and how they prepare leaders to perform effectively under pressure.
- Recognize the leadership behaviors that foster organizational agility, resilience, and sustained performance in complex, high-pressure environments.
- Apply practical strategies to lead with greater clarity, confidence, and adaptability during periods of change and uncertainty.
Leave with actionable insights and a practical framework to strengthen your leadership capacity, improve decision-making under pressure, and build the resilience needed to lead yourself and others through today's most complex challenges.
Official Leadership Lab Participant Guide
Continue your Leadership Lab experience with Athleadership: The Elite Athletic Mindset—How to Lead Under Pressure and Perform When It Counts, the official participant guide for the Leadership Lab series. While the Leadership Lab introduces the principles of Leadership Conditioning, the Founder's Edition Experience helps you apply them through practical exercises, reflection prompts, and leadership tools designed to strengthen your ability to lead with confidence under pressure.
For $32.50 (plus tax and shipping), you'll receive an autographed Founder's Edition of Athleadership, along with the Leadership Lab Discovery Guide, the Pressure Proof™ Assessment, Founding Athleader Recognition, and priority access to future Athleadership opportunities.
Use your guide throughout the series to reinforce key concepts from each session, develop your own Leadership Conditioning plan, strengthen agility, resilience, alignment, and wellbeing, and build the confidence and readiness to perform when the stakes are highest.
Your leadership development doesn't end when the session does—it begins with consistent practice.
Order your Athleadership Founder's Edition Experience today and start building the conditioning to lead with greater clarity, resilience, and impact when it matters most.
Because insight is valuable. Application creates change. Conditioning creates performance.
Meet the Presenters
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Carolynn Johnson
Carolynn Johnson is President of the SHRM Center for Inclusion & Diversity, a credible, research-based “source of truth” think tank and member community for inclusion and diversity.
Before joining SHRM, she served as Chief Executive Officer and Executive Editor of Fair360 (formerly DiversityInc), the leading workplace fairness management platform for content comparative benchmarks, and predictive workforce analytics. She led teams of data scientists to build advanced analytics, benchmarking tools, and predictive models measuring inclusion, diversity, and performance. Under her leadership, the Top 50 survey became a catalyst for thought leadership and revenue growth, and she launched the DiversityInc Top 50 Event series in 2009—widely known as the “Oscars of Diversity and Inclusion.”
Carolynn has testified twice as an expert witness before the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services. She was named a Distinguished Alumna of Rutgers University (2016) and, in 2022, received an AACSB honor for her research on intersectional workplace issues with a focus on gender—recognizing alumni who demonstrate leadership and societal impact. A CEO Action signatory since 2019, she worked alongside senior leaders at PwC and public-policy partners to help expand the coalition’s reach by engaging executive leaders across client organizations.
She completed an executive management fellowship at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and earned her MBA from Rutgers Business School. She also holds two MIT certifications in Artificial Intelligence in Business Strategy and Machine Learning and Data Systems. In 2023, she consulted with Wharton to design talent development coursework for undergraduate, MBA, and EMBA students. The creator of the Women of Color and Their Allies Leadership Program, Carolynn serves on national nonprofit boards including the Center for Healthcare Innovation (CHI) and is Co-director of the Relationships Across Differences Roundtable within Wharton’s McNulty Leadership Program. She is also a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.
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Melissa Dawn Simkins
Melissa Dawn Simkins is the founder of Athleadership® and CEO of Velvet Suite®, an Inc. 5000 company. Athleadership is a leadership conditioning operating system grounded in neuroscience and the elite athletic mindset and the foundation of a new category redefining how leaders perform under pressure. With a proven track record of accelerating performance and purpose, her work has reached more than 250,000 leaders globally. She is the author of the new book, Athleadership: The Elite Athletic Mindset: How to Lead Under Pressure and Perform When It Counts.
For nearly two decades, she has partnered with Fortune 500 companies, professional sports organizations, elite athletes, and high-performing executives, equipping them to adapt with clarity, navigate change, and lead when it matters most. She defines modern leadership as a discipline of conditioning, building the mental muscle required to outperform any environment. Athleadership proves what most leadership models overlook: leaders are not born, they are built.
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Charlie Batch
Charlie Batch is a former NFL quarterback turned entrepreneur, media personality/color analyst, community advocate, and professional speaker.
His NFL career spanned 15 years which included two Super Bowl victories. In retirement, Mr. Batch continues to be a respected strategist in the NFL, providing game-day commentary for Steelers broadcasts and several national media outlets. Mr. Batch is the Former President of the NFLPA Pittsburgh Chapter. He also served for 9 years as Senior Captain for The Trust Powered by the NFLPA, an initiative that Mr. Batch helped negotiate in 2011 with NFL team owners. Additionally, he helps former players achieve their dreams after football as a Transition Consultant for the NFLPA.
SHRM certification has approved this webinar for 1 PDC toward SHRM-CP or SHRM-SCP recertification. A program code will be provided at the end of the webinar.