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Jess Pettitt

Workplace Culture and Crisis Manager

For almost 20 years, Jess Pettitt has supported and guided diverse audiences to success. Her social justice and diversity curricula as well as her publications, books, and resources are highly regarded and used nationwide. Her background uniquely qualifies her to educate employers on building welcoming, productive, and innovative teams.

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Bio

Jess isn’t a chef by any stretch of the imagination, but similar in that a true chef has a secret ingredient that they often leave out of a recipe on purpose and add a dash when no one is looking that pulls from past experiences and is exactly what is needed to really elevate a dish. By pulling from a variety of consulting clients, direct crisis management experiences, multitudes of different jobs along the way, and experience on stage as a stand-up comic, trainer, and now keynote speaker, Jess can elevate conversations.

It is through Jessica’s work in Student Affairs, as a college administrator, in South Carolina, Oregon, New York, and Arizona that she realized her love for the conversations across difference. As a Social Justice Training Institute Alumna, Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, and a Certified Speaking Professional, Jessica has taken the typical diversity talks to the next level of social justice conversations examining privilege, oppression, entitlement, and our collective responsibility to make change while connecting difficult topics with employee retention, crisis management, and increasing innovation and profits.

Jessica blends politics, humor, identity, and local flair with big city passion and energy through direct, individualized, and interactive conversations. Her workshops, seminars, and keynotes don’t just leave participants invigorated but inspired and motivated to follow through with action to create change. Having traveled and lived in a variety of communities and environments all over the world, while also engaging with education as student, teacher, administrator, and active community member, Jessica uses her take on life to lead participants through a safe but confrontational process of examination, self-reflection, and open dialog that is as challenging as it is rewarding.

Responses to Jessica’s programs are overwhelmingly positive and include comments ranging from, “This was awful – I never had to think so hard while laughing!” to “I can’t believe my boss brought her – thanks for actually treating us like adults,” to “She answered all of my questions knowledgeably and without making me feel dumb for asking.”

With her attention now turning to larger associations and corporate leadership, Jessica is pulling from the past 15 years of direct experience to lead teams to try instead of avoiding a stretch. It is in this trying that clients uncover a deeper sense of belonging, resourceful collaboration opportunities, and reignite their creativity and innovative ideation. Learning, feeling, and being Good Enough Now allows for teams to do the best they can with what they have and persist long into the future no matter the crisis, topic, or challenge.

Graduating from the University of South Carolina with an M.Ed., in Higher Education Administration with an emphasis in Crisis Management, Jessica pulls together lessons from teaching History and English in the classroom as well as those from the stand-up comedy stages of New York City to bring real and actionable results to meeting rooms and board tables. She is well published, including multiple online training courses, curriculum guides, and a book that makes the abstract actionable.

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Keynotes

Featured Keynote

Conversations That Matter: Better Connections
Regardless of how traditional or progressive your organization is, there are some people and topics that at some point are off limits. You just can’t do them right now, especially when you have to bring up the difficult topics with the difficult people.

What if you could engage in these conversations with more confidence, humor, and ease? What if you could let go of someone has to win and someone has to lose or someone has to be right and someone has to be wrong? You can! Because no matter the person or topic, you are your best tool for conversations that matter.
Understanding yourself and others as differently right gives you the tools to intentionally design teams, groups, and partnerships that can bring value to a single project or your entire organization.

We are all frustrating to someone (and at times even to ourselves). Once you know who and how you are, you can (re)claim responsibility for your behavior-response-patterns and leave room for others to do the same. Before you know it, you are having better conversations and fuller relationships with those around you and clearing the way for your organization to experience greater efficacy and growth. It really is that easy.

Learning Outcomes:
- A three-part framework for taking responsibility for who and how they show up
- Develop skills for a significant and powerful (and free) method to change culture around difficult topics and see other’s as differently right.
- The powerful skills that change culture around difficult topics and challenging people
- How to see others as differently right

Good Enough Now
Good Enough Now
Sitting around pointing fingers and waiting for change to appear on the horizon—has it ever worked for you? Do you feel imbalance between who you are and who you think you should be? Do you see fulfillment, better relationships, and stronger teamwork as something to work for, but not possible now?

The truth is that all of these are available to us in this present moment, right where we are. And by being our authentic selves, we can immediately improve our companies, relationships, and communities.

This is Jess’s signature breakthrough message—an innovative, practical guide to ridding ourselves of self-doubt, self-limiting beliefs, and habitual excuses so that we can do “the best we can with what we have some of the time” and be the best versions of ourselves right here, right now. Yes, even you back there in the corner—I see you.

Learning Outcomes:

The importance of being true to their authentic self

How to develop momentum based on their strengths

The three-part model to build on empathy and giving grace

How to recognize their own personal patterns and see them in others so they can leave room for edits in the stories they tell themselves about other people.
Why Diversity Initiatives Fail
Why Diversity Initiatives Fail
After nearly two decades of leading Diversity trainings, Jess Pettitt, CSP, has uncovered why change doesn’t stick. With over 50 examples of her own clients’ previous, failed DEI responses, Jess will show your participants how our go-to answers are steps in the right direction, even if they fail. Leaving room for failure dismantles the urgency of action and gets to the core of the issue at hand to increase a sense of belonging in our organizations and build greater communities.

That’s because doing something and failing (or even doing nothing) is still a response. As long as you acknowledge what you’re doing (or not doing) and don’t hide from it, as long as you stop trying to win and focus on doing better, you will keep learning and growing as a company, and your responses will mean more and more to your people and to your public.

If your Diversity initiatives aren’t sticking, then you’re stuck in an old pattern. The only way out is disruption. So let’s do some disrupting and create change for good!
In this talk, Jess help will help your people navigate this new and unfamiliar terrain and show them how any sincere and honest response can lead to your most inclusive culture.

Learning Outcomes:

Successfully disrupt the normalized status quo for good

Remove excuses, learn from failed attempts, and get back to work

Motivate and inspire employees to act as participants in their own change
Workshop - DIVERSITY & SOCIAL JUSTICE: A STARTING PLACE

Workshop - DIVERSITY & SOCIAL JUSTICE: A STARTING PLACE

Unlike other online diversity trainings bogged down with history and theory (and oftentimes the educator’s personal agenda), this course introduces concepts that participants can apply to their own lives immediately. Regardless of participants’ identities and lived experiences, an understanding of how we coexist, interact, and impact one another is imperative to build better teams, better connections, and deeper relationships. Spend an hour reflecting on how you fit into the conversation of Diversity. The foundation of social justice work is understanding the intersection of our own unique biases, perceptions, and expectations of entitlement. Our experiences, choices, and impact—both intentional and unintentional—matter. This is the starting place
Workshop - "UNCONSCIOUS BIAS: PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND OTHERS"

Workshop - "UNCONSCIOUS BIAS: PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND OTHERS"

Have you ever experienced an optical illusion where you don’t initially see all of the options? Was the dress blue with gold stripes? Were you team Laurel or Yanny? Can you see the rabbit and the duck? Our lived experiences are the tools we use to interpret the world around us. This is why we may assume there is a monster in the garage during our first earthquake—we literally don’t have the experience to pull from to understand what is happening. We believe what we know, whether we realize it or not. Take some time to notice how you perceive yourself and others. The role of perception is directly linked to all that we are (and are not!) conscious of. We must become aware of our habits to open up to something outside our own experience.
Workshop: WORKING ACROSS DIFFERENCE: MAKING BETTER CONNECTIONS

Workshop: WORKING ACROSS DIFFERENCE: MAKING BETTER CONNECTIONS

We communicate across difference, in passing or on purpose. And while we “know” our coworkers, we often struggle to understand the cultural nuances that come with working with people of different cultural backgrounds, religions, languages, sexual orientations, gender expressions, socioeconomic variety, and more. We may be well-intentioned when we enter or step back from a conversation yet still slight, offend, or outright insult someone. We know better, but how can we do better? The way forward is to make sure everyone understands what is required to work with people who are not the same as you. Spoiler alert—it’s not about them—it’s all about you!

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Topics

Diversity & Inclusion
Teambuilding & Collaboration Trending

Emcee Reel

Jess Pettitt Sizzle Reel

Diversity Requires Avoiding the Easy 'Yes' - Jess Pettitt

Jessica Pettitt Keynotes

What if it happens?

With the election looming, we should be planning now for the complexity and disruption that is happening - and we can, together!

2024 Almost Doing Good: Doing the Best You Can with What You Have Some of the Time
2017 Good Enough Now: How Doing the Best We Can With What We Have is Better Than Nothing

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"I am the Organizational and Employee Development Manager for the Department of Surgery at the University of Colorado School of Medicine and have known Jess for at least 20 years. I had the pleasure of working with her at the University of Arizona and, most recently, she was able to work virtually with members of my own academic medicine community in the middle of the pandemic to engage with her book, “Good. Enough. Now.” I believe she would be a perfect candidate for your conference, especially on a topic such as raising awareness of, and ensuring equitable access for, patients regardless of sexual orientation and/or gender identity. Jess is a dynamic speaker and engages her audience while simultaneously challenging them in a way that makes whatever her topic is, accessible. She can connect with a variety of audience members regardless of their role and is effective whether addressing physicians, university faculty, staff, or students. I wholeheartedly endorse her as an educational speaker. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact me at your convenience."

Brian Shimamoto, M Ed. DEI and OED Manager

I am an experienced nurse educator and have for the last two years been a Clinical Assistant Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University College of Nursing. I am also a fifth-year nursing PhD student at the SUNY University at Buffalo. My research is on the knowledge, beliefs, and experiences of pre-licensure undergraduate nursing faculty with teaching lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) content in their curricula. I first met Jess as a participant in a dynamic workshop on examining biases and communicating across difference that she led for student life staff, librarians, educators, and nurse recruiters in 2016. This experience left a deep impression on me as an educator and now as a researcher. She engaged the room in a challenging way, and challenged the room in an engaging way, and participants ended the workshop energized rather than (as could so easily happen with a less expert speaker) disengaged or defensive. It was the first time I had seen an educator use transformative learning theory to disrupt participants' comfortable or deeply held beliefs in a way that was inviting and encouraging and genuinely fostered a shift in framework. She is also wicked funny, and her humor contributes to the inviting and encouraging energy of her work. As a nurse educator, I immediately saw the benefit of this kind of workshop and teaching for my learners, whose biases and beliefs have real consequences for patient care. In addition to Jess' expertise in winning over a diverse group and getting them to buy in to her objectives-- to understand that doing a well-informed something is better than doing nothing, and that everyone has something to learn and that that is GOOD-- I was struck by her generosity; namely, I asked if I could use and adapt her workshop exercise for use with my nurses and she said yes! We have since co-presented on the use of that particular workshop exercise ("Just Rescue") at a national nursing professional development conference, and it has been adopted by a leading Nurse Residency Program consortium curriculum. Jess is my go-to recommendation for any healthcare organization that is seeking an outside consultant or speaker regarding diversity/equity/inclusion/belonging/justice and continues to inspire me to do better-- or at least to do as well as I can with what I have, which is where we all have to start.

Caitlin M. Nye MSN, RN, NPD-BC, CHSE Clinical Assistant Professor

My team was forever changed after I brought Jess in to speak at our annual staff retreat! They all loved the personal insights that applied to each of them as individuals and we as her hilariously witty approach to building self-awareness by addressing how each person “annoys others.” Her fun, authentic presence was a breath of fresh air to lighten our heavy strategy sessions before and after her time with us. Your team will love Jess, so call and get your date locked in before someone else beats you to her calendar!

Carla Silletto, MBA, CSP, Magnet Culture, President & Chief Retention Officer

Going to see Jessica speak was such a highlight. She came to Atlanta and spoke at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Jessica was in my city-so I had to go see her. It was a treat! She was funny, engaging, interesting….really everything you would want in a Keynote Speaker. Even though the room had hundreds of people she came over to me after speaking and asked how I was, what I liked and didn't like about what she had to say. And then I noticed she would go to as many people as she could to try to make them feel at “home” I highly recommend Jessica as a Speaker, social action extraordinaire. And she's a fanboy of Star Wars and you have to respect that!

Harrison Nathan, CPFA Investment Advisor MassMutual, MML Investments

A joy to work with. Inspires collaborators to transcend our limitations and be and do more than we thought we could. She creates a big tent with room for people who wouldn't normally inhabit the same space. As a team member, she does what she says she will do, and more.

Jim Hight Senior Editor Climate Change Business Journal

Jessica's learning and conversation with our company was one of the most memorable, encouraging, and thought provoking. Months later I still refer back to the very interesting way she presented information that challenged the way I think – or thought I was supporting a broader community. She brings a LOT of knowledge and thought-provoking messages to the table that help upgrade our conversations and how we think, talk, and react to others. Thank you Jessica!

Kaneen Christensen, Mission Assurance Director, Leidos

“I am currently the Associate Director for DEI for the ONeal Comprehensive Cancer Center at UAB and previously the Chief Experience Officer at UAB and the national President of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine. In these roles I have experienced Jessica Pettitt on numerous occasions with events and programs and I consider her one of the “go to” speakers and motivational leaders on the subject of diversity, equity and inclusion in a number of ways. Her intellect, lived experience, humor and disarming approachability leads individuals to honestly think differently and explore their own biases. I consider her as effective as any individual I have met in this space and know that she if more than a “speaker”…she changes minds and attitudes and does it in a way that lasts. I look forward to my next opportunity to work with her in my organization.”

Rodney Tucker

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Jess Pettitt

Bio

Keynotes

Conversations That Matter: Better Connections

Topics

A joy to work with. Inspires collaborators to transcend our limitations and be and do more than we thought we could. She creates a big tent with room for people who wouldn't normally inhabit the same space. As a team member, she does what she says she will do, and more.

Let's find your perfect speaker!

Explore

Quick Links

Keep Up To Date

Jess Pettitt

Bio

Keynotes

Conversations That Matter: Better Connections

Good Enough Now

Why Diversity Initiatives Fail

Workshop - DIVERSITY & SOCIAL JUSTICE: A STARTING PLACE

Workshop - "UNCONSCIOUS BIAS: PERCEPTIONS OF SELF AND OTHERS"

Workshop: WORKING ACROSS DIFFERENCE: MAKING BETTER CONNECTIONS

Topics

A joy to work with. Inspires collaborators to transcend our limitations and be and do more than we thought we could. She creates a big tent with room for people who wouldn't normally inhabit the same space. As a team member, she does what she says she will do, and more.

Let's find your perfect speaker!

Explore

Quick Links

Keep Up To Date