Speaker Spotlight
She Accepted a Global Power Leader Award at Parliament. What She Brings to a Room Is Frameworks, Not Adjectives.
Shari Collins — Top 100 Global Power Leader · Harvard Business Review Advisory Board · Chief Well-Being Officer Certified · Omaha, Nebraska
Wellbeing has become one of the easiest topics to program badly. A room hears that people matter, nods, and goes back to the same week it had before.
Shari Collins runs her sessions off named, published frameworks instead, which is the reason HR and leadership audiences tend to leave hers with something they can actually put in a plan. Timothy Clark’s four stages of psychological safety. The PERMA model. The Surgeon General’s framework for workplace mental health. Shawn Achor’s structure for social capital. Each session is built on one of them.
She accepted the Top 100 Global Power Leader Award at Parliament in London in November 2025, and she serves on the Advisory Board for Harvard Business Review and the Editorial Board for the Infonomics Society.
The Credential Stack Is Unusually Deep
It is worth listing plainly, because the combination is rare in this category. Shari is a Certified Chief Well-Being Officer through the World Happiness Academy, with recent certifications in psychological safety and organizational happiness, and she is a certified Change Cycle facilitator. She is Diversity Director for the HR Nebraska State SHRM Council. She remains a certified educator in two states and facilitates professional development for educators across the country with the National Education Association.
She is also a published author in the Parent Ready! series and facilitates national workplace conversations for OpenSesame’s Future of Work Club. This year she was named a Top 10 Rising Voice for 2026 and HR Influencer of the Week, after Insights Success named her a most admired leader to watch in 2024.
What an Audience Walks Out Carrying
The most useful thing in her feedback is not a compliment. It is a specific idea somebody took home.
An HR generalist who heard her at the Iowa SHRM conference wrote that the session was the highlight of the whole event, and then explained why: Shari introduced a concept she calls Shadow Directors as a way to strengthen a leadership pipeline, and the attendee left actively writing a proposal to bring it into her own organization. That is the difference between a session that lands and a session that gets implemented.
A vice president at a multi-state bank described the same pattern from the consulting side, noting that Shari took the time to understand their culture and challenges first, which made the training feel specific to them rather than generic, and that she left the team with a set of tools they are now rolling out across departments.
Seven Sessions, Grouped by What a Room Needs
Brave and Bold is the psychological safety session, working through inclusion, learner, contributor and challenger safety as four distinct things a leader can build rather than one vague quality.
Unlocking Ageism Bias handles the part of the generational conversation most agendas skip, including the coded language that quietly shapes hiring, and it covers ageism aimed at young professionals as well as older ones.
Cultivate a Thriving Workplace and Well-being At Work are the two wellbeing keynotes. The first runs on purpose, strengths and belonging alongside the PERMA model. The second is built on the Surgeon General’s five essentials, from protection from harm to mattering at work, and is the better fit when an organization wants a roadmap rather than inspiration.
The Happy Brain Advantage and The Connect Effect come from positive psychology, the first on the research linking wellbeing to productivity and innovation, the second on social capital as a practical answer to workplace loneliness.
Full Circle is the change session, walking teams through the six predictable emotional stages of any transition so leaders can anticipate resistance instead of being surprised by it.
Full descriptions are on her speaker profile.
Book Shari Collins
Available for keynotes and workshops on psychological safety, workplace wellbeing, organizational happiness, multi-generational teams and leading through change.