Unveiling the Role of a Chief Dream Officer with Melissa Severance

Hey everybody welcome back wendy sellers the hr lady we are here today with my co-host jc how you doing jc oh i'm doing pretty good wendy you know when i i kick back today and i think about effectively balancing supporting individual employee aspirations and advancing the organization's strategic goals i i get hung up sometimes and i i think to myself wendy sellers Is there someone out there that does something kind of like that? And I'm like, what if there's a dream officer that takes care of these things?

Is that a real thing, Wendy? It is. And in fact, our guest, Melissa Severance, is chief dream officer. She's also an executive and leadership and team coach, a mindfulness facilitator, a speaker, so much more.

Welcome to the show, Melissa. I am so excited to be here. I'm excited to talk to you, Wendy and JC. I'm here and ready to go.

Hey, where the heck did the title Chief Dream Officer come from? You know, I think when I really wanted to, you know, start Inspire Big Dreams, I just knew I wanted to help people get where they wanted to go, meet their goals, meet their dreams. And it just seemed like the best title for me. So I'm a Chief Dream Officer now.

I love it. I love it. That's actually really cool. That's something I wouldn't have thought of, but.

You can make any title you want when you own your own company, right? Yeah. My title is simply the HR lady, and I have two trademarks on that, so I just stick with that. I probably should trademark mine because, you know, it's pretty, I think it's pretty unique and cool.

Yes, it absolutely is. Go ahead, JC. Yeah, I can't lie. You know, before we started this whole podcast today, I'm like, what is a chief dream officer?

So I look it up and it really starts to highlight like employee development, cultural enrichment, innovation, advocacy, alignment of goals, engagement initiatives. I'm I'm I'm stopping at that point and thinking to myself, why don't more organizations have a senior leader in that kind of role? It's absolutely awesome. That's a cool, cool, like focus.

Now, do you do all those things? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I have a lot of services and I think it's because everybody's unique.

Everybody needs something different to really get to the next level, meet their goals and dreams. It could be, you know, executive leadership coaching, it could be corporate training. I come into companies and help upskill them as well, working with individual leaders. And of course, you know, I have the HR experience as well, too.

That all comes into play. Every leader needs that experience. And, you know, I like being on stage and I like really sharing my thought leadership. So speaking comes into play as well.

So a little bit of everything. And, you know, I want to have compelling experiences for everybody that works with me. So it could be one-on-one and it could be big, huge events, like when I put disrupts or other learning experiences on in the community. I love it.

Well, it sounds like you specialize in, you know, igniting coaching cultures within organizations. Can you share what the heck that even means? What is a coaching culture? Yeah, it's where every employee has the opportunity to be coached by their mentor, by their leader, or by somebody else in the firm.

You know, a lot of companies don't have coaches on staff, so their leader has to kind of fill that role or somebody else in the firm to really help them figure out what they need to do, get their maximum potential, and figure it out on their own through reflection, questions, and different other avenues instead of just being directed to do something or giving advice. Because as we all know, you know, when you want to do something, you have that fire under you, you're igniting yourself and you're going to really get there and do what you need to do and be transformative, take action.

And that's really what I'm trying to do in all of my roles and all my services. In 2024, the International Coaching Federation, the ICF, reported that 51 percent of organizations with strong coaching cultures experienced higher revenue growth compared to their industry peers. Additionally, 62% of employees in these organizations rated themselves as highly engaged. Back to you.

I just want to stop right there. Any company that has 62% of their employees highly engaged should be doing cartwheels, you know, because you're lucky you get that. You get 20% barely engaged, right, Melissa? Oh, unbelievably.

And I have them stats in my presentation. I love that you grab them because I'm an ICF certified coach. So I definitely look at their stats. But you're right.

You know, we need our people to be engaged and it's getting harder and harder with five generations across. And coaching kind of helps fill that gap because everybody wants to be engaged differently. You can't do everything across the board to your team or to the whole company, let alone. So really developing culture and really doing individual plans for each employee is so needed.

And that's, I think, every leader's challenge is engaging and keeping them excited and challenged at work. In your work as an executive and leadership coach, what are some of the, speaking of challenges, what are some of the common challenges that we find? And, you know, are there any like case studies? You don't need to share any names or anything that you want to share.

Good results, bad results, you know. What are the common challenges that you see? And I guess it might just depend on generation, but just generally. Yeah.

You know what? I think it's a lot to do with trust and communication. When those are broken, we really can't move forward. And then people aren't giving ideas.

People aren't being innovative. People aren't talking to each other. Their relationships are really broken. So when you have stronger relationships, coaching helps that as well, too.

And most of my coaching, I'm helping with strategies on communication. How do I really get my point across? How do I be seen in meetings? How do I have that presence I need out there to be the great leader?

So I think all that comes together and really is needed when you bring coaching in to the atmosphere within a corporation. I love that. I know also that you are a mindfulness facilitator in addition to your coaching experience. So let's just stop there.

What is that? What is a mindfulness facilitator? Because I might need it. You know what?

Yeah, it's just I really got into mindfulness. And I think everybody has that time in their life when big tragedies maybe or big challenges happen. I had two at the same time. I was going through a divorce and then also got this like VP position and I was already overwhelmed.

I felt like I was falling on the floor and everything was around me. And I put a picture in one of my presentations about that. Like this was me. It didn't show, but that's what I felt like every day.

So we really need to bring in different tools to help burnout and help people really be their best selves at work. And that's where I started doing mindfulness. And you can be a facilitator and help people with it. And I kind of just bring it in on all my services in little ways because we all need it.

In 2024, the Wellable Employee Wellness Industry Trends Report indicated that 55 percent of organizations planned to increase investment in mindfulness and mindfulness. And meditation programs, reflecting a growing recognition of their role in enhancing employee well-being and performance. That's a huge amount. 55% is a huge amount.

So kudos to those 55% of organizations. And, you know, for folks that are saying, oh, we can't afford that, or, you know, we don't have some, we can't afford to have a full-time person on your team. That's the beauty of where we're at now, I'll just say in 2025, is that we have consultants like Melissa who can help with these type of items. We have coaches all over the universe that can help.

You don't need to have 42 HR type people or therapists on your staff. You can just contract with people. What is the best way for somebody? Let's just say we have a medium-sized company that's listening to us today.

What's the best way for them to find a mindfulness facilitator or an executive coach? Yeah, you know, there's lots out there. And there's ones that manage or I should say focus in certain areas. Like if you have mind shift problems or if you're burnout problems, like I think there's different coaches for different things.

Some people dabble in a lot of different areas. I think it's just going out there and looking. The ICF is actually have a listing of all the coaches out there. The wellness is a little different animal.

You know, I don't know if there's really one place to go for that. But I think if you search on LinkedIn, you know, I try to publicize what I do with it. There's different people with different expertise. And maybe you're even going to your yoga studio or different things along those lines.

Anything wellness in the community, they might have the resources at your fingertips. Next year, I'm going to be helping HR Florida and be their wellness director and kind of help them with different things along this lines. You know, mindfulness is kind of my baby with wellness, but there's so many other things that you can bring into your organization that could just help with burnout and making your people be healthy and well and feeling good when they're at work. That's amazing that the conference is actually putting wellness at a forefront.

For those that don't know what HR Florida is, Melissa and I are both in Florida, JC is in upstate New York, but HR Florida is the HR Florida Conference, and it's a very large conference. So if you're not in Florida, you don't have to fly down to Florida, although you might want to just because of the time of year. However, I would definitely recommend, regardless of what your, for our listeners what your title is, you know, what's on your business card or on your email, I would recommend finding some kind of, you know, conference that is going to help you be a better HR person, even if only HR is like 10% of the time in your role, because we can't know it all.

Even if you are 100% dedicated to HR, holy moly, things have changed so much in the past few years and continue to change. So we have to make sure that we listen to experts. And then on top of that, that we have people just to lean on when we're about to lose our mind. Absolutely.

You know, I think a lot of HR lean on a lot of other HR, but I think we need to, like the leaders need to lean on HR and HR needs to lean on the leaders because we're all in this together trying to make sure our company culture and, you know, is strong and lively, right? And healthy. Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes it's just not, you don't always feel comfortable going to your manager, your boss, or even HR to say, hey, I have a problem.

I have a concern. So this is where we really, truly have to say, listen, we're all in this together. Let's help. That's why we're here.

That's why we're here doing this podcast. All right. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about trends in leadership and development. As someone deeply involved in training and development, you know, what emerging trends or skills do you believe the next generation of successful leaders and high-performing teams need to have.

Now, that's a big statement. We could probably be here for seven hours talking about that. Well, yeah, there's definitely a lot of things. Some of the tough things for me that I see and I'm kind of helping with is getting ready for the future of work, getting ready, upskilling, making sure that you're taking control of your development, and finding things that's going to upskill you.

It might not be huge certifications if you have time to and money to, please do, but there could be micro-credentials learning on LinkedIn. You know, you just have to be aware of everything because, you know, AI is here and it keeps coming in stronger into the workforce. So we need to make sure we're up-building our skills because some jobs that we're doing now might not be here and we need to have skills for new jobs that are really needed. I love AI, but I do think, and I think there's a great opportunity with it.

I know some people are scared of it, but I think if we up-skill ourselves, we'll always have a job. We are needed. Yeah, we really, really are. Thank you for that.

And just on a little side note to the listeners, The HR Lady, my company, we just announced and have on my website really affordable and effective training programs. And most of them are less than 30 minutes. And so check it out. Go to thehrlady.

com. You can go to training shop after that. It's all over my website. But I'm just so excited to be able to help the average person who was probably shoved into management and or HR and didn't necessarily sign up for that, say, OK, where do I start?

And that's what my courses are for. Or you can contact Melissa as well. Before we get into that, JC does have some statistics he would like to share. The 2024 LeadX Leadership Development Benchmark Report revealed that 37% of organizations identified the creation of new or updated leadership programs as their top priority.

And this underscores a huge trend upward towards enhancing leadership development initiatives to include effective manager training. Back to you. Yeah, so you can get this manager training at conferences online. Everything has switched to a digital world.

I do personally believe that in-person training where you can kind of relax and not be having to worry about 10 people walking in your door while you're trying to watch a video is still the best. But let's face it, we all have limited time and limited budget. So get the training where you can and take from it what you can. Final thoughts on a manager training, Melissa?

Yeah, I'm seeing more and more of it. I did four eight-hour trainings last week. People want me to come in and be in person because they have not been training their leaders, and they're walking blind, like you said, and they need the knowledge and expertise. And also, the team building component is, because a lot of people are remote or hybrid, is getting lost.

So if you bring people in together and have a cohort of training within your organization, the team building and silos are going to start breaking down, and there's going to be even better results. Yeah, I'm happy to see and report myself that people do want the training in person and online. It usually depends on the budget as well. So we've got it all now.

All right. You mentioned before about Disrupt HR. So for our listeners who have never heard about Disrupt HR, what is it? Yeah, you know, I kind of call it like a TED style event, but it's very short and sweet.

They're five minutes, 20 sides. They rotate every 15 seconds and you're going to leave with, It could be 10 to 20, depending on how many speakers the events have, great ideas to innovate, change, and have better leadership. So even if one of the topics isn't exactly in your wheelhouse, there's other ones. You're always going to leave with great takeaways.

And it's very challenging. You know, I know, Wendy, you did it before. I've been doing it in a couple cities and Naples where I have it at. It's putting your message in five minutes and making it impactful and giving takeaways is an art.

So it's, it's exciting and fun. And some of them are very, you know, risque, I guess, sometimes. Yeah, those are just fun. Yeah, some of the some of the topics are off the wall.

And then other ones are, you know, where they're amazing topics, but that person has never spoke before in public. So the five minutes could be seem like an hour to them. And it could also seem that, you know, people freeze, but it's a great opportunity to say, you're the expert, get up there and speak. It's only five minutes.

Go ahead, JC. You had a question? I've emceed Disrupt HRs in multiple cities across the United States. And one thing that I could tell our listening audience today is you definitely do not have to be in human resources to attend.

I have met so many small business owners, managers, leaders in different organizations. And remember, you can lead from any seat within your organization. And they've all been present and just networking, exchanging ideas, and maybe having a cocktail at the same time. It's actually pretty cool.

Back to you. Yeah, it really is. I opened mine up and it's not just for HR. I have everybody, anybody in the community.

It is some HR topics like more than heavy on it, but every leader needs that information. And as you see the mission for all the SHRMs, which is the HR chapters across the U.S., they're going to just be for leaders.

So all leaders can come and learn about HR. Yeah, absolutely. And maybe you can have a JC, a cocktail there or some wine. Speaking of wine, Melissa, I read somewhere that wine is bottled poetry.

It is. You know, I, you know, fell in love with wine going to Napa a lot. And, you know, I'm a learner. I love to learn about things.

So I kind of went and got a certification and have some knowledge in it and try to learn more about it whenever I can. So I just learn about it by opening up the bottle and tasting it. But I love wine. Love, love, love wine.

Everybody knows that. The best thing is learning what kind of wine you like. Yeah, absolutely. I totally enjoyed that.

Hands down, a beautiful journey. And by the way, Pinot Noir is one of the oldest grape varieties. It dates back to Roman times and is genetically linked as to apparent to many modern grape varieties, including Chardonnay. Back to you.

Love it. I did not know that. Thanks, JC. Hey, Melissa, how can people contact you and learn more about your inspired big dreams?

Yeah, my website is inspirebigdreams.com. Very easy. I'm on all the social channels.

Look me up, Melissa Severance or Inspire Big Dreams. And I also do events under Disrupt HR Naples. So please look at that, the traditional Disrupt HR events and also other learning experiences because I love to learn and I love to help other people learn too. That's awesome.

Well, thank you so much. This has been so informational. I really appreciate it. And we hope everybody enjoyed this.

Thanks for joining us and take care. Thank you. Bye.