Lisa Even

About Lisa Even

Lisa Even is a speaker and coach who works on leadership and culture, and who describes herself as a culture and joy connoisseur. Her background is in non-clinical healthcare leadership, and she has spent years helping organizations build places where people thrive rather than survive. She came to the work from a challenging upbringing, and the philosophy she took from it is short: you happen to the world, not the other way around. Waiting for circumstances to improve before showing up fully hands your power to the wrong source.

Her ripple effect framework started as a question she asked her healthcare teams: is this good ripple effect? A year or two later she overheard someone in a hallway use the phrase to hold themselves accountable, unprompted. She works from the premise that leaders and coworkers affect mental health more than therapists or doctors do, and that the average person spends roughly 90,000 hours of life in the workforce. Her tools are practical: a values exercise, a zoom-out audit of attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs, and joy calendars measured like any other KPI.

On The Daily Mastermind, Lisa sat down with George Wright III for a conversation about leadership, culture, and building joy into the workday. She explained the weather a leader brings into a room, why finding out what your people value and where those values came from does more than authority ever will, and how a team norm about skipping lunch changed without a memo. She and her husband have kept a joy list on a bedroom whiteboard for eight or nine years.