Shannon S. Jennings · Dr. J
Hi, I'm Shannon. Most people call me Dr. J.
I work with owners of growing companies in the trades, manufacturing, family business, and professional services, on the decisions that don't have a clean answer. If you've been carrying something alone, you're in the right place.
Here's what it usually looks like when someone calls me.
Usually it starts with "I'm not sure this is the kind of thing you do, but." A manager you promoted is struggling and you can't tell whether to coach them or move them. Your kid, or your partner's kid, wants a bigger role, and that conversation keeps getting rescheduled. Two of your best people have stopped talking to each other and everyone's working around it. Or nothing's on fire exactly; you're just tired of being the only one who sees the whole picture, and you'd like to say so out loud to somebody who isn't on your payroll.
I come in when what's stuck was built by good people, on purpose, for good reasons, and it worked right up until the company outgrew it.
Psychology is my family business.
My dad is a clinical psychologist with sixty-some years of shrinking heads (he still calls me Star, which is always a little awkward), and my mom was a therapist too, so this isn't a career I picked so much as the world I grew up in. I don't know how to not apply that kind of thinking to every area of my life. I became a therapist myself and spent close to a decade with families in the hardest situations: people in deep conflict and real pain, fighting over their kids and their assets, in a court system that was supposed to sort it out and mostly made it worse.
The biggest thing I learned in those rooms is that the way through real, legitimate hurt was almost never to settle who was right. It was to turn people toward the future, the outcome they wanted for their kids, and ask what their own behavior, starting now, could do to get there, regardless of what their co-parent was up to. Something happened when people made that turn. They could see their own part. They could shape it.
The fight didn't go away, but it stopped being everything.
That carried straight into how I see a company. When something's stuck, I'm not looking for the bad guy. I'm looking at what the system is doing to everyone in it, and at what you can do, starting now, regardless of what your partner or your brother or that one manager is up to. Because the other thing those years taught me is that nobody's stuff happens to them alone. It happens inside a family, a workplace, a town. Fix the system and you've helped every person standing in it.
That's what drives me now. I spent five years at the Edward Lowe Foundation running peer retreats for entrepreneurs and CEOs, and found the people I never get tired of, the ones whose brains connect a supplier problem to something their kid said at breakfast or a podcast they half-heard on the drive in. Their mission was to champion the entrepreneurial spirit, and I'm still living it, because the companies growing in your town, hiring locally, sponsoring the Little League, are the ones holding communities together. Everything in one of those companies runs through the owner: the foreman's week, the office manager's mood, the thirty-year employee waiting to see which way you'll go. Help that one person think more clearly and you've helped all of them. I think I can help the world by helping leaders be better leaders, and by helping work suck less.
"Dr. J has so much experience and knowledge around family business, business psychology, and regenerative leadership. It's a joy working with her and the Syncovate team. She continually provides fresh perspectives, and ways to better understand the complexity of the human brain, business and the world!"
Tyler KanczuzewskiVP of Sustainability, Inovateus SolarWhy a business psychologist?
Because in a company your size the business and the person running it were never two separate things, and most advice treats them like they are. My doctorate is in business psychology, which is a plain way of saying I study how a company and the people inside it behave as one system. So the work is psychology, business, and systems at the same time. Pull one out and you're only fixing part of the picture.
What it's like to work with me.
- I listen first.
Long enough that you'll probably say the thing you weren't planning to say.
- I don't take sides.
Not the owner's, not the team's, not the individual's. That's usually why people open up to me.
- Your experience counts.
If you built your leadership by doing it instead of studying it, you know more than you likely give yourself credit for. I'm here to help you see it clearly and use it better.
- We work on what happens next.
Insight is the easy part. The hard part is next Tuesday, when you have to do something with it. That's where the real work is, in what you do after we talk, so that's what we build toward.
The work takes whatever shape the situation calls for: one session to get a stuck decision moving, a year of monthly calls that become the one place you can think out loud, or me in a room with your team when they've stopped being honest with each other.
Let's talk.
I'm based in Niles, Michigan, and I'm in rooms across the South Bend–Elkhart region, Kalamazoo to Fort Wayne, regularly. For everything else, I work virtually with owners across the country.
Tell me what's happening. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit, and if I'm not, I'll point you toward who is.
Or email me a few times that work and we'll find a spot.