Synergy’s 2025 Leadership Forum, held earlier this month in Chicago, brought together emerging leaders from across the country for a three-day deep dive into emotional intelligence, feedback, and accountability. Designed to foster meaningful peer connections and personal growth, the session blended expert facilitation, small group mentorship, and hands-on learning.

Day 1: Leading with Emotional Maturity

The forum kicked off with an impactful workshop from Vanessa Kiley, who challenged attendees to examine their leadership from the inside out. Her core message? Who you are is the root of how you lead. She encouraged attendees to become both inwardly sound and others-focused, reinforcing the idea that what leaders do flows from who they are.

Using Pixar’s Inside Out as a metaphor, Vanessa walked the group through the six core emotions, joy, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise, and how they impact our leadership presence. Emotional maturity, she explained, means welcoming these emotions and learning to work with them, not against them.

Key takeaways included:

• Emotions often pass in six seconds, and leaders benefit from pausing before reacting, like dropping the rope in a tug-of-war.

• Introverts think to speak; extroverts speak to think, understanding this helps build stronger teams.

• Leaders must recognize the full humanity of their team members, when you hire someone, you hire the whole person.

• A triggering event doesn’t define you, but your reaction might, so build in that critical moment of pause.

Day 2: Turning Feedback into Fuel

Day two focused on 360-degree feedback, a powerful tool used to gain perspective from direct reports, peers, and supervisors. Prior to the forum, each attendee received a customized report with feedback from their teams. Vanessa guided them through interpreting the results with openness and curiosity.

She emphasized the value of both positive and developmental feedback, encouraging leaders not to brush past the praise. Often, the things we’re told we’re great at are the things others most value, but we may overlook them ourselves.

Her message was clear:

• If you’re ever going to be great, focus on what you’re already doing well.

• Feedback reveals how others experience you, even if it’s hard to hear, it’s a gift.

• Three truths about receiving feedback:

  1. People care enough to give it.

  2. They trust you won’t retaliate.

  3. They believe in your ability to grow.

Vanessa also connected the feedback process to the Johari Window, highlighting how the forum helped attendees expand their self-awareness, especially in areas that might be blind spots.

In the afternoon, attendees took on the Tradewinds Challenge, a fast-paced, team-based activity designed to test leadership assumptions, communication, and adaptability. Halfway through, the rules shifted, mirroring the unpredictability of real life in the mechanical industry.

Key lessons from the game included:

• “Processes and roles need to be clearly defined.”

• Leaders must trust in things outside of their control and lean on others, even when the path isn’t clear.

• Individual contributors may need to step aside to let others shine or speed up progress.

• Our instincts in the game often mirror our behavior in business, do we step up, step back, or check out?

Day 3: Owning the Path Forward

The final day centered on accountability and real-world leadership challenges. In their mentor groups, attendees shared wins and struggles, working through barriers to success and outlining personal action plans for change. Conversations were candid and practical, covering topics like delegating responsibility, navigating difficult conversations, and recognizing when perfectionism gets in the way.

Each attendee left with a concrete next step to bring back to their company, something tailored, actionable, and rooted in self-awareness.

Want to learn more about Synergy’s upcoming events?
Visit synergysolutiongroup.com/events to explore upcoming training forums and peer group opportunities.