Professional Development Videos
The Windshield and The Bug
Addressing a large gathering of automotive engineers and supply chain professionals, Susan A. Marshall uses humor to point out the necessity of recognizing limitations and managing setbacks.
How to Connect the Dots
In a world where we like to talk about connecting the dots, Susan A. Marshall challenges this notion by suggesting that most people do not capture the dots to begin with. Here she offers suggestions for capturing the dots and demonstrates how to connect them. She punctuates her comments with an admonition regarding rest.
Why we need YOUR point of view
Addressing a large audience of automotive professionals, Susan A. Marshall reminds us that each individual perspective represents a tiny part of a greater picture. By learning to share your point of view and challenging your colleagues, clients and business partners to do the same, you give innovation a helping hand.
Why YOUR Backbone Matters
The engine housed inside your cranium is far greater than any our best scientists and engineers could ever create because it is attached the engine in your heart. What do you need to get better at in order to elevate your confidence to take the risks the rest of us need you to take?
Create a Hero That’s Not YOU
Making others uncomfortable can be a career enhancer! Susan A. Marshall, Founder of Backbone Institute, LLC encourages you to find out where the tension points are in your organization so you can work through them, growing talent along the way.
What Do Your Competitors Fear?
Susan A. Marshall, Founder of Backbone Institute, LLC, challenges automotive engineers and supply chain professionals to consider the biggest fears of their competitors. The answer may surprise you.
Solving Problems: Where Do You Start?
Addressing an audience of business leaders, Susan A. Marshall, Founder of Backbone Institute, LLC asks, When presented with a problem, where do you start in your thinking? Do you take the presenting problem at face value? Step back to assess contributing factors in a bigger picture? Start with assumptions? Knowing your tendencies is the first step in strengthening your problem solving capabilities.
Where Do YOU Place Your Trust?
Speaking to a large group of Christian Women at Wisconsin Lutheran College’s annual Butterfly Brunch, Susan A. Marshall challenges the notion of placing our trust on worldly possessions or important people. There is only One in whom our trust is secure.
How to Gain Power and Influence
Speaking with an audience of business and community leaders at the distinctive Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee, WI, Susan A. Marshall outlines four ways to gain power and influence. She also speaks about the difference between power and influence.
A Picture of Life and the Power of Learning
Speaking to a large audience of engineers and supply chain professionals, Susan Marshall sets the stage for learning by describing life as we experience it.
Dealing With New Information
Susan A. Marshall asks a business audience how they deal with new, uncomfortable or conflicting information. As leaders, do they reject it? Consider it? Dismiss it as irrelevant to a desired outcome? Leaders build or destroy power and influence by the way in which they manage such information.
Do You Look Influential?
Susan Marshall explains how you present yourself in a situation can impact the way others see and judge you. Having a purpose implies power and influence.
What Is Your Track Record Made Of?
A record of many accomplishments connotes power and influence, says Susan A. Marshall. What about idea people? When ideas go nowhere, is failure the result? Here is candid advice for creating a track record to be proud of.
Quiet People Sometimes Most Brilliant
Susan A. Marshall, addressing a business audience, shares a familiar story of the one brave soul who offers an opinion in a meeting, with which others enthusiastically agree (and are let off the hook). She encourages leaders to engage the brains, questions and interest of all in order to achieve optimum results.
How Leaders Teach
Speaking at the Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee, WI, Susan A. Marshall encourages leaders to engage and learn from the experiences and perspectives of colleagues and employees to collectively turn gloom into opportunity. Intelligence, honesty and courage are hallmarks of power and influence.
Find a Different Way
Susan admonishes a group of automotive executives not to become bystanders or critics or succumb to bureaucratic helplessness. Find cracks in the system, new ways to share information or new people to bring into discussions in order to move forward.
The Power & Influence Equation
Susan addresses business leaders on the elements of power and influence, how to notice power as it moves around a room, and how to leverage their unique influence regardless of position or title.
Letting Go of Understanding
During a Butterfly Brunch keynote address at Wisconsin Lutheran College, Susan shares a humorous story of the day she finally let go her wish for understanding in order to live peacefully and joyfully.
Practice Your Way to Confidence
Susan shares advice on building confidence. It takes practice and baby steps first with trusted friends, then in larger groups until confidence infuses your daily work.
Teach People Goodness
Using Ghandi’s admonition to be the change you want to see in the world, Susan encourages her audience to build competence in their work, thereby enriching their confidence and enabling them to take intelligent purposeful risk. These elements–competence, confidence and risk taking–comprise Backbone.