Dr. Kristine grew up understanding that organizations succeed or fail on the strength of the people leading them. Her path took her through doctoral work in business and organizational psychology, into university classrooms where she shaped the next generation of business leaders, and into boardrooms and consulting engagements where she put that research directly to work. She built her practice, Shattered Glass Leadership, around one core belief: that when people truly understand how they are wired, how they make decisions, and how they affect the people around them, everything changes. Her work has always lived at the intersection of science, strategy, and the deeply human work of becoming a better leader.

Dr. Christine came to this work through a different door. Her career took her across nonprofits, corporations, startups, and educational institutions, through the full spectrum of what organizational life looks like when it is working and when it is not. She helped scale a business from five million to five hundred million dollars. She spent years as what she calls a fixer, walking into organizations in crisis and helping them find their way back to something healthier. And she spent seven years researching what she had witnessed throughout her career: the very real, very measurable cost of toxic leadership on the people inside organizations, with a particular focus on its impact on women. That research became her PhD. That lived experience became her framework for Radical Care Leadership.

Two different paths. Two different bodies of work. One shared conviction.

When we finally sat down together, the conversation did not feel like a business meeting. It felt like two people who had been solving the same problem from opposite sides of the same wall finally finding each other. The gap we had both spent our careers trying to close was the same gap: Leaders being promoted without preparation. Organizations investing in one-day trainings and wondering why nothing changed. People carrying the weight of leadership alone when they did not have to.

The Evolving Leader Fellowship is what we built instead. And both of us will tell you it is the work we were always meant to do together.

The Ch(K)ristines

Dr. Kristine Medyanik and Dr. Christine Perigen Fonner

The Evolving Leader Fellowship did not start with a business plan. It started with two doctors, decades of hard-won experience, and a shared conviction that leaders deserve better than being left to figure it out alone.

Between the two of us, we have spent decades inside organizations doing the work that most people never see. Coaching leaders through their hardest moments. Rebuilding teams after trust broke down. Sitting with executives who were brilliant at their jobs and quietly drowning in the human complexity of leading people. Teaching in classrooms, consulting in boardrooms, and facilitating in circles where real transformation was happening one honest conversation at a time.

Somewhere along the way we kept arriving at the same conclusion from different directions. Most leaders are set up to figure it out alone. They are promoted because they are exceptional at what they do and then handed a team, a title, and the quiet expectation that they will somehow know how to lead. No real preparation. No ongoing support. No community of peers navigating the same terrain.

We met as two educators, coaches, and organizational leaders who had both built careers around solving exactly that problem. And when we started comparing notes, we realized we were describing the same gap from two very different angles. Kristine from the world of organizational psychology, business strategy, and the science of what makes people and teams genuinely thrive. Christine from the world of transformational leadership, radical care, and the very real human cost of what happens when leadership goes wrong.

The Evolving Leader Fellowship was born from that conversation. Not as a course or a certification program or a one-day workshop that gets forgotten by Friday. As a genuine, ongoing leadership practice. A place where leaders can learn, reflect, grow, and be held accountable by a community that understands exactly how hard and how worthwhile this work really is.

We built what we wished had existed. And we are excited to share it with you. 

Here is something we tell every leader who walks into our programs, sits across from us in a coaching session, or shows up at a retreat wondering if they really are a leader:

Leadership is hard. Not in a way that should make you doubt yourself. In a way that means you are doing something real and you recognize the responsibility of holding other peoples' well-being in your hands.

In the outdoor adventure world there is a concept called "The Fun Scale."  What it explains is that outdoor adventurists, adrenaline junkies, athletes..."like to have fun to have fun, sure...but we LOVE to have fun to transform, experience something we have never experienced before, and come out the other side...different."

There are 3 kinds of fun and only one of them is simply F-U-N. Which one do you think leadership falls under?

Christine knows Type 2 Fun the way you know something you have lived inside for years. For five seasons she was a mountain bike stage racer, training six days a week for seven to nine consecutive days of racing. The hardest was JoBerg2C, a nine day, 900 kilometer stage race across South Africa. There were days on that course where everything hurt and the finish line felt like a concept rather than a real thing she was moving toward. She kept going anyway. Because the middle is supposed to be hard. The middle is where you find out what you are made of. It's where transformation happens. And on the final day, crossing that finish line after nine days and 900 kilometers of South African trail, what she felt was not relief. It was joy. Deep, earned, full-body joy. The kind you cannot fake or shortcut or buy.

That is Type 2 Fun in its purest form. And that, in every way that matters, is leadership.

Curious? Learn more.

Whether you are stepping into leadership for the first time, navigating the complicated middle of a role that is stretching you, or leading an organization that is ready to build something better, we have a place for you here.

Join the Fellowship A year-long leadership development experience built for leaders who want more than a one-time training. Monthly curriculum, live MasterMind sessions, and a cross-industry community that holds you accountable and celebrates your growth. The most accessible way to begin.

Work With Us If you are leading an organization that is ready to invest in its people in a meaningful way, we would love to explore what that looks like together. From workshops and training series to executive coaching, strategic consulting, keynotes, and retreats, we build every engagement around your organization's real challenges and genuine goals.

The first conversation is free. It is also, in our experience, where the best things begin.

Schedule a consultation.

Come to a Retreat If you are a woman who is ready to step away from the noise, reconnect with yourself, and invest in the kind of growth that actually lasts, our Rise and Thrive Women's Retreat was built for exactly that. An immersive, carefully facilitated experience in a setting that reminds you why presence, courage, and joy belong in leadership too.

Learn more at evolvingleaderfellowship.com

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