Speaking
Sheryl Rafferty speaks to leaders who are handing out responsibility — and to the people carrying it. Her material is operational, not inspirational: audiences leave with a diagnostic they can run on a real person on their real team, that week.
SIGNATGURE KEYNOTE - 45-60 MINUTES
What almost killed me in the safest place I ever worked
The Authority Audit
Photo by Mick Haupt on Unsplash
In 2007, Sheryl Rafferty ran intelligence support teams across Afghanistan. Fully resourced, genuinely dangerous, and — as she puts it — one of the sanest places she has ever worked.
Three years later, a defense contractor recruited her to rescue a $200 million contract in Orlando. They bought her out of an underwater condo, grossed up the taxes, gave her a significant raise, and told her the company was counting on her. They gave her everything except the authority to make decisions that could have spelled success. She had a heart attack at forty-nine, with no risk factors.
This keynote is the anatomy of the gap — the gap between responsibility and authority; the ninety-second diagnostic that would have made it visible to anyone who knew to look. Audiences score a real member of their own team before they leave the room, and the show of hands at the end is usually the most uncomfortable and most useful moment of the day.
Audiences leave able to:
Score any assignment on four levers of authority in under two minutes
Recognize the “dangerous four” — the partial-authority score where high performers quietly burn out
Distinguish an individual authority gap, which a leader can fix, from a structural one, which requires creating a role that doesn’t exist
Ask three specific questions before handing anyone an outcome to own
Built for: Executive teams · Leadership summits · HR and people-operations conferences · Healthcare operations leadership · Project and program management associations · Government and defense organizations
Formats: 60-minute keynote · 45-minute keynote · 90-minute keynote with live audit exercise · Half-day workshop
You Don’t Have to Be the Smartest Person in the Room
KEYNOTE - 45- 60 MINUTES
Leading experts when you aren’t one
Most of us were taught that you get good at a thing, you get better at it than the people around you, and then you get put in charge of it. That model works right up until your span of responsibility gets wider than your span of expertise — which, if you’re any good, happens early and keeps happening.
Sheryl has led eighty people who all knew more than she did, across six Marine Corps bases. She has stood in front of physicians and clinical directors as a non-clinician and asked to help run their work. She has managed engineers building Navy simulators, none of whose jobs she could have performed.
This talk names the second kind of authority — structural authority — and makes it teachable. It is for anyone who was promoted for their technical skill into a job where technical skill has run out.
Audiences leave able to:
Replace technical questions with risk questions, and understand why that single change protects both the expert and the outcome
Apply the operating principle: protect your experts from ambiguity, and protect the mission from your experts’ blind spots
Lead credibly without positional authority, rank, or domain expertise
Recognize that most organizational failures are not knowledge failures — the knowledge existed and had nowhere to go
Built for: Newly promoted leaders · Technical organizations · Engineering and IT leadership · Leadership development programs · Military transition and veteran professional audiences