Clinical expertise meets corporate impact

The Founder

Rhonda Gipson-Willis

Founder and Lead Facilitator, MSW, Certified Leadership Coach

Rhonda Gipson-Willis is a former licensed therapist turned leadership development trainer. After more than a decade inside corporate training rooms, she came away convinced that most leadership programs were solving the wrong problem. Teams were being taught communication frameworks when what they actually had was an unaddressed trust breakdown. Leaders were handed feedback models when the real issue was that nobody felt safe being honest with them.

She founded Skylight Leadership to close that gap. The clinical training gives her a different starting question. Not what skill is missing, but what is actually driving this behavior, and what would have to change for it to stop.

That approach has held up across more than 30 organizations, from grassroots nonprofits with $1 million budgets to Fortune 500 manufacturers exceeding $2 billion in annual revenue, in education, healthcare, child services, economic development, and industry. Several of those relationships have run for the better part of a decade, which she considers the only endorsement that counts. Her facilitator rating from Notre Dame's cohort sits in the range the Net Promoter benchmark defines as world class.

Her work is strength based and direct. She will name what she sees, including when it is uncomfortable, because teams do not change based on findings nobody was willing to say out loud. The goal of every engagement is a team that can hold these conversations without her in the room.

• Master of Social Work, former licensed therapist
• Certified Leadership Coach
• More than 10 years of corporate training experience
• 30 or more client organizations across six sectors

In the Room

What a session actually looks like

Sessions are discussion led rather than presentation led, because people do not change how they lead by watching slides. Participants work through real situations from their own jobs, practice the skill in the room, and leave with something they can use that week. The skills carry: participants consistently report using what they learn at work and at home, because communicating clearly, handling conflict, and setting boundaries are not workplace skills. They are life skills that happen to show up at work.