She'll Make You Do the Hard Thing

Jane Sommers-Kelly has a gift for getting people to think through and do the thing they've been avoiding.

Not through pressure. Not through a PowerPoint. Through a room full of peers who won't let you put it off for another month.

Jane is the founder of JSK Leadership, and for the past several years she's been running CEO peer groups for small and medium business owners — face-to-face monthly meetings where each person brings their hardest strategic challenge to the table. They talk it through with peers from completely different industries. They commit to what they're going to do before next meeting. And every meeting starts the same way: here's what I did. Here's what I didn't. Here's what I learned.

One member told her recently, "Jane, the only reason I took action is because of this damn meeting. I have so much on my plate, I would have kept putting it off." She takes that as ROI — having them pick one challenge from the fifteen crossing their desk every month and actually getting traction on it.

The power of the groups isn't just accountability, though. It's what happens when CEOs from completely different industries question and ideate on each other's problems. Jane shared that last week a member said, "Wow. I would never have thought of that… What you said from a completely different industry opened my mind. I'm going to try this for my industry." That kind of cross-pollination — ideas jumping from manufacturing to tech to healthcare — is what makes the groups more than a check-in. It's a thinking room.

Jane also consults with leadership teams, and the model she's built is intense by design. She interviews each team member one-on-one, then brings the whole group together for a four-hour workshop. In that room, she gets them to agree on the top three patterns that aren't working and commit to how they will together adjust these patterns going forward. Then she observes their meetings for three months and makes sure the commitments actually stick.

One team she worked with realized three people dominated every conversation while three others stayed quiet. The fix wasn't a lecture or a personality assessment. The talkers committed to asking, "Do you have anything to add?" It sounds small. But Jane has learned that the small, specific commitments are the ones that change the temperature of a room. "It's them owning the change," she said. "It's not coach Jane who's going to make them do it. Each leader learns to gently coach their peer, for mutual benefit."

And she has a particular courage that most consultants don't. She'll call out the leader in the room — the one who hired her — when that leader's behavior is part of the problem. She'll ask, in front of the whole team: How might you change? That takes nerve. But that's where the real shift happens, and Jane knows it.

At the core of all of it is a framework she's refined over decades: Ask, Listen, Respect. It sounds deceptively simple. But it requires leaders to stop performing expertise and start getting honest about what they've been avoiding.

Jane earned that ability to read a room by spending most of her life being the new person in one. She grew up moving between countries, and when she landed at Hotchkiss, a Connecticut boarding school, she was the outsider. She won a Morehead-Cain Scholarship to UNC Chapel Hill — a school she'd never heard of before a nomination from her boarding school brought her down for an interview. She flew to North Carolina with a classmate, already accepted to Princeton, thinking there was no way this would work out.

"I met a southerner with a deep accent," Jane told me, "and she beat me at basketball and was smarter than I was. And my false perceptions totally changed."

She said yes to Chapel Hill. Her classmate did too. And after he spent thirty years as a CEO of three companies, he retired — right back in Chapel Hill. "It was a life-defining flight for both of us," Jane said.

After graduating, she spent six years as a VP at J.P. Morgan on Wall Street — and it was there that her identity as a self-described "business geek" took root. "I like the fact that our financial advice actually helped the company and its leadership team do what they knew they should do," she said. "It wasn't just, we're earning a margin, yep, good, next client. You get to know the business." That orientation — caring about what happens after the advice and funding is given — has shaped everything she's done since.

She earned her MBA at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France. She and her English husband — also a UNC alum — married in Chapel Hill and moved to France together the very next day. From there it was Prague, where she ran the Bankers Trust country office for six years and birthed both her sons. Then back to INSEAD for nearly a decade, where she became the managing director of Exec Ed and INSEAD Online — one of the first virtual executive education platforms — and led programs for multinationals like Shell and Anheuser-Busch. Then Duke Corporate Education for ten more years, designing leadership programs for companies like Caterpillar and HSBC.

Through all of it, she kept noticing the same thing. The classroom was valuable, but it wasn't where the real change happened. The real change happened in the follow-up — when a leader had to sit across from Jane and say, out loud, what they were actually going to do differently. "I saw the ROI of the one-on-one," she said. "The individual said, 'Yeah, that had a lot of impact. I was able to apply it at work.'"

That realization is what eventually led her to launch JSK Leadership and go out on her own.

Every move in Jane's career was a recalibration. New country, new culture, new room to read. "Every time you're in a new environment, you learn to read people," she told me. She talked about what it's like to grow up international — surrounded by people from everywhere — and then land in a place where every other kid had known each other for twelve years. "You're the odd one out," she said. "That was a real shock for me. To go from everybody's different, that's the norm, to we're all supposed to be this way."

That experience of constantly being different is what drew her to leadership work in the first place. "I think that's why I went from finance into leadership," she said, "because I had lived it, experienced it. And both have business impact." Not as a theory. As a matter of surviving and progressing.

Through all the globe-trotting, Chapel Hill kept pulling the family back. Both of Jane's sons chose UNC over every Northeast school she pushed. Her eldest, Robert — a three-time All-American for the Tar Heels — played pro tennis for a year, spent five years in corporate New York, and then chose to come back and coach tennis at Carolina over an offer from Columbia. When I asked Jane why Chapel Hill, she said it simply: "It is a place of diverse people without the urban intensity. Quality of life is high and there's smart people here."

Jane just moved to Meadowmont — twelve days ago, boxes still everywhere, labels mostly useless. She found her laptop battery cable and considered that a victory. She's been in the Chapel Hill area for nearly twenty years, and the town has had its hooks in her family even longer than that.

When I asked her what keeps her doing this work — the peer groups, the team consulting, the hard conversations — she didn't talk about cash flow. She talked about watching a CEO realize the hard conversation was worth the discomfort. She talked about teams going from wasting time in meetings to feeling genuinely productive. About a business owner saying, "My daily life will be better if I enable Ricardo to do his job better. Even selfishly, I can see why I should do it. Not just to be nice."

That's the thing about Jane Sommers-Kelly. She doesn't teach people to lead better because it sounds good on a slide. She gets leaders to see that their own daily lives get better when they think through their impact on others and decide how they want to adapt. And then she makes sure they actually do it.

Learn more about JSK Leadership: Website: jskleadership.com Email: [email protected] Specialties: CEO peer groups, team consulting, leadership coaching Certifications: MBA (INSEAD), PCC-ICF, GTCI Team Coaching