LIBBY WAGNER / PRESIDENT

Libby is a trusted advisor to presidents, CEOs, and executive directors. Her work has shaped the cultures of numerous Fortune 500 clients, including The Boeing Company, Nike, Philips, SAP, Diageo, and Costco, and Keurig/Dr. Pepper. An award-winning former poetry professor and university faculty member, Libby holds a Masters of Fine Arts in Poetry and is a graduate of the prestigious Million Dollar Consulting® College—a perfect symbiosis for the poet pragmatist.

She was honored as a 2014 Nellie Cashman Woman Business Owner of the Year and quoted in the New York Times and The Harvard Business Review. Her monthly column, “The Culture Coach,” is a fantastic resource for thousands of business owners in the retail industry. She is the author of the Amazon best-seller, The Influencing Option: The Art of Building a Profit Culture in Business, poetry collections; Like This, Like That, and Somehow, and 2016’s What Will You Do With Your 90,000 Hours? The Boardroom Poet’s Thoughts on Work. Shop Publications.

In 2015, Libby released Harvest, a poetry-music compilation in collaboration with Irish musician Owen Ó Súilleabháin. In 2017, Libby released Now Just This, with Irish musician Owen Ó Súilleabháin. You can find her inspiring Tedx Talk, “Own Your Voice,” on YouTube. More about Libby.

DEAN HALLATT / PROGRAM MANAGER

Dean Hallatt is a Senior Resource Partner at Influencing Options® and an accomplished consultant and trainer based in Central Washington. Dean has worked extensively with groups and individuals representing all levels of an organization— with a targeted focus on maximizing the effectiveness of people, processes, and performance.

​Dean leads powerful workshops and seminars that help leaders effectively handle their most challenging personnel and organizational challenges. He specializes in targeting performance issues and guiding leaders on addressing them by asking for what they want with clarity and specificity. He helps leaders reinforce the actions and behaviors needed to move organizations into the future and create workplace cultures of commitment, alignment, and shared vision.

Dean is a Wagner Certified™ Master Trainer. He also holds Wagner Certification™ in Influencing with the Core Dimensions, Problem Solving & Confronting Without Conflict, Managing High Performing Groups & Teams, and Performance Conversations. These workshops, part of the Influencing Options® library of world-class transformational programs, have benefited tens of thousands of participants from all corners of the globe over the past 25 years.

​MARIA AGNEW / COACH + TRAINER

Maria is a Senior Resource Partner at Influencing Options® and a highly energetic and skilled facilitator. She helps organizations build a commitment culture by increasing trust and creating hope through developing skills for clear and respectful communication skills. The immediately useable skills she teaches are brought to life by practical, real-life examples.

​Maria is committed to leadership, strategy, management, and executive team development, inspiring individuals and organizations to create and sustain change for the future. She brings a complete toolbox to help organizations achieve task-related and interpersonal skills accelerating healthy culture growth and change.

Maria has a Master’s Degree in Organizational Development, emphasizing interpersonal development and accountability. She has a diverse background working within non-traditional organizations. Maria works with organizational cultural issues by doing various assessments and skill-building to help make proactive choices that help people thrive in their lives and work.

PHIL TYLER / COACH + TRAINER

Phil Tyler is a Senior Resource Partner at Influencing Options®. His greatest desire is to make the world a better place by helping professionals and individuals improve their relationships through better communication and increased trust.

Phil’s ability to promote and conduct the actual facilitation of the communication and relationship-building classes through a hands-on, personalized approach allows him to connect with his clients and serves to build lasting relationships. He specializes in helping organizations assess the areas of need for communication growth and reveal trust gaps. He also assists companies with the onboarding of newly promoted staff and executive coaching.

Phil has earned numerous accolades throughout his military career, including a Provost Marshall Award. During his tenure with the Spokane Sheriff’s Office-Jail Division, he was the first African American to be promoted to sergeant and lieutenant. He is the recipient of the Trilogy Award from FBI-LEEDA and was the first ’member spotlight’ for the FBI-LEEDA Insighter magazine.

FREDDIE BARRETT / COACH + TRAINER

Freddie worked in private sector sales and management positions for over 25 years before launching, Resilient Solutions, a Coaching and Leadership Development practice. Over the past 20 years, Freddie has worked with leaders and teams to identify personal and leadership strengths and develop interpersonal skills to expand healthy relationships and attain sustainable results.

Freddie’s coaching focuses on building leadership capacity in emotional intelligence, natural talents, and leadership competencies to inspire and motivate others while achieving results. Freddie provides executive coaching to the leader taking on a new team and works with the entire team to establish a foundation of trust, identify the team culture based on each individual’s natural talents, and improve the quality of conversations, which raises overall performance and effectiveness.

Freddie holds a Master of Arts in Applied Behavioral Science with an emphasis on coaching and consulting in organizations, a Bachelor of Science in Business Management, and is a Master Hudson Institute Certified Coach (accredited by the International Coach Federation). Freddie was part of Judith E. Glaser’s (author of Conversational Intelligence (C-IQ): building trust and getting extraordinary results) first group of coaches to be certified as a Conversational Intelligence (C-IQ) Coach.

Freddie is a Certified Facilitator of the Instinctive Drives System® (identifying natural talents and needs of a team) and The Extraordinary Leader (360-degree feedback program). Her love of learning and expanding the “toolkit” allows creative and innovative solutions for her clients.

ERIC BENSON / COACH + TRAINER

Eric Benson is a Senior Resource Partner at Influencing Options® and has been providing professional development to senior leaders, mid-level managers, supervisors, and front-line team members for over 25 years. As a facilitator, speaker, and coach, he’s seen the high and low performers, the motivated and the unmotivated, as well as the happy and the unhappy.

Since working with people across the spectrum of industry and position has convinced Eric that people possess a vast reservoir of untapped potential, he now concentrates his efforts on providing people with the keys for unlocking their full potential and achieving as never before. He does this at meetings, conferences, workshops, and retreats for government agencies, corporate clients, and professional associations.

Eric’s high-energy and first-rate people skills combine to engage people and create an interactive learning environment to accelerate growth and development. His commitment to converting the theoretical into the practical enables people with varying levels of education and experience to grasp the material and immediately apply it to their real-world situations.

Eric is an Authorized Partner for the Everything DiSC suite of assessments and has been certified as a facilitator with FranklinCovey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Leading at the Speed of Trust) and The Ken Blanchard Companies (SLII, formerly known as Situational Leadership II). Eric holds a B.S. in Industrial Technology and an A.A.S. in Personnel Administration.