Dr. Kristine Sickels spent two decades in corporate marketing, rising to SVP of Global Marketing for a $2 billion portfolio at Newell Brands, where she led a 200-person global team behind Crock-Pot, Calphalon, Rubbermaid, Mr. Coffee and Oster. She left to solve a problem she kept watching in those rooms: capable people going quiet at the exact moment their voice mattered most. Today she is CEO and co-owner of Mic Drop, which develops women into paid public speakers, and co-founder of the consulting firm C-Sweet. Her book, The Clearest Voice in the Room, comes out September 23, 2026 from Page Two for Mic Drop Books.

Q: You spent nearly two decades as a senior executive inside Fortune 500 leadership before starting over on your own terms. What was the moment you knew it was time to go?
KS: I can tell you the exact moment. I was in my car one night after work, and I heard myself say it out loud, to nobody: "You have to leave this job, and if you don't, it will crush you." By then I'd spent nearly two decades at Newell Brands, a company I'd relocated for four times, working my way up to senior vice president of global marketing, running a team of two hundred and a $2 billion portfolio of brands. On paper I had made it. But what that moment in the car was actually about wasn't a title or a promotion. Somewhere in the last stretch, I'd landed in a role where almost nothing fit. Not the culture, not how decisions got made, not what I was being asked to prize. Most days felt like working against my own grain, and I'd gotten so used to holding back what I really thought that I'd stopped noticing I was doing it. There's an old image I come back to, a frog in a pot of water that heats up so slowly she never thinks to jump. That night in the car, I decided I would not be the frog. I left on my own terms, and on my way out I finally said something I'd been sitting on for a while, that the company had almost no women in its C-suite and that had to change. I have never once regretted it.

Q: Your research centers on why capable women go quiet at the exact moments that decide their careers. Where did that idea come from?
KS: The idea came from a lifetime of watching, and from my own story too. I was an only child, raised by a single mom who taught me early to use my voice. I was the kid belting out Broadway show tunes in the school choir and getting my seat moved for talking too much in class. Speaking up came naturally to me, and my first corporate team happened to be full of outspoken, brilliant women, so I assumed that was just how work went everywhere. It wasn't. 

Over thirty-some years in the rooms where business decisions actually get made, I kept seeing the same thing, and it never sat right with me. Some of the smartest people at the table were women who said almost nothing. It wasn't for lack of ideas. They often knew more than the people doing most of the talking. Something else was keeping them quiet. I started calling it the Voice-Values Gap, the distance between what you believe on the inside and what you're willing to say out loud. Once I gave it a name, I saw it everywhere, and I knew I wanted to write about how to close it.

Q: You've identified patterns you call the "Seven Silencers." Can you describe one that most women would recognize?
KS: One almost every woman recognizes is "I don't want to take up too much space." We're taught to be accommodating, so passing the mic feels generous and holding it feels selfish. I've felt it myself. The reframe that changed things for me is simple. When you use your voice, you show everyone around you that it's okay to use theirs. A woman who stays quiet isn't making room for other people, she's modeling silence. If you want your teammates, especially the other women, to speak up, the most powerful thing you can do is go first. Share your idea, then genuinely pull others in. Ask what they think. Taking up space well doesn't crowd anyone out. It makes more room for everyone.

Q: You're deeply connected to this community. How does Seattle show up in your life and work?
KS: The Pacific Northwest is my other home. I'm active in the business community out here, including the Grays Harbor Chamber of Commerce, and I own two experiential retail stores, in Seabrook and Pacific Beach, Washington. I'm thrilled to be part of this community. The pace here is a little more reflective, and some of my clearest thinking happens in that quiet.

Q: What do you most hope a woman takes away when she reads your story?
KS: That being capable was never the problem. So many women carry a quiet worry that they haven't earned the right to take up space in the room yet, that they need to be a little more polished or a little more buttoned-up first. I want them to hear the opposite from me. For me, speaking up at work was never about being the loudest person in the room. It was about being the clearest. You don't have to perform a bolder version of yourself. You just have to close the gap between who you already are on the inside and what you let yourself say out loud. I wrote it in the book and I believe it completely. You can be heard without shouting. If one woman finishes my story and speaks up somewhere she would have stayed quiet, all of it was worth it.

Q: What is one word of advice you can offer to young women who want to reach your level of success?
KS: Most of us are taught to keep our heads down, do great work, and wait to be noticed. I did that for years. The real turning points in my career came when I stopped waiting and asked directly, for the role, for the raise, for the company to fund both of my graduate degrees, which it did. The worst answer is usually no, and no often just means not yet or not here. Silence is the only answer that guarantees you never get it.

Q: Can you tell our audience one of your most memorable moments of your career?
KS: I was a senior executive when the company brought in a coach to work with me. She sat across from me with my 360 review and handed me a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, the 1936 classic on getting people to like you. The message, delivered to a woman decades into a senior career, was basically: soften up. Which was rich. What made it memorable was the other coach I had at the time, someone I'd worked with for years. He read the exact same 360 and asked me a completely different question. He reminded me that my top values are candor, curiosity, and optimism, that I had chosen them on purpose, and that I'd said I wanted to be known as a leader who led with them. Then he asked, "So, are you going to lead from those values, or not?" That was the moment it clicked for me. How you lead is a choice. 

The room doesn't get to make it for you, and you don't have to shrink to fit it. One coach wanted me to change who I was so people would be more comfortable. The other reminded me I got to decide the kind of leader I'd be, as long as I let my values steer it. I chose to keep leading as myself. It's the clearest lesson I carry, and it's the one I give every woman who's ever been told to soften.

Q: At the start of your career, what do you wish you had known?
KS: Clarity is everything. Not clarity about what you want. Clarity about what you believe and what you're willing to say out loud. I spent years leaving meetings having said a version of what I meant, the safer version, the one that was easier for the room to hear. I thought the goal was to get better at reading the room. The real work I eventually figured out, was understanding why I was translating myself in the first place. That gap between what you believe and what you actually say at work is not a communication problem. It's a values problem. And it costs more than most people realize, for longer than they expect.

Q: Which woman inspires you and why?
KS: My mom. She got pregnant with me at nineteen, put her own college plans aside, and raised me on her own for years, working multiple jobs to make sure I had what I needed. She's the one who taught me to use my voice, and she's still my best friend and my loudest cheerleader. Everything I've built, I trace back to her. When people ask where my confidence came from, the honest answer is that she gave it to me before I was old enough to know what it was.

Q: What advice would you give to young women who want to pursue their dream and start a business?
KS: Know what problem you're actually solving. Not what you want to build, but what pain exists for someone else that you're uniquely positioned to fix. I spent twenty years in brand strategy, and most business failures I've seen aren't execution problems. They're founder-market fit problems, where someone built what they wanted instead of what a real customer needed. Talk to the people you think you're building for. Listen more than you pitch.

Q: What advice would you give to young women who want to succeed in the workplace?
KS: Stop waiting for your work to speak for itself. Promotions get decided in rooms you're not in, by people who need to be able to say something specific about your value. Not just that you're great, but what you do that no one else does. Giving them those words is your job. Not because you need to brag, but because if you don't, they'll fill the gap with something generic, and generic doesn't move you forward.

Q: What's your advice for women in male-dominated fields?
KS: The environment is real, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't. But I've watched a lot of women spend years trying to adapt to rooms that were never going to fully welcome them, softening their ideas, hedging, making themselves more palatable. The instinct is understandable, and over time it's corrosive. The work is getting clear on what you stand for and finding the words to say it directly. You can't translate yourself into belonging. You can only make your value impossible to ignore.

Q: After high school, where did you feel your career path would take you?
KS: Retail, honestly. I loved it, and coming out of college the dream was to run retail stores and operations. I got to live that out early, working for J. Peterman and Eddie Bauer, and that's what pulled me toward marketing. I fell for the consumer side of it, the products, and the craft of communicating with the people you're trying to reach. It's a funny full circle that today I own two experiential retail stores of my own. The thing I loved at twenty-two turned out to be the thread running through my whole career.

Q: Can you tell us how you manage your work-life balance?
KS: I don't think balance is truly attainable, at least not the way we picture it. What I aim for instead is presence. When I'm at work, I'm fully at work. When I'm home, I'm home, with my family and my friends, not half-checked into my inbox. Giving each space my full attention while I'm in it is the closest thing to balance, I've found, and it comes down to intention, choosing to show up on purpose wherever I am.

Five Things About Dr. Kristine Sickels

1. What's your favorite thing to do in your free time? 
Live music. I'm a lifelong Dave Matthews Band fan, a proud member of the Warehouse, and I've lost count of how many times I've seen them play. A festival with my friends is my happy place.

2. What's the most amazing adventure you've ever been on? 
For my fortieth, I took eight of my closest friends to Honduras, and it became one of the most special trips of my life. We went horseback riding, saw how coffee is sourced and how chocolate is made, did yoga, and spent real time with the locals. Somewhere in all of it we learned so much about the culture and about each other. It's the kind of trip that changes how close you feel to the people you share it with.

3. What were you like in high school? 
Chatty enough that teachers kept moving my seat, in the choir and the musicals, and usually singing something. Honestly, not much has changed.

4. What's your big passion? 
Building rooms where women speak up. I spent years looking for those rooms and rarely finding them, so now I try to make them, through the book, the coaching, and Mic Drop.

5. What song would you sing at Karaoke night? 
I love jazz, so you'll usually catch me singing a jazz standard with my own spin on it.