Our Team

Rachelynn Lee, Founder and CEO

Rachelynn (Rachel) Lee has built a career helping executives and teams unlock their potential. She has a track record of being a strategic thinking partner to leaders, enabling them to feel empowered and confident, generate insights, gain clarity in complex situations, drive transformational change, solve strategic problems and connect the dots. Rachel brings over 18 years of hands-on HR Business Partner experience supporting senior executives and their leadership teams in Fortune 500 and start-up companies. Rachel understands the common problems executives and their teams face in the ever-changing complex business environment we currently live in. Leveraging her entrepreneurial and design-thinking background, Rachel has developed and tested team effectiveness solutions and playbooks for Fortune 500 and Tech companies with high adoption and recommendation rates.

Rachel leverages her deep HR expertise to advise leaders on how to build diverse and successful teams that leverage team members’ strengths for high performance, without sacrificing compassion, teamwork and well-being. Rachel brings proven HR best practices and strategies from Fortune 500 companies focused on recruiting, onboarding, leadership development, diversity & inclusion, compensation, performance management, talent assessment and succession planning to attract, develop and retain the best diverse talent needed to drive business results. Rachel has worked alongside C-suite executives to help them amp up their leadership game so that they can successfully lead their teams through transformational change and critical business challenges. Rachel is an executive coach and trusted advisor with an aptitude to challenge thinking.

Rachel holds her Master’s Degree in Human Resource Management and Development with a concentration in Organizational Effectiveness from New York University, a Bachelor’s Degree in Design and Environmental Analysis from Cornell University, and a Leadership Excellence certification from American Express and Harvard Business School. She is a Certified Senior Human Resource Professional (SPHR), Certified Compensation Professional (CCP) and is currently pursuing her Executive Coaching Certification.

Rachel currently lives in Maryland with her husband and two children (ages 5 and 10). In her free time, she enjoys swimming, ice skating and biking with her family.

Mike Wagner, Senior Consultant

Mike Wagner helps leaders reward and motivate their people. His focus is making sure that pay is competitive and reinforces the behaviors leaders need for their strategies to be successful. He draws from his extensive experience in employee compensation, incentive design and performance management to design systems that get the right business outcomes. Mike also helps leaders understand themselves – how their teams see them, and what they can do to better engage them. He does this through employee surveys, coaching, and leading employee action teams, where employees design their own solutions to workplace challenges.

Mike brings 20+ years of HR experience to Leadership Wow, having worked at various Fortune 500 companies. Formerly he has been Vice President of Compensation and Risk Management at Fifth Third Bank and an HR Manager at American Express in New York City. Mike was also Director of Human Capital Metrics at AXA Equitable Insurance, where he managed the annual employee engagement survey. Furthermore, Mike has been a Human Resources consultant at companies such as Mercer HR Consulting in New York. His consulting work has spanned multi-national organizations to small start-ups.

Mike is a professor of management at the Lindner College of Business at the University of Cincinnati, where he is also Director of the Master of Arts in Human Resources Program. He has published his work on leadership and rewards in journals such as the International Journal of Psychology and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science. Mike earned his PhD in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University in New York City, and his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University.

Mike enjoys spending time with his family and playing music (guitar and vocals) in bands in the Cincinnati area. He also loves travelling (anywhere), running and all types of coffee.