Leading Through Chaos with your Sanity Intact
Katie Thornton, KGT Consulting
Portand, Oregon, USA
Drawing from decades of real life experience leading teams through emergencies, chaos and crises, Katie Thornton will share strategies for leading through the unknown while maintaining your integrity and your own well-being.
Session Description
The past 5 years have given organizational leaders abundant opportunities to strengthen our ability to adapt and persevere through challenges and ambiguity – and the constant crises, social upheavals, and “new normal” have taken a heavy toll on leaders at all levels.
Staff, customers and clients all look to organizational leadership for answers in challenging times. There is a great deal of pressure for leaders to do the impossible: to have answers when circumstances are unknown and beyond our control; to satisfy all needs when there is no realistic way to do so; to be transparent in decision-making while facing a culture of constant hyper-critique.
All of this takes a heavy toll and threatens to drive good leaders towards burnout. In 2025, we find ourselves entering a new era of even greater threat that requires us to fight for our own survival, for our social infrastructure, and for our collective future.
How can we lead within this fight in a way that allows us to maintain our truth, choose the right battles, use our resources and power strategically, remain adaptable, and maintain strength and resilience?
In this workshop, Katie Thornton will share strategies for leading through the unknown while maintaining your integrity and your own well-being. Participants will work through a series of scenarios drawn from decades of real life experience leading teams through emergencies, chaos and crises.
Participants will test their theories, share their expereinces, and develop a personal focus for strengthening their ability to lead through resistance and towards resilience.
Presenter Bio
Katie Thornton has been a nurse for over 15 years. She began as an addiction specialty nurse running clinical operations at Oregon’s largest methadone clinic. She transitioned after 6 years to Multnomah County where she ran the refugee health screening program as nursing supervisor for the state of Oregon. She now happily resides as the regional manager for Multnomah County’s North and Northeast Health Centers; the Northeast Health Center is the county’s historically black American health clinic.
As a biracial woman with an 8 year old son, Katie strives every day to make sure the world she leaves to her sons is made a little better than the one she inherited, this is the long standing tradition of her family.
Katie supports clients through coaching, leadership training, culture change initiatives and more, bringing decades of hands on experience as a service provider and a seasoned executive to support leadership teams in creating cultures of care for their staff and their patients/clients/customers.
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