Our Approach
Building human capacity where real work happens
The ServantEDGE works at the intersection of leadership, human capacity, and complexity. Our approach reflects how we orient to the work, how leaders navigate uncertainty, and how learning unfolds in practice. Together, these elements ensure our work is thoughtful, grounded, and focused on meaningful, sustained change.
Our Story
The ServantEDGE began with a realization: great leadership starts with alignment, between personal purpose, values, and professional impact.
Founder Stephanie Mikulasek is a former U.S. Diplomat, certified executive coach, and seasoned leadership development professional with decades of experience working across higher education, government, and organizational transformation. She had seen it repeatedly: organizations investing heavily in tools, technology, and training, yet still struggling with the human capacity to make them work.
The problem wasn’t resources. It was misalignment. Leaders disconnected from purpose. Teams without trust. Systems that undermined the very relationships they depended on. And no space, in the rush of daily demands, to pause, reflect, and rebuild.
The ServantEDGE was founded to create that space.
Based in Washington state, The ServantEDGE is a woman-owned firm partnering with organizations and leaders navigating complexity and rapid change. Through leadership development, coaching, and immersive experiences, we help rebuild trust, alignment, and clarity: the human foundations that allow strategy and systems to work.
Where technology accelerates, humanity must deepen.
Our Orientation
Three elements shape every engagement we design and deliver. Together, they reflect not just what we do, but how we think, how we listen, and how we show up. You don’t need to understand them fully before reaching out, but if you want to understand what makes this work different, this is a good place to start.
EDGE reflects how we show up to the work. It is our orientation toward curiosity, service, and learning at the edge of certainty. Not a methodology to be applied, but a posture to be inhabited. We believe growth happens when leaders pause, inquire, and engage complexity with humility rather than the instinct to control.
EDGE shapes everything: how we listen before we design, how we partner rather than prescribe, and how we measure success not by content delivered but by capacity developed. It is what makes The ServantEDGE different from training programs that sit outside real work and rarely take root.
The EDGE Principles
- Experiential: Real challenges in real contexts. Learning happens through direct engagement, not observation.
- Deliberate: Intentional design with meaningful outcomes. Nothing is incidental.
- Growth: Opening pathways and crossing thresholds. We work at the edges where change becomes possible.
- Embedded: Building capacity for sustained development. Transformation doesn’t end when the engagement does.
The BRIDGE Framework™
BRIDGE™ is our operating framework for navigating complexity. Where leaders and organizations face competing demands, unclear paths, and moments of disorienting transition, BRIDGE gives leaders and organizations a shared language for what they’re navigating and a deliberate path through it.
Rather than offering a linear process or a fixed set of tools, BRIDGE works with the actual texture of complex situations: the assumptions that go unexamined, the generational and cultural differences that create friction, the gap between what leaders intend and what teams experience. It helps individuals and groups move from confusion and reactivity toward coherence and intentional action.
When organizations work with BRIDGE, they gain more than a framework. They gain a shared vocabulary for navigating difficulty together, which reduces rework, strengthens alignment, and protects the time, energy, and trust that complex work demands.
The Transformative Servant Model™
The Transformative Servant Model™ (TSM) describes how our work unfolds in practice. It is not a product, not a workshop, and not something sold separately. It is the shared rhythm that runs through every ServantEDGE engagement, ensuring that learning is integrated, human-centered, and sustained over time rather than experienced as an event and quickly forgotten.
TSM moves through four phases that mirror how genuine transformation actually happens in people and organizations: Alignment, in which we establish shared understanding of purpose and context; Awareness, in which we surface what is actually happening beneath the surface; Action, in which new insight becomes deliberate, practiced behavior; and Absorption, in which learning is integrated and carried forward into real work.
These phases are not strictly linear. They recur, deepen, and build on one another across the life of an engagement. What TSM ensures is that no stage is skipped: leaders don’t move to action before they have clarity, and they don’t leave without a path to sustain what they’ve learned.
Our Team
The ServantEDGE is led by a founder and a team of experienced facilitators, coaches, and advisors who bring deep practical knowledge to every engagement. We steward the work with care: convening, facilitating, and walking alongside leaders as they navigate complexity. We don’t arrive with answers. We arrive with rigor, experience, and genuine commitment to the people and organizations we serve.
Stephanie Mikulasek
Managing Director and Founder
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A former U.S. Diplomat, Stephanie Mikulasek is Managing Director and Founder of The ServantEDGE, a company that designs and facilitates transformational international immersion experiences, executive coaching, and experiential leadership development. Drawing from decades of global leadership, academic scholarship, and immersive transformation work, Stephanie blends wisdom, wit, and depth to inspire leaders and teams to challenge the illusion of certainty, disrupt ineffective patterns, invite radical belonging, and rediscover what matters most.
Stephanie holds a Master of Public Administration in International Management and a Master of Arts in World Religions and Cultures, and is currently a PhD candidate at George Mason University researching how transformational leaders are developed through immersion experiences. A certified Executive Coach from Georgetown University and a member of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), she is also a certified Mindfulness Meditation Teacher trained under Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach. She has studied with Dr. Richard Schwartz, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Jim Dethmer, and faculty at Harvard University, and has lived, traveled, and worked in over 60 countries.
A frequent guest on podcasts, Stephanie is sought after for her engaging and dynamic keynotes and workshops. She publishes weekly on Substack and LinkedIn, and her forthcoming book addresses managing multiple generations in the workplace, including AI.
Core Collaborators
Samantha Mathis
Director, Learning and DevelopmentView Bio
Samantha Mathis is a global leadership, coaching, and learning development expert with more than 20 years of experience helping leaders, teams, and organizations thrive in complex, rapidly evolving environments. A retired officer of the Royal Air Force, she brings a rare combination of high-stakes leadership experience, resilience, and systems thinking to her work, forged across international development organizations, diplomatic services, government institutions, multinational corporations, and global professional services firms.
Samantha has designed and delivered leadership development programs across 35+ countries and six continents, leading multicultural teams and directing large-scale learning initiatives that give her first-hand insight into both the strategic and operational challenges leaders face. She is exceptionally skilled at building cross-cultural relationships and navigating the interconnected realities of today’s AI-enabled world.
Her Doctorate in International Education explored how leaders grow through virtual communities of practice, research that directly informs her evidence-based approach to leadership development, virtual learning design, and AI integration. As a certified coach, Samantha blends structured methodologies with immersive learning experiences that challenge leaders to grow, collaborate, and lead with greater self-awareness and cultural intelligence.
Margaret “Maggie” Weiss
Director, Strategic DesignView Bio
Margaret “Maggie” Weiss is a seasoned leadership coach and organizational culture consultant with more than 20 years of experience helping global corporations, government agencies, and high-stakes project teams strengthen collaboration, trust, and performance. She partners with executive leaders to guide human-centered transformation, including helping teams successfully integrate AI in ways that elevate, rather than replace, human creativity and contribution.
Maggie has worked with some of the world’s most demanding organizations, including Chevron, BP, Shell, Intel, Microsoft, AT&T, Johnson Controls, and BARDA within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Her work at the executive level focuses on the cultural shifts required for genuine innovation, cross-functional collaboration, and sustainable care for people and the environment.
Her approach draws on Adaptive Leadership, Appreciative Inquiry, somatic learning, and communication frameworks that coordinate action. Grounded in a belief that every person’s unique contribution matters, she creates high-engagement experiences that tap collective intelligence and produce results that are often surprising and always profound.
Donna Gandt
Principal Coach
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Donna Gandt is an executive and leadership coach and strategic advisor with more than 30 years of experience leading people, projects, and change. As a former Chief Revenue Officer and senior sales leader in the SaaS and professional services industries, she brings firsthand knowledge of the pressures, decisions, and dynamics her clients navigate every day, from managing high-performance teams to presenting in board rooms alongside equity partners and investors.
Donna’s coaching is grounded in empathy, authenticity, and a genuine focus on client outcomes. She helps leaders develop a confident sense of self, find deeper fulfillment in their roles, and build the clarity and inspiration to achieve their most important personal and professional goals.
A U.S. Navy veteran, Donna holds an MBA from Boston University, a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology, and a Certificate in Leadership Coaching from Georgetown University. She is a member of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and serves on boards supporting women’s leadership, entrepreneurship, and veterans’ organizations.
Monique Nathan
Director, Immersion OperationsView Bio
Monique Nathan is a global connector, international program manager, and operations specialist with a career built on bridging cultures, communities, and causes across the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Her work is rooted in service and driven by a deep commitment to building systems and partnerships that create lasting impact.
Monique’s international work includes coordinating earthquake relief in Nepal following the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, facilitating partnerships among local and international NGOs including One Heart World-Wide and BlinkNow/Kopila Valley, and founding a scholarship program for young women in rural Nepal that she continues to manage today. She has also led grassroots initiatives supporting Nepali artisans and worked across maternal and child welfare organizations on multiple continents.
Her broader career spans international program management, government, nonprofit leadership, and university recruitment, with a through-line of cross-cultural understanding and educational access. Fluent in Italian and Spanish, Monique brings to The ServantEDGE both the operational expertise and the lived experience of navigating complexity across cultures, exactly the spirit that defines our immersion work.
Monique holds an M.Sc. in Government from the London School of Economics and a B.A. in Political Science from UC San Diego.
Susan Ellison-McGee
Director, Marketing and Strategic CommunicationsView Bio
Susan Ellison-McGee is a strategic communicator, storyteller, and narrative architect with more than two decades of experience bridging worlds: government and grassroots, corporate and community, local and global. As Director of Marketing and Strategic Communications for The ServantEDGE, she shapes the organization’s voice and amplifies the ideas, stories, and leaders that inspire courageous leadership, human connection, and purposeful growth.
Her career includes senior communications roles with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the U.S. Department of State, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and international organizations working across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the United States. Susan has spent her career doing what The ServantEDGE is built to do: helping people see across difference, find common ground, and act with greater clarity and intention.
Susan has worked across four continents and dozens of cultures, helping governments, international organizations, and communities tell stories that build understanding and move people to action. From coordinating emergency response communications at the World Bank in Bangladesh to launching a digital storytelling campaign that reached 50 million Pakistanis, to crafting award-winning public health messaging for seven million Washington state residents in 30+ languages, her work has always been about finding the human thread in complex situations and pulling it into the light.
Susan holds an M.A. in Communication from Southern New Hampshire University and a B.A. in International Relations and Economics from George Mason University. Outside of work, she is an avid birdwatcher, environmental steward, and devoted companion to her border collie, Whammo.
