Our Approach
Building human capacity where real work happens
The ServantEDGE works with (mostly) women at the intersection of visibility and leadership. Our approach reflects how we orient to the work, how we navigate the hesitation and fear holding us back, and how learning unfolds in practice. Together, these elements ensure our work is thoughtful, grounded, and focused on meaningful, sustained results.
Our Story
The ServantEDGE began with a realization: too many women are not raising their voices – in the boardroom, in the publishing house, or on the stage – and we are all suffering by their absence.
The reason over and over? Because women self-edit before they give themselves a chance.
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 has seen it repeatedly and personally: women are not making the impact they deserve because they have absorbed the idea to stay small.
The problem is not a lack of talent or capability. The problem is fear to step into the leadership that happens when you publish a book, when you speak on a stage or podcast, when you walk into a conference room with confident presence. The cost to our daughters, our communities, our nation, and the world has been consequential. The need to create spaces for women to learn how to leap across the edges holding her back.
The SeravntEDGE was created to create that space.
We as a team recognized that we have the experience, wisdom, skills, and motivation to help women move from behind the curtain to defining the room: through their words on a page, to their voices on stage, to their presence at work.
Because we believe we will have a better, stronger, safer, kinder world filled with women’s voices out front, leading the way, unabashedly.
Based in Washington state, The ServantEDGE is a woman-owned firm. We hold a ton of certifications, degrees, recognitions, and awards that are nice but don’t matter nearly as much as we’re a group of compassionate, talented, smart women who have your back.
Your voice matters. We’re here to help you cross over the EDGE and into the spotlight.
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. This is not a methodology to be applied, but a posture to be inhabited. We believe shifts happen in the pause, inquiry, and engagement with humility.
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.
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 you face competing demands, unclear paths, and moments of disorienting transition, BRIDGE provides a shared language for what we’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 you intend and what others’ experience. It helps individuals and groups move from uncertainty and reactivity toward coherence and intentional action.
When organizations of women 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 offer, 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: we don’t move to action before we have clarity, and we don’t leave without a path to sustain what we’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 women as they unleash their voices into the world. 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 Development
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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.
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.
Susan Ellison-McGee
Director, Marketing and Strategic Communications
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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.
Monique Nathan
Director, Immersion Operations
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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.