Dr. Cheri O’Nan is a leadership development and psychological safety consultant with more than 20 years of experience helping organizations improve performance by strengthening how leaders lead and how teams engage.

Her work is grounded in evidence-based research demonstrating that leaders and teams operating in psychologically safe environments consistently outperform those that do not. Recently, new breakthroughs at the intersection of traditional leadership development best practices and equine assisted learning caught Dr. O’Nan’s attention as a way to create sustainable, learning experiences with high impact. The resulting SafetyLeads™ working sessions integrate proven leadership development approaches with an equine-assisted experience, creating a distinctive, high-impact learning environment that leads to meaningful and lasting behavior change.

Dr. O’Nan holds a Doctorate and Master’s degree in Organizational Leadership and a certificate in Organizational Development. Her doctoral research, Employee Engagement, Brain-Based Psychological Safety, and the Sales Professional, examined the measurable impact of leadership behavior and psychological safety on engagement and business outcomes.

Earlier in her career, she worked in finance and technology sales, where she observed firsthand that performance challenges were rarely driven by strategy alone, but by leadership behavior, trust, and clarity under pressure. That insight shaped her focus on practical, behavior-based leadership development.

Over the course of her career, Dr. O’Nan has partnered with Fortune 50, 100, and 500 organizations, linking priorities such as execution, engagement, and retention to leadership capability and behavior change. Through SafetyLeads™ , she delivers development that is not only understood intellectually, but felt, remembered, and applied.