Founder & Principal

I am T.J. Winn, the founder of Forging Leadership. Most of what I know about building teams and developing leaders I learned by doing it, not by reading about it, and that shapes how I work with every client.

I have spent more than twenty years leading and developing people. It started in the military, where developing others is not a side project, it is the job, and where I learned what leadership looks like when the stakes are real. Later, as the HR leader at a company through nine years of fast growth, I helped drive the people strategy behind its expansion from $250,000 to $9 million in revenue, including rebuilding how we hired so we stopped losing good candidates to a slow process. That stretch taught me more about what actually works than anything since.

At some point I wanted to understand why the things I had seen work actually worked, so I went and studied them. I hold a Doctor of Business Administration in organizational leadership, along with an MBA and a bachelor's in business, and my research looked at how hiring processes break down and what it costs an organization when they do. That work was recognized by SHRM. The combination is the point. I am a practitioner who has done the work and a researcher who has studied it, so what I bring to a client is neither guesswork nor theory borrowed from a book.

I also teach business and leadership as an adjunct professor, which keeps me honest. There is no faster way to find out whether an idea holds up than to explain it to a room of people who will tell you when it does not.

Through Forging Leadership, I help small and mid-sized businesses build the ability to hire strong people and develop them into leaders, not by doing it for them, but by building the systems and skills their own teams can run. I believe good leadership is built, not born. It is forged through experience, honest feedback, and a willingness to keep growing. If that is the kind of work you are after, I would like to help.