PUBLIC RELATIONS KEYNOTE SPEAKER AND TEAM FACILITATOR
You Keep Everyone Else’s Story Straight. Mark Helps You Prioritize Your Story.
Mark helps companies build healthy, confident, and connected PR, communication, and marketing teams.
Trusted by the most influential organizations in the world
“Mark Mohammadpour firmly subscribes to the time-proven Service Profit Chain: happy and healthy people = happy and healthy clients = happy and healthy businesses. Partnering with Mark is an asset for any company looking for a strategic employee well-being partner to reduce turnover and help meet their business objectives.”
— Kim Sample, PR Council
About Mark
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A former communications executive who led teams and strategy for global brands like Adobe, Microsoft, and Samsung, Mark lost 150 pounds and has kept it off for more than a decade. Mark combines Fortune 50 leadership experience with certified health coaching expertise.
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Mark comes from inside the communication world; he spent years as an executive at Edelman and Weber Shandwick, leading award-winning campaigns for global brands.
He is a PRSA Fellow and APR, which means when he walks into a room of PR and comms professionals, he’s not an outsider explaining their world back to them. Instead, Mark’s a colleague who’s been in the same pressure-cooker environments, managed the same impossible client expectations, and lived through the same cycles of always-on culture that make this industry as challenging as it is rewarding.
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His Keynote Conversations blend full attendee engagement, actionable insights, and current research. Today, his most requested topics, Leading with Empathy, The Buoyant Leader, and Lead a Culture of Well-being, are built around one conviction: healthy employees are your greatest competitive advantage.
Who We Help
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The Goal: Reducing client and employee burnout.
The Result: Growing client relationships and budgets, and a reduction in team turnover.
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The Goal: Breaking down silos and leading with empathy during crises.
The Result: Improved cross-functional trust and a culture that attracts top talent.
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The Goal: Providing high-value, "sticky" leadership tools for your members.
The Result: Increased member loyalty and high-impact conference programming.
What We Address
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We address a profession that’s been undervalued and misunderstood for decades.
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Practitioners who are tired of being “the spin team” in the org chart.
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Young talent leaving the field before they’ve seen what it can be.
“We brought Mark back because his custom interactive workshops take to heart the specific challenges we want to tackle. He brings data to back up every single one of his key points and recommendations. He ensures his programs are respectful of the needs of the staff as well as adherence to our HR policies.”
— Weber Shandwick
How to work with Mark:
Keynote Conversation
Start here. An interactive session built around your people and your industry. 45 to 90 minutes, steeped in data, insights, humor, and engagement. Your audience walks out with something they can use the same day.
Team Facilitation & Offsites
Go deeper. Mark sits with your team and names what's been going unsaid. No personality colors. No letter types. No trust falls. Half-day, full-day, or multi-day. You leave with a written plan: decisions, owners, dates.
The Three-Point Impact™
Make it stick. Mark’s signature program. Includes one keynote, a facilitated team session, and follow-up coaching on priority topics. This is a long-term investment that builds healthy, confident, and connected teams.
Keynote Conversation Topics
Mark's Leadership Keynote Conversations
Lead a Healthy Culture of Well-being
Makes well-being how your team works, not a perk you offer.
Communication teams spend their careers protecting other organizations' cultures. The ones with the lowest turnover and the strongest creative output figured out that the healthiest culture in the room should be the one they built for themselves. Your leaders examine their everyday habits, from how they debrief after a crisis to how they protect thinking time, and decide together, in the room, which one to change first.
Why now: 52% of employees say their employer doesn't support their well-being in meaningful ways, and 69% of executives admit they have no way to measure it. (Deloitte)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Build the healthiest culture in the room for their own team first
- See how small leadership choices build or drain a team
- Debrief, onboard, and protect thinking time so they build energy
Pairs with The Team Culture OS workshop: Your leadership team walks through its own crisis debriefs, onboarding, and thinking-time habits, decides which one to change first, and agrees on how they will handle after-hours requests from then on.
The Buoyant Leader
Turns pressure into the thing your steadiest leaders are known for.
PR and communication professionals are trained to stay calm in a crisis, for their clients. Under their own pressure, most push harder. The most effective leaders apply that same steadiness inward, and their team feels it. Your leaders work through a real high-pressure moment together and practice staying clear enough to make the right call.
Why now: 77% of workers reported work-related stress in the past month, and 57% reported effects tied to burnout. (American Psychological Association)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Stay steady with a routine that holds up when the news cycle turns
- Read stress as a signal and use it to make a sharper call
- Use calm as a competitive advantage, because judgment under pressure is the product
Pairs with Leading with Clarity and Calm: Live scenarios and group coaching for your leaders, so the frameworks get practiced before the next crisis brief rather than heard once and filed.
Lead With Empathy
Turns empathy into a performance skill leaders can use under pressure.
This industry teaches empathy to everyone else. Practiced inside the agency or the department, it is what separates teams that produce great work from teams that produce it until they burn out. Your leaders practice it live, in the moments where it is hardest: the perfectionist running on empty, the account lead who has stopped pushing back, the colleague carrying the emotional weight of always-on work.
Why now: Employees with highly empathic senior leaders report being innovative 61% of the time, compared with 13% under less empathic leaders, and 76% report being engaged, versus 32%. (Catalyst)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Understand the pressure, perfectionism, and emotional weight the team carries
- Practice internally the empathy this industry teaches everyone else
- Apply specific moves the same day, before the next crisis brief lands
Pairs with The Empathy in Action workshop: Paired conversations and real scenarios from your own accounts, where leaders practice hearing the thing underneath what was said.
REWORK: The Future-Ready Leader
Rebuilds the leadership playbook for a modern workplace.
Communication professionals are experts at managing everyone else's reputation, crisis, and narrative. The ones burning out fastest are the ones who never turned those skills inward. Your leaders rebuild their approach around capacity instead of always-on output, then test the new moves together before taking them back to the team.
Why now: Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025, the second straight annual decline and the lowest level since 2020. Manager engagement has dropped nine points since 2022. (Gallup)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Lead around capacity, not always-on output
- Turn the strategic clarity they give clients toward their own people
- Build the motivation a team creates together instead of waiting for it
Pairs with The REWORK Sprint workshop: Leaders map where their energy actually goes, pair up with someone outside their own account team, and leave with a 30-day plan they run together.
Work in Sunlight
Reconnects your people to the work and to each other.
People go into this work because they love it: the storytelling, the strategy, the way a well-crafted message changes how the world sees something. Between client demands and an always-on culture, that gets hard to find, and it costs teams their best people one quiet exit at a time. We name where belonging is slipping and build the habits that rebuild it, right there in the room.
Why now: Employees with a strong sense of belonging show 56% higher job performance and 50% lower turnover risk. (BetterUp)
Your leaders walk out able to:
- Measure performance by energy, clarity, and connection
- Recognize great work and protect creative space, so people feel seen as individuals rather than billing units
- Run a shared, team-built plan for staying connected
Pairs with The Sunlight workshop: Small daily habits, regular peer check-ins, and a connection map the team builds together, so belonging survives the stretch between launches.
The four facilitation topics teams ask for most.
Offsite themes
For teams seeking clarity and purpose
Gets everyone pointed at the same thing, in writing, before anyone leaves the room.
When you're merging departments, onboarding new leadership, or pivoting strategy, an offsite is the fastest way to align the compass. Mark designs the session to cut through the confusion instead of talking around it.
Why now: Across 124 organizations, only 28% of the executives and middle managers responsible for executing strategy could name three of their company's strategic priorities. (MIT Sloan Management Review)
- Before: A short team pulse and a conversation with you about what success looks like in the first 90 days.
- The offsite: Working sessions on mission, vision, and values that end in a written Team Charter.
- After: A 30/60/90-day plan and a follow-up guide, so clarity turns into consistency.
What the team walks away with:
- A shared purpose everyone can say out loud.
- Clear norms for how decisions get made and communicated.
- A foundation for a culture of well-being and accountability.
Pairs with the Lead a Healthy Culture of Well-being keynote and The Team Culture OS workshop. The keynote makes the case that culture is built through everyday decisions rather than programs. The offsite writes your team's version down. The workshop keeps it running after you leave the room.
For teams building confidence
Builds the nerve to say the thing in the room where it gets decided.
Your people are good at the work. They're less sure of themselves in the room where it gets decided. This offsite builds the confidence to speak up, be heard, and be trusted, under pressure and in front of leadership.
Why now: 61% of employees say they regularly watch colleagues stay silent rather than share a differing opinion, and 45% name psychological safety and trust as their single biggest concern at work. (Radical Candor, 2026 workplace report)
- Before: Each person picks a real upcoming conversation they're nervous about: a board update, a budget ask, a hard piece of feedback.
- The offsite: Hands-on work on influence, storytelling, and presence, ending with a live practice round in front of the group.
- After: A 90-day follow-through plan with checkpoints, so the confidence sticks.
What the team walks away with:
- Practical tools for influencing at the executive level.
- More clarity and more calm when the stakes are high.
- A team that speaks up before the hallway conversation.
Pairs with the The Buoyant Leader keynote and Leading with Clarity and Calm workshop. Confidence rests on calm. The keynote gives the room the idea and the language for it. The offsite gives them the reps, in front of people whose opinion they care about.
For executive teams and boards
Gets the hard decision made instead of postponed again.
High-stakes environments require high-stakes conversations. Mark provides the neutral structure that keeps dominant personalities from hijacking the agenda, so the hard decisions actually get made.
Why now: In a survey of more than 1,200 managers, 61% said at least half the time they spend making decisions is wasted. The strongest predictor of fast, high-quality decisions was the presence of real debate. (McKinsey & Company)
- Before: An anonymous team survey to surface where communication is strong and where it's stuck.
- The offsite: Structured work on the real disagreements, ending in a written operating agreement for how this team decides.
- After: A leadership health check at 30 and 60 days to track whether it's holding.
What the team walks away with:
- Faster decisions, because the real disagreement finally gets said out loud.
- Shared expectations and healthy boundaries.
- Stronger trust, transparency, and performance.
Pairs with the Lead With Empathy keynote and The Empathy in Action Lab workshop. Hard decisions need people who can hear the thing underneath what was said, especially when they disagree. That is the exact skill the keynote introduces and the lab drills.
For teams rebuilding after a hard year
Repairs the trust the last year quietly cost you.
A reorg. A round of layoffs. A leader who left. High turnover that never quite stopped. When a team has been through it, the work keeps going, but the trust doesn't. This offsite is about the health in healthy teams are wealthy teams: psychological safety, well-being, and repairing what got fractured.
Why now: Across 146 companies that conducted layoffs, employee confidence in the organization fell nearly 17 points, and engagement took 12 to 24 months to return to where it had been. (Harvard Business Review)
- Before: An anonymous pulse on how people are actually doing, plus a private conversation with you about what's been hardest.
- The offsite: Honest conversation about what the team has been carrying, guided so it stays safe and productive, ending in agreements on workload, boundaries, and how this team looks after each other.
- After: A well-being check-in at 30 and 60 days, so the agreements hold instead of fading.
What the team walks away with:
- Permission to say what's been hard, and a team that can hear it.
- Shared boundaries around workload and availability.
- A team that trusts each other again, and a leader they trust to keep it that way.
Pairs with the Work in Sunlight keynote and The Sunlight Series workshop. The keynote reconnects people to the work and to each other in a way that feels safe because everyone is in it together. The offsite repairs what got fractured. The series keeps belonging alive through the months that follow.
Any theme below can run as a half-day, full-day, or multi-day offsite. Mark builds the agenda around what your team actually needs.
“I brought Mark in to speak at a conference of CEOs and senior executives; one of the toughest, most discerning rooms you can put a speaker in front of. And he owned the conversation. He can stand in front of a room full of chief executives and challenge their thinking with total confidence, then make every leader in that room feel personally seen. Mark is not merely a speaker you hire; he's a partner you keep.”
— Elizabeth Edwards, Founder and President, Volume Public Relations
Contact Mark about your event.
Email Mark at mark@chasingthesunpdx.com, call him at 360.609.1077, or fill out the form below.
Mark will respond to you within one business day.
Frequently asked questions:
How can agencies reduce senior-level churn and burnout?
By stopping treating burnout as the cost of doing business. Mark helps agency owners set real boundaries around after-hours client requests and the channel fatigue that comes from living in four inboxes. Protecting senior people's energy steadies client relationships, because clients notice when the team keeps changing.
Why is empathy a strategic tool for communications leaders?
Because it is how you find out what is actually happening before it becomes a problem. Leaders who understand what other teams are carrying break down silos and keep everyone aligned during a crisis, which is exactly when silos cost the most. It is a reputation-management skill, not a soft one.
How do you make this stick for teams that live crisis to crisis?
By making it part of how the team already works rather than something extra. Through the Three-Point Impact, teams write their own rules of engagement for how they communicate under pressure. That survives past the week everyone forgets the keynote, because it is the thing they reach for during the next launch.
What is the link between workplace culture and creativity in marketing teams?
Creative work suffers when people are running on empty. Teams under constant stress produce safer, more predictable work, because the mental room good ideas need has been spent somewhere else. A team that feels safe enough to pitch the risky idea produces better work and gets to it faster.
Do you work with agencies as well as in-house communications teams?
Yes, and the problems differ. Agencies are usually dealing with churn and always-on client demands. In-house teams are usually dealing with being the last to know and the first blamed. Mark has led both, at Weber Shandwick and Edelman, and builds the session for whichever room he is in.
How much does a PR or communications keynote cost?
The fee depends on the format, the length of the session, travel, and whether you add a follow-up workshop or coaching. Email mark@chasingthesunpdx.com with your date, location, and audience size, and you will have a number back within one business day.
