ABOUT.
I’m Michelle Cantor.
Most of my clients are good at the work.
I help them get just as good at leading it.
How I Got Here
I spent eighteen years at Accenture. I ran operations for a $500 million global consulting practice, led inclusion and diversity strategy for a 1,600-person organization, and spent most of my career there working on change — how organizations move, and why they so often don't.
What I noticed, over and over, was that the people having the hardest time were usually the ones who were best at the work. They were the ones who had been excellent at something specific and then found themselves responsible for other people. Nobody had taught them that part. Nobody teaches anyone that part.
I started Volar in 2017 to do something about it.
Volar means “to fly” in Spanish. I studied the language at Michigan, and I named the company that because the point of the work is movement — not insight for its own sake, but the thing that happens after.
The Part That Isn’t On My Resume
I've been married thirty years. I have three kids, all grown now. Somewhere in there I also had a career that asked a great deal of me, people at home who needed me, and a calendar that never once looked reasonable.
I didn't balance it. I don't think anyone does. What I did was make choices on purpose instead of by accident, which turned out to be the only version of this that actually works.
That matters to the work more than it sounds like it should. A lot of the leaders I coach are somewhere in the middle of the same math: a role that's growing, people who need them, and a sense that they're doing all of it at seventy percent. I'm not going to tell them how to fix that. I am going to tell them it's possible to do it with intention rather than perfection, because I've done it.
Credentials
MBA, Indiana University Kelley School of Business. BA, University of Michigan.
ICF Associate Certified Coach. Certified Diversity Executive. Certified practitioner, Everything DiSC and The Five Behaviors. Leadership Oakland alum.
Named a 2023 Crain's Detroit Business Notable Leader in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion.
Based just north of Detroit.