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"Practice makes progress. Constructive makes catchy."
Platinum Pivot mantra
Table of Contents
Our Mission
Our Mission
Platinum Pivot is on a mission to help STEM professionals reprogram their inhibition habits with new reflexes that boost safety, wellbeing, and belonging in the workplace.
There are many valid reasons why we acquire or reinforce inhibition habits. These habits can be a barrier to being heard, understood, or included at work even in positive interactions. By practicing tiny, constructive behavior pivots grounded in self-worth and the platinum rule ('treat others as they want to be treated'), we build muscle memory that leads to more respectful & inclusive interactions every day – for ourselves and for others.
Are you an aspiring ally, upskilling upstander, and/or evolving empoweree? We're here for you! Learn these terms and more at the glossary.
Our Purpose
Our Purpose
Platinum Pivot is committed to serving mid-career STEM professionals who value healthy, inclusive workplaces but who might struggle with constructively asserting themselves or standing up for others. We are an empowerment engineering project for STEM professionals, by STEM professionals – with hopes our work is useful beyond STEM, too.
Platinum Pivot believes that:
💠 Everyone has as much a right to workplace psychological safety as to physical safety.
💠 Context matters when practicing respect and inclusion.
💠 Being a learner takes courage.
💠 Empowerment skills are only effective with consistent, active practice.
💠 Human relational skills belong in STEM, period. Because STEM should serve humanity, not the other way around.
As mid-career professionals ourselves, we have decades of experience in scientific, engineering, and tech environments and their mandatory workplace trainings. Too often these trainings lead with worst-case examples and end with ambiguous calls to action that leave little room for subtlety, too much room for confusion. and almost no sustained follow-through. Lean In's Women in the Workplace report shared similar observations from their 2024 survey respondents: "a rise in inclusion training is not leading to employee action." (LeanIn.org, 2024).
Don't get us wrong: we are 10000% here for the end of harassment and discrimination. In our real-life experiences, one annual workplace training does not a safe culture make.
Without meaningful and contextual examples, living practice, coaching, or ongoing discussion & feedback, how can anyone be expected to 'just know' how to:
offer a moment of dignity, not dismissal?
be assertive, not aggressive?
lean into humility, not hubris?
And oh yeah, do all that while also completing deliverables on time, managing stakeholders, improving the bottom line, etc.??
Platinum Pivot is here to offer clarity and community. We won't have all the answers, and your contexts will vary...but your experiences matter, and we are learning with you. Peer practice creates a rising tide of belonging and self-empowerment. For all of us, and not just at work.
Our Values
Our Values
Platinum Pivot was founded on and operates by these values.
Curiosity: We're at our best when we get to exhibit and receive respectful curiosity. We recognize that staying curious when faced with the unknown or the uncomfortable takes intentional practice.
Psychological Safety: "Team psychological safety [is] a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking" (Edmondson, 1999). We value both physical and psych safety as prerequisites to allow awesome performance to emerge.
Whole-Human Excellence: Most workplaces already have high standards for technical excellence. We value a more holistic definition of excellence that also recognizes the mental, social, and emotional reality of being a grown-ass human.
Service Mindset: We are servant leaders who recognize that leadership is a responsibility to be in service to others rather than be served by others (Brown, 2025).
Our Founder
Our Founder
Sharon Torres is an emerging expert for psychological safety and empowerment practices in STEM workplaces. For two decades she has worked with multiple century-old companies in defense, aerospace, and energy to deploy organizational transformation, improve product outcomes, build and train technical communities, and unleash safer, healthier team cultures that outperform expectations. She holds an MS in systems engineering and a BS in physics from the Johns Hopkins University, is a Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP), and is a former Registered Agile Coach.
Sharon is widely regarded by STEM professionals for her 20 years as an award-winning systems engineer and enthusiastic nerd for agile principles and emotional intelligence. Her writing about the intersection of these domains has been featured in INCOSE's practitioner magazine, INSIGHT. As the Founder and Executive Director of Platinum Pivot, Sharon helps people struggling with inhibition habits to experience the liberating power of constructive assertion reflexes for greater safety, wellbeing, and belonging.
Origin Story
Origin Story
Platinum Pivot is built on a body of work that began way back in 2017, but the really exciting stuff snowballed a few years later.
While working as a systems engineering practitioner, the founder started recognizing a critical gap in empowerment behaviors and emotional intelligence skills that kept impeding performance on teams developing complex defense and energy systems. Over the next seven years she began researching, testing, gathering data, and gaining advocacy experience.
On a fateful day in early 2024, a group of high school students on a field trip to STEM workplaces that employed a high percentage of women posed a tough question: "How do you speak up in a space where you're the 'only'?" The discussion raised uncomfortable truths, and sparked an idea for a new initiative.
emPower Rangers launched in April 2024 as a workplace initiative with a small crew of volunteers and a vision to actively champion for empowerment through approachable, easy-to-practice ways. The ePR crew celebrated notable wins for psychological safety, mentorship, and leadership buy-in over the following six months, and delivered a highly-regarded interactive talk about bite-sized empowerment practices. They began expanding their footprint and ambition into the next year, laying the foundation for a successor project.
By summer 2025, Platinum Pivot was founded to evolve the mission and be of greater service to more people. And the work continues...
References
References
- LeanIn.Org. (2024). Women in the Workplace 2024, 10th Anniversary Report (p. 21). https://leanin.org/women-in-the-workplace
- Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
- Brown, B. (2025). Strong Ground (p. 102). Random House. New York. https://brenebrown.com/book/strong-ground/
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