Lynnette M. Adams
Dr. Lynnette Adams, PhD, known as The Joy Architect™, is a certified executive joy strategist, organizational heart healer and consultant helping leaders, founders, and changemakers build lives and organizations rooted in joy. She holds a PhD in Global Leadership and Change from Pepperdine University’s School of Education and Psychology, where her research focused on emotional wellness, equity, and joy-centered leadership practices.
With more than two decades of experience in nonprofit fundraising and leadership, Dr. Adams witnessed a troubling pattern across sectors: passionate, mission-driven professionals burning out in environments where toxicity is tolerated, bullies are mislabeled as leaders, and control is prioritized over care. Growth and professional development are too often treated as nuisances instead of necessities, while fear becomes a tool for compliance rather than courage. Rather than shrink to fit those spaces, she chose to reimagine them.
Through The Joy Architect™ and her nonprofit arm, The Joy Lab Inc™, she is redefining workplace culture from the outside in—with nonprofits still at the heart of her mission—because every person deserves to work in a space where joy, not fear, leads.
Her work is rooted in the belief that authenticity, not perfection, is the true key to joyful living. Having personally overcome depression, anxiety, and the unraveling of a life she once curated with care, Dr. Adams stands as living proof that sovereignty and success can coexist when we center true joy.
The Formula for Joy™ helps leaders intentionally cultivate joy as a strategy to mitigate trauma, foster authentic leadership, and build organizational cultures rooted in care, empowerment, and innovation—not control. It offers a research-based pathway for creating resilient, inclusive environments where both people and missions can thrive.
Through one-on-one coaching, organizational consulting, and soul-nourishing programs, Dr. Adams invites her clients and communities to trade burnout for balance, fear for faith, and pressure for purpose. She doesn’t just talk about joy—she helps you blueprint it, build it, live it, and lead with it, every single day.