Culture creator, difference maker.

TLDR 😉

As the name suggests, I (Kristen Bakalar) am the face (and brains) behind kristenbakalar.com.  I’m a trusted speaker, facilitator, and practitioner and I bring important and nuanced messages to life inside organizations.  I develop talent, I find obvious and hidden ways to be more inclusive, I challenge the status quo, and I passionately protest mediocrity.  Oh, and I wrote a book. I’ve helped numerous organizations ‘up their game’ when it comes to their employee experience, and I’ve helped them reap the benefits of doing so. 

I have extensive experience with what I call the “fun” parts of HR: culture, DEI, talent development, strategy, learning & development, leadership, etc.  I’ve given entertaining and informative keynotes, I provide skillful facilitation, and offer a useful and pragmatic approach to often unnecessarily complex concepts.  Decoded: I make the hard stuff simple.

LinkedIn Profile.

The Long[er] Version:

Before devoting her work full time to her own pursuits, Kristen’s career consisted of increasingly complex roles, from Leadership Development Consultant to Interim Chief People Officer, with lots of excitement in between.  She has designed and delivered a myriad of programs for large companies such as Intuit and Prudential, medium-sized companies such as athenahealth, CarGurus, and Mendix, and small companies such as ProSound Effects.

Kristen has delivered keynote presentations to a variety of organizations, including Gallagher Bassett, SEI, SHRM, and The Institutes.  Her first DisruptHR talk, “To Inclusion and Beyond,” has become one of the organization’s most watched, and her second, “If You’re Privileged And You Know It, Clap Your Hands,” got her invited to speak in other DisruptHR arenas, as well. She has been the emcee at events like The Professional Women’s Roundtable, The Mendix Company Kick Off, and multiple DisruptHR conferences.  She consistently proves to be both entertaining and informative, the blend of which makes her a crowd pleaser.

She has key experience and a core competence around company culture: defining culture, operationalizing culture, and enabling companies to use their culture as the force behind their success.  She has conducted a number of ‘culture audits’ where she helps companies understand the gaps between what they say their culture is and what their employees live every day. She is also passionately stuck on creating more inviting workplaces, where everyone has an equitable chance to grow their careers and find true success…particularly the most marginalized among us.  Kristen believes the secret to success in this area is to use the power of the invitation: it is not good enough to say we’re “inclusive.”  Inclusion is passive.  She believes in building inviting cultures, where employees are proactive and deliberate about inviting difference.

Kristen is a total geek about all things human-related.  She has a master’s degree in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, she has decades of experience working with and around people, and a personal background well-suited for this field (you can read more about that in her book).  For fun, she reads the Harvard Business Review, she orders more books than she can read, and she studies human behavior everywhere she goes, which makes her absolutely no fun at a dinner party.  That thirst for knowledge sits at the core of who she is: always trying to learn more to be more.