The human side of business is where strategy succeeds or stalls.
Unlock Your
Organization's Potential
with Natalie Baumgartner, PhD
A Dynamic, Data-Driven Speaker
and Advisor on What It Takes to Turn Investment, Ambition, and Change into Sustained Enterprise Performance.
AS SEEN ON
Welcome!
Natalie Baumgartner, PhD
Partner and Chief Research Officer
Contemporary Leadership Advisors
Natalie has spent her career helping organizations convert strategy and investment into sustained enterprise value.
A trusted advisor to C-suite executives, investors, founders, and boards, she has worked across industries and geographies, including extensively with private equity-backed, family-owned businesses, and Fortune 100 enterprises - navigating growth, transformation, and leadership transition. Her background in strength-based psychology brings a rigorous, research-grounded lens to assessing where leadership, talent, and organizational effectiveness are enabling the value creation plan, where they may be introducing execution risk, and what targeted interventions will produce the greatest impact.
Natalie serves as a Partner and Chief Research Officer at Contemporary Leadership Advisors (CLA), where she advises private equity and family office investors, C-suite executives, and boards of directors on the leadership and organizational dimensions of business performance. She brings nearly two decades of consulting experience across these audiences, helping organizations navigate growth, transformation, leadership transition, and other moments of significant enterprise consequence.
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Her perspective is also informed by firsthand experience as both a founder and public-company executive. Natalie co-founded and scaled RoundPegg, a venture- and private equity-backed HR technology platform designed to measure and manage organizational culture. Following RoundPegg’s acquisition by Achievers, she served as Chief Workforce Scientist and launched the Achievers Workforce Institute, dedicated to empirically understanding the factors that shape a powerful employee experience.
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Together, these experiences give her a distinctive perspective as an advisor, founder, and public-company executive, with firsthand understanding of the demands of growth, investment, acquisition, and value creation.
Natalie serves on multiple boards and as an advisor to a wide variety of organizations. She is a regular contributor to Forbes and Harvard Business Review, among other press outlets, and is a popular speaker–engaging audiences on topics related to culture and the employee experience, including a TED talk on the importance of culture fit. Natalie has the great fortune to live in Boulder, Colorado with her family and when she’s not nerding out on business research you can find her on the ski slopes with her husband and three little girls, just trying to keep up.
Culture Practice Solutions
Our unique system aids organizations in refining, validating, or altering their culture and core values. It achieves this by crafting a blueprint or tactical plan to ensure the delivery of an optimal employee experience.
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We achieve this by conducting workshops and offsite events that integrate culture into the employee experience. This approach allows us to pinpoint opportunities for advancing organizational culture and providing a cohesive employee journey.
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Click here to learn more about Culture Practice Solutions & to schedule a free consultation.
Speaking
Unlock your Organization's Potential with Natalie Baumgartner
A Dynamic Speaker on Building Culturally-Aligned, Connected, and High-Performing Organizations
Step into a new standard for business performance! With her deep understanding of the power of data-driven organizational culture and employee engagement, Natalie crafts personalized sessions to meet a wide variety of needs. Through thought-provoking keynotes and interactive workshops, she will guide your audience on a journey of cultural discovery, fostering deep connection, a sense of belonging, and collaborative excellence. Get ready for an unforgettable experience as Natalie takes the stage, leaving your participants inspired, empowered, and equipped with actionable insights to drive meaningful change. Embrace the extraordinary by booking Natalie Baumgartner
as your dynamic speaker or workshop facilitator today!
Natalie’s Guiding Principles
All of Natalie’s keynotes and workshops are designed based on four guiding principles.
Results-Focused: Grounded in data-driven insights designed to deliver impact
Immersive: Participant engagement throughout the session
Personalized: Tailored to unique needs at this precise time
Actionable: Practical tactics, not just theory or fluff
Topics
Natalie's Most-Requested Speaking Topics
Natalie is delighted to offer a range of her most-requested workshop and keynote topics to inspire and empower your conference attendees or organization.
The dynamic sessions listed below represent just a glimpse of Natalie’s expertise.
Rest assured, Natalie can tailor her presentations and workshops
to address your specific needs.
The Leadership Bet: Selecting CEOs and Executives Who Can Deliver
When a critical leadership hire underperforms, the cost extends far beyond the individual. It can slow the value creation plan, destabilize the executive team, and erode confidence among investors, boards, employees, and other key stakeholders. This session explores how investors, boards, family owners, and enterprise leaders can assess whether a CEO or key executive has the capabilities, judgment, cultural alignment, and team fit to succeed in the specific context they’re entering.
The Risks the Numbers Don’t Show: Leadership Due Diligence That Protects the Investment Thesis
Strong financials can obscure leadership gaps, team instability, and organizational constraints that emerge only after a transaction, leadership transition, or major strategic shift. This session offers a rigorous approach to identifying the leadership strengths, execution risks, and critical talent decisions that could accelerate or undermine the investment thesis or enterprise strategy, whether during diligence, immediately following the LOI, or at another consequential inflection point.
When the Executive Team Becomes the Constraint: Turning Leadership Friction into Performance
Even a strong strategy can stall when the executive team is divided, decision-making is slow, or trust has begun to erode. This session examines how investors, boards, family owners, CEOs, and enterprise leaders can address friction among founders, executives, family and non-family leaders, or newly combined teams and build the trust, clarity, and operating discipline required to deliver together.
M&A Integration: Preventing Leadership and Culture Friction from Eroding Deal Value
Many integrations begin to lose momentum long before the financial impact becomes visible. Key talent departs, leadership teams remain divided, and unresolved cultural differences slow execution. This session presents a data-driven approach for investors, boards, and enterprise leaders to identify those fault lines early and translate them into focused integration choices that protect performance, sustain momentum, and accelerate the value of the combined enterprise.
When AI Adoption Stalls: Building an Organization Ready to Execute
The greatest barriers to AI adoption are often not technological. They are leadership alignment, trust, decision-making, accountability, and deeply embedded ways of working. This session explores how investors, boards, and enterprise leaders can diagnose what’s preventing adoption from gaining traction and strengthen the conditions required to move from isolated experimentation to sustained business impact.
Hybrid Work Under Strain: The Performance Cost of Disconnection
When hybrid and distributed teams lose connection, the impact extends well beyond engagement. Decisions slow, execution fragments, accountability weakens, and critical talent becomes harder to retain. This session offers investors, boards, and enterprise leaders a research-grounded approach to restoring trust, cohesion, and collaboration while protecting speed, standards, and performance.
Reel
Praise
Press
Company culture is the foundation of an organization and is defined by the values, goals, attitudes and practices shared by employees. It is a living, breathing entity, and its growth and vibrancy is dependent on the level of care and attention that an organization provides.
The Power And Importance Of Making Every Employee Feel Welcome In A Hybrid Environment
As hybrid work becomes the norm for many in 2022, it’s critical that new employees feel welcomed, or introduced to and incorporated within, the organizational culture and community — whether at home or in the office. Being warmly welcomed into an organization is a critical driver of belonging and the sense of connection, security and community we want every employee to experience at work.
Given that two-thirds of employees are likely to job-hunt in 2022, most organizations are thinking more deeply about how to engage and retain existing employees. Between the ongoing pandemic, a worsening labor shortage and a workforce on the edge of burnout, there is a massive need to focus on retention and providing employees with support and recognition.
Let's Talk About
What's At Stake
Whether you’re navigating a consequential business challenge, considering support for a leadership team or organization, or exploring a speaking engagement, Natalie brings rigorous research, real-world experience, and a distinctive perspective to the issues that most directly shape performance.
Let's start with the moment you're facing and what success needs to look like.