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.

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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.

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.

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.

About

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.

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.

Click here to learn more about Culture Practice Solutions & to schedule a free consultation.

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Culture

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!

Speaking

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.

Topics

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

"Natalie is a “go to” for me whenever I need help me with my personal development, building high performing teams; and as a speaker on leadership and culture. Natalie’s insights and tools were invaluable and helped me lead a team through a tricky culture merger. She helped us identify the current state, areas of alignment and also gaps in both cultures as we worked to identify the culture we wanted to create. We were able to have authentic and values centered conversations to lead change and purposefully implement a culture that lead to high performance. Natalie is a thought leader and speaker who can translate important concepts in a way that inspires action. Natalie is on my speed dial and should be on yours as well!"

-Bill Rock, C-Suite Executive in Travel and Leisure Industry

Press

Change Is The New Normal: How To Build A Resilient Workplace

Change happens constantly in the workplace. It can be large-scale, such as a merger or acquisition, or a day-to-day change like a new tech system for a sales team. Add to that the increased mobility of U.S. workers: Achievers, the company I work for, surveyed 1,724 employees and found that 74% of North American employees planned to look for a new job last year.

Build a Culture That Aligns with People’s Values

Candidates are seeking workplaces where they can intertwine their beliefs with those of the company, and work together on a common vision of purpose and success. As leaders grapple with how to recruit top candidates and retain employees, they must rethink how they’re shaping and building a culture that unites people around a common cause. Great culture should provide continuous alignment to the vision, purpose, and goals of the organization.

Creating An Inclusive Culture: Five Actionable Ways Leaders Can Foster A Greater Sense Of Belonging

Most business leaders today agree that providing an inclusive workplace—that is, one in which employees feel valued and accepted without reservation—is critical in ensuring both employee and business success. Achieving this goal, however, is more challenging than it appears at first glance. Designing and delivering on the promise of a truly inclusive workplace requires securing both buy-in and commitment across the entire organization, which is a daunting task.

‘Quiet quitting’ isn’t really about quitting. Here are the signs.

The term is a bit of a misnomer, because quiet quitters aren’t walking away from their jobs. Instead they’re renouncing hustle culture, quitting “the idea of going above and beyond at work,” as TikTok user zaidleppelin said in a July post that has amassed more than 3 million views and helped popularize the phrase. The trend is resonating strongly with those Gen Z and millennial knowledge workers fighting to rewrite the rules of the workplace.

When You Need To Revamp Company Culture (And How To Do It)

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.

Want to end quitting in place? It takes more than ‘thank you’

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.

PRESS

Press

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.

Get in touch

The human side of business is where strategy succeeds or stalls.

Natalie Baumgartner, PhD

Culture Practice Solutions

Download The Culture Formula Now

Unlock your Organization's Potential with Natalie Baumgartner

Natalie’s Guiding Principles

Topics

Natalie's Most-Requested Speaking Topics

The Leadership Bet: Selecting CEOs and Executives Who Can Deliver

The Risks the Numbers Don’t Show: Leadership Due Diligence That Protects the Investment Thesis

When the Executive Team Becomes the Constraint: Turning Leadership Friction into Performance

M&A Integration: Preventing Leadership and Culture Friction from Eroding Deal Value

When AI Adoption Stalls: Building an Organization Ready to Execute

Hybrid Work Under Strain: The Performance Cost of Disconnection

Reel

Praise

Press

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