Photo of a smiling, energetic-looking Karen Catlin wearing a mic-pack, about to give a keynote at Florida Polytechnic University. There's a crowd of people in the audience.

Speaking

Great culture isn’t built by chance—it’s built by consistent actions.
Karen Catlin delivers talks and workshops that are grounded in the fundamentals of effective leadership and her unique Better Allies® approach. She loves helping audiences learn everyday, repeatable steps to create environments where everyone can do their best work and thrive.

Her most popular talks are:

  • A Fireside Chat with Karen Catlin, Author of the Better Allies® Book Series

    Karen is known for creating an atmosphere of trust that allows leaders to show vulnerability and share their authentic experiences. In this candid and personal conversation, a leader from your organization sits down with her to explore the challenges employees face at work and how to foster a culture of belonging. (To make hosting a fireside chat straightforward, we provide suggested interview questions and scenarios. These can be customized to your unique workplace needs.)

  • The Better Allies® Way: Create the culture you want (and others need)
    In this interactive keynote, Karen introduces her 7 Ally Archetypes—Sponsor, Champion, Amplifier, Advocate, Scholar, Confidant, and Upstander—and explores practical ways anyone can step up to create a better workplace, where everyone can do their best work and thrive. Topics include:
    • Creating better meetings to unleash talent
    • Addressing bias employees can face when using AI
    • Providing effective feedback to support career growth
    • Building meritocratic and fair hiring practices

Planning on offsite (or onsite) for your team? She also lead workshops.

Photo of a smiling, energetic-looking Karen Catlin wearing a mic-pack, about to give a keynote at Florida Polytechnic University. There's a crowd of people in the audience.

Why Choose Karen?

Karen is a storyteller. She loves sharing stories from her research and her experience of working in the tech industry for 25 years. 

Karen loves research. She highlights relevant social science research on diversity, equity, inclusion, and merit-based approaches.

Karen builds connections. She engages individuals in conversations using techniques learned as a facilitator of women’s groups at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. With panelists, she stitches together their stories into an overall meaningful message.

Karen is all about action. People say her talks and workshops are the most actionable they’ve ever attended. She loves inspiring others to take concrete next steps.

Last but not least, Karen is a highly acclaimed public speaker. She has spoken at hundreds of events and has delivered a TEDx talk. To share her approach to developing and delivering presentations, Karen coauthored a book, Present! A Techie’s Guide to Public Speaking, with Poornima Vijayashanker. Over 600,000 learners have taken their LinkedIn Learning course about public speaking, which is part of Toastmaster’s certificate program.

Next Steps

Interested in bringing the Better Allies approach to your podcast, conference, event, or employee resource group meeting? Contact us at info@betterallies.com.