Barbara Steel is a Managing Director in EY’s People Advisory Services and serves as the Central Region Culture Leader. She built a reputation for her expertise having functioned both in industry executive human resource practitioner roles and in people advisory consulting leader roles with an emphasis in aligning people strategy to strategic business priorities for more than 20 years. She has devoted her career to leading organizations through organizational structure and redesign, culture transformation, organizational development, people experience, and organizational change management. Barbara is a published author and co-wrote the best-selling business book, How to Be Exceptional: Drive Leadership Success by Magnifying Your Strengths.

Barbara has extensive consulting experience in leading transformation engagements for culture, leadership, DEI, and performance for clients adopting a new business operating models, digital transformation strategies, and new go to market strategies. She has led culture change projects that include evolving the existing culture and embracing a new culture anchoring on behaviors such as client service, risk taking, inclusion, and learning agility. Culture change outcomes resulted in organizations being more market responsive, providing improved client experience, and delivering higher performance and teaming. In addition, Barbara has led engagements that integrated leader capability building, workforce development, organizational people experience, and change management to fully enable the expected culture change outcomes. In the area of performance management, she has led redesign efforts that enabled organizations to abandon dated, biased models for evaluating performance and reimagine human-centric designs which emphasized employee development and growth, career, and high performance grounded in growth mindset. Barbara is also known for her deep DEI expertise and has led numerous consulting engagements leveraging data analytics, research, and cognitive social neuroscience to formulate DEI philosophy and strategy, cultivate an inclusive culture, employ habit activation, and transform processes and systems to reduce cognitive bias and other systemic inequities. Her client engagements have afforded her opportunities to work with global organizations representing the financial, professional services, technology, oil and gas, utilities, healthcare, entertainment, and telecommunications sectors.

Barbara’s industry experience includes serving as Head of Human Resources, Head of Organization and Leadership Effectiveness and Head of Learning. Her practitioner approach emphasized using human-centric models that positively impacted business results in the areas of increased productivity gains, improved employee engagement, enhanced people experience, improved retention, and higher overall business performance. Her expertise and skill set include talent strategy, talent management, performance and rewards, organizational design, culture and change, leadership and learning development, DEI, and compliance. Barbara is a global speaker, presenter, and panelist for numerous clients, organizations, and conferences and is known for her engaging, dynamic style. In 2022, she will be presenting at the Future of Work Conference on the “Hybrid Return to Office Model.” Some of her prior speaking engagements include being a recurring speaker on culture, DEI, leadership and performance for the NeuroLeadership Institute (NLI). She served on a “Strategically Impact Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” panel with Dr. David Rock (NLI, CEO), award-winning journalist, Soledad O’Brien, Linda Leonard (Bristol Myers Squibb) and Ester Neznanova (NLI) at an annual NLI conference. She presented the “Neuroscience of Mitigating Bias” at a conference for the Conference Board. She’s also been a speaker for the Association for Talent Development and the Society for Human Resource Management in addition to being a recurring speaking at the International Leadership Association conference for the past six consecutive years.

Barbara is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Values-Driven Leadership at Benedictine University. She received her MBA in Organizational Behavior and Marketing from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a BBA in Management Science from the Loyola University of Chicago. Barbara is a certified executive coach in brain-based coaching and has coached hundreds of executive leaders throughout her career. She is also a lifelong meditation practitioner, a certified mindfulness meditation teacher, and a member of the International Mindfulness Teachers Association.