Member since November 2026
Raquel Daniels
C-Suite HR Executive · Keynote Speaker · Moderator
Raquel Daniels is a C-suite executive with 25+ years of HR and international leadership experience. She has held senior roles at The Pokémon Company International, where she reported to the CEO, Health Care Service Corporation and Southwest Airlines. Today she is the founder of Raquel Daniels Consulting LLC, where she advises CEOs and executive teams as an HR advisor and fractional Chief People Officer. She has interviewed high-profile talent including LeVar Burton, Alison Hammond, Sir Lenny Henry and Dr. Moogega Cooper. Raquel holds an M.S. and B.A. from the University of North Texas, is SHRM-SCP certified and completed the Wharton CHRO Program. Raquel is a businessperson first. She knows how to move people at scale and build relationships at scale for mutual benefit.
Raquel speaks on:
• Culture as a Catalyst: treating culture as the way work gets done, with metrics and bottom-line impact.
• Talent-to-Value Architecture: building and keeping high-performing teams in volatile markets.
• It's All in Your Head: lessons from golf on mental toughness and performing under pressure.
• Inclusion as a Leadership Superpower: bringing together people's unique skills to deliver shared results.
Areas of expertise: culture and organizational health, talent strategy and development, inclusion, employee relations, conflict management, and executive presence.
Raquel's passion is helping employees, teams and leaders see what's possible when they work better together. She believes everyone has untapped potential, and she gives audiences practical tools to unlock it in themselves and in the people around them.
You all remember Charlie Brown and the football.
Lucy holds the ball. Charlie Brown backs up, takes a deep breath and tells himself, this time, this time I've got it. He runs full speed. And at the last second, Lucy pulls the ball away, and he lands flat on his back. Again.
We laugh because we've all been there.
You've prepared for the big meeting. You know your material. You walk up to the moment and you're ready to kick. Then a comment, a look, a moment of silence in the room, and something shifts. You hesitate. You stumble over the point you've made a hundred times. You walk out of that room mad at yourself, because you knew better.
And here's what I've learned. Most of the time, nobody pulled the ball. Lucy was in our own head.
I see it on the golf course all the time. One bad shot, and if I let it, it follows me to the next tee and the one after that. The swing didn't change. My head did.
That's what today is about. It's all in your head, and the good news is that means you get to decide what happens next.
I didn't start in HR. I started in marketing.
My job was to understand what customers valued, build systems around it, and measure what moved the business. And I was good at it. But one day I had to be honest with myself. Yes, I could do marketing. I just wasn't passionate about it.
What lit me up was the people side: watching people and companies find success together. So I made a move a lot of people didn't understand. I stepped into inclusion work. For a long time, I hesitated to talk about that part of my story. But that work is what brought me here, and you dance with the one that brought you.
Inclusion was my entry into how organizations really operate: talent, structure, operations, global people leadership. At Southwest Airlines, I helped change how leaders got promoted, moving from who you knew to posted roles and formal panels across a 70,000-person company. At The Pokémon Company International, I reported to the CEO, and for 18 months I shared people leadership with our CFO while the company was without a CHRO.
So when people ask what I do, here's my answer. I'm a businessperson. I know how to move people at scale, and how to build relationships at scale, so that everyone benefits.
Here's what all of it taught me: people don't rise to their goals. They fall to their systems. When the system works, people work better together, and that's when they start to see what they're capable of.
That's still my passion. It's why I started my firm, and it's why I'm standing here today: to help you work better together and unlock the potential you already have.
The higher you rise, the farther you get from the people doing the work. By the time information reaches you, it's been filtered, summarized and softened. In a world that changes this fast, that distance is a risk you can't afford.
Drawing on her years in the C-suite reporting to CEOs, Raquel shows executives how to close the gap. Leaders learn to go where the work happens, because dashboards show what happened and the front line tells you why. They learn to make it safe to tell them the truth, since how they react to bad news decides whether they ever hear it again. And they learn to stay a student, seeking out new voices and fresh perspectives so success doesn't stop them learning. Executives leave with simple habits to stay connected, keep their thinking sharp and lead with clear eyes.
Culture isn't a poster on the wall or a program. It's the way we work. Drawing on her C-suite experience at Southwest Airlines and The Pokémon Company International, Raquel shares with leaders how to build cultures where people work better together and the results show up on the bottom line.
Corporate professionals are athletes, and performance is a mental game. Drawing on lessons from the golf course and from rooms where she was often the only one, Raquel shows how to stop a mental spiral before it costs you the next shot. Attendees leave with a simple framework, Recognize, Reframe, Reset, to stay composed under pressure and perform at their best when it counts.
You all remember Charlie Brown and the football.
Lucy holds the ball. Charlie Brown backs up, takes a deep breath and tells himself, this time, this time I've got it. He runs full speed. And at the last second, Lucy pulls the ball away, and he lands flat on his back. Again.
We laugh because we've all been there.
You've prepared for the big meeting. You know your material. You walk up to the moment and you're ready to kick. Then a comment, a look, a moment of silence in the room, and something shifts. You hesitate. You stumble over the point you've made a hundred times. You walk out of that room mad at yourself, because you knew better.
And here's what I've learned. Most of the time, nobody pulled the ball. Lucy was in our own head.
I see it on the golf course all the time. One bad shot, and if I let it, it follows me to the next tee and the one after that. The swing didn't change. My head did.
That's what today is about. It's all in your head, and the good news is that means you get to decide what happens next.
I didn't start in HR. I started in marketing.
My job was to understand what customers valued, build systems around it, and measure what moved the business. And I was good at it. But one day I had to be honest with myself. Yes, I could do marketing. I just wasn't passionate about it.
What lit me up was the people side: watching people and companies find success together. So I made a move a lot of people didn't understand. I stepped into inclusion work. For a long time, I hesitated to talk about that part of my story. But that work is what brought me here, and you dance with the one that brought you.
Inclusion was my entry into how organizations really operate: talent, structure, operations, global people leadership. At Southwest Airlines, I helped change how leaders got promoted, moving from who you knew to posted roles and formal panels across a 70,000-person company. At The Pokémon Company International, I reported to the CEO, and for 18 months I shared people leadership with our CFO while the company was without a CHRO.
So when people ask what I do, here's my answer. I'm a businessperson. I know how to move people at scale, and how to build relationships at scale, so that everyone benefits.
Here's what all of it taught me: people don't rise to their goals. They fall to their systems. When the system works, people work better together, and that's when they start to see what they're capable of.
That's still my passion. It's why I started my firm, and it's why I'm standing here today: to help you work better together and unlock the potential you already have.
The higher you rise, the farther you get from the people doing the work. By the time information reaches you, it's been filtered, summarized and softened. In a world that changes this fast, that distance is a risk you can't afford.
Drawing on her years in the C-suite reporting to CEOs, Raquel shows executives how to close the gap. Leaders learn to go where the work happens, because dashboards show what happened and the front line tells you why. They learn to make it safe to tell them the truth, since how they react to bad news decides whether they ever hear it again. And they learn to stay a student, seeking out new voices and fresh perspectives so success doesn't stop them learning. Executives leave with simple habits to stay connected, keep their thinking sharp and lead with clear eyes.
Culture isn't a poster on the wall or a program. It's the way we work. Drawing on her C-suite experience at Southwest Airlines and The Pokémon Company International, Raquel shares with leaders how to build cultures where people work better together and the results show up on the bottom line.
Corporate professionals are athletes, and performance is a mental game. Drawing on lessons from the golf course and from rooms where she was often the only one, Raquel shows how to stop a mental spiral before it costs you the next shot. Attendees leave with a simple framework, Recognize, Reframe, Reset, to stay composed under pressure and perform at their best when it counts.