Rachel Anderson

Leadership Trainer | Speaker | Author at The Human Centric Leader + Pivot Studios LLC

Member since April 2024

Leadership

Education: California State Polytechnic University-Pomona
Durham, NC, USA

Biography

Rachel Anderson is a three time business owner, keynote speaker, leadership coach, and author, who loves to help leaders create human-centric teams that deliver big results. She's worked with organizations of all sizes, like SXSW, Epsilon Sigma Alpha, Raleigh Startup Week, Creative Mornings, ShopLocal, Tomo Engineering, and NCDoT, to give leaders the tools they need to achieve big goals and retain top talent.

Using her more than 20 years of leadership and business development experience, she believes that small practices can lead to major impacts. Rachel is passionate about helping leaders at any size organization and in any industry take a human-first approach as they build strong and passionate communities. Her book “Being Human (Centric) was published in 2025, and the Novelty Experiment was launched in 2026, all helping people live human-centric lives at work, and at home.

One leader recently said: “Working with Rachel is a dream - I'd 10/10 do it again. What I love about working with Rachel is her bias toward action. Rachel doesn't just have good ideas, she knows how to build plans and execute around those ideas, as well as how to train others and bring them along.”- Madeline, VP

Using her more than 20 years of leadership and business development experience, she believes that small practices can lead to major impacts. Rachel is passionate about helping leaders at any size organization and in any industry take a human-first approach as they build strong and passionate communities. Her book “Being Human (Centric) was published in 2025, and the Novelty Experiment was launched in 2026, all helping people live human-centric lives at work, and at home.

Passion

Helping women have the tools they need to succeed is one of my top passions. In a world that struggles to see how the incredible contributions of the emotionally intelligent can drive increased performance, women are uniquely gifted with the ability to excel.

As a recently discovered novelty junkie, I have dedicated an entire year to novelty. In a world where productivity is becoming a key definition of personal success, I’ve discovered that the quest for novelty is the best way to recenter your life and redefine productivity around what matters. Novelty is anything that's new, interesting, or unusual, and has incredible health benefits. Whether through my own pursuits of blacksmithing, my experiences with robot fight club (humans who dress up as robots), or a simple color walk, I'm passionate about bringing the world of novelty to others.

Example Talks

The 57% Problem: The Antidote to Employees Leaving and Culture Plummeting (And What Executives Can Do About It)

The biggest threat to your company culture isn't market disruption or talent scarcity, it's the untrained manager three desks down making decisions that drive away 57% of your employees. In 82% of hiring decisions, companies miss the opportunity to hire high-talent managers. And 85% of new managers receive zero formal training before promotion. These aren't minor gaps - they're cultural killers.

As an executive, you set strategy and vision. But culture lives or dies in the daily decisions of middle management. If your managers don't know how to lead human-centric, your culture initiatives will fail, no matter how well-intentioned.

In this session, I'll expose the hidden training crisis undermining culture transformation efforts and share the five keys to building human-centric leadership throughout your organization.

I'll share how organizations that shifted to human-centric cultures achieved measurable results in retention, team growth, and revenue, and how cascading this approach from the C-suite through every layer of leadership turns your managers from culture liabilities into culture champions.

This is about executive accountability. Culture isn't what leadership says in all-hands meetings. It's what managers do when executives are not in the room.

The Productivity Reboot: Bidding Burnout Goodbye in the Age of AI

AI is driving our ideas about productivity faster than ever before, with more that could be done, more content created, more ideas generated, and more activity required. Employees struggle to keep up. This sprint towards more output, and the race to keep up with the bots’ productivity is pushing people towards burnout faster than ever. 

For employees and leaders alike, there seems like little that can be done to counter this race, and rest never seems to be enough. This is where the Creative Margin Reboot is the ideal antidote to the productivity burnout. It’s based in biology and psychology, to refresh any employee to be their best productive self. With the Creative Margin Reboot, employees can go from output to quality production.

In this session, we’ll explore the science behind engaging with particular parts of the creative brain, what tools are needed to combat burnout, and activities designed to lay the foundations for a longer reset. I’ll show managers how to encourage their employees to create margin in their productivity practices, and I’ll highlight options for employees to create their own routines of work care for better team engagement and employee retention throughout the entire organization. 

The best productivity reboot isn’t in rest, but in engaging the parts of our brains that allow us to explore other ways to contribute, and thrive, within their organizations.


The Key to Clarity: Team Values that Support a Winning Culture

Many leaders struggle with cultivating real culture within their teams and organizations. Unfortunately, this creates ambiguity for many executives and managers who are trying to instill certain behaviors or values in their teams without context or consensus of the organization at large. 

Not any more.

Team values are the key to clarity. In this session, I explore how to identify the behaviors that your team embodies for excellence, what activities are central to smooth collaboration, and how leaders can support their teams towards organizational success. Together, we’ll workshop values, behaviors, ideas, and activities, with clear take-aways and next steps for implementation in any culture. 

There’s one fact that has been consistently true through it all: If a company or individual can’t articulate what their brand or values are and/or they don’t believe they have any, someone else is defining those values for them. Take the reins on building a winning culture with the first step: clear team values.


Topics/Keywords

womens leadership women in business women in technology management leadership women empowerment women empowerment and leadership author creativity improving innovation and creativity team creativity team values team building burnout cultivating resilience emcee mc facilitator workshop leader consultant trainer workshops hr human resources executives

Featured Video

I am willing to travel more than 100 miles
Yes
I generally get paid for speaking but make exceptions
I am willing to travel more than 100 miles
Yes
I generally get paid for speaking but make exceptions

Example Talks

The 57% Problem: The Antidote to Employees Leaving and Culture Plummeting (And What Executives Can Do About It)

The biggest threat to your company culture isn't market disruption or talent scarcity, it's the untrained manager three desks down making decisions that drive away 57% of your employees. In 82% of hiring decisions, companies miss the opportunity to hire high-talent managers. And 85% of new managers receive zero formal training before promotion. These aren't minor gaps - they're cultural killers.

As an executive, you set strategy and vision. But culture lives or dies in the daily decisions of middle management. If your managers don't know how to lead human-centric, your culture initiatives will fail, no matter how well-intentioned.

In this session, I'll expose the hidden training crisis undermining culture transformation efforts and share the five keys to building human-centric leadership throughout your organization.

I'll share how organizations that shifted to human-centric cultures achieved measurable results in retention, team growth, and revenue, and how cascading this approach from the C-suite through every layer of leadership turns your managers from culture liabilities into culture champions.

This is about executive accountability. Culture isn't what leadership says in all-hands meetings. It's what managers do when executives are not in the room.

The Productivity Reboot: Bidding Burnout Goodbye in the Age of AI

AI is driving our ideas about productivity faster than ever before, with more that could be done, more content created, more ideas generated, and more activity required. Employees struggle to keep up. This sprint towards more output, and the race to keep up with the bots’ productivity is pushing people towards burnout faster than ever. 

For employees and leaders alike, there seems like little that can be done to counter this race, and rest never seems to be enough. This is where the Creative Margin Reboot is the ideal antidote to the productivity burnout. It’s based in biology and psychology, to refresh any employee to be their best productive self. With the Creative Margin Reboot, employees can go from output to quality production.

In this session, we’ll explore the science behind engaging with particular parts of the creative brain, what tools are needed to combat burnout, and activities designed to lay the foundations for a longer reset. I’ll show managers how to encourage their employees to create margin in their productivity practices, and I’ll highlight options for employees to create their own routines of work care for better team engagement and employee retention throughout the entire organization. 

The best productivity reboot isn’t in rest, but in engaging the parts of our brains that allow us to explore other ways to contribute, and thrive, within their organizations.


The Key to Clarity: Team Values that Support a Winning Culture

Many leaders struggle with cultivating real culture within their teams and organizations. Unfortunately, this creates ambiguity for many executives and managers who are trying to instill certain behaviors or values in their teams without context or consensus of the organization at large. 

Not any more.

Team values are the key to clarity. In this session, I explore how to identify the behaviors that your team embodies for excellence, what activities are central to smooth collaboration, and how leaders can support their teams towards organizational success. Together, we’ll workshop values, behaviors, ideas, and activities, with clear take-aways and next steps for implementation in any culture. 

There’s one fact that has been consistently true through it all: If a company or individual can’t articulate what their brand or values are and/or they don’t believe they have any, someone else is defining those values for them. Take the reins on building a winning culture with the first step: clear team values.


Topics/Keywords

womens leadership women in business women in technology management leadership women empowerment women empowerment and leadership author creativity improving innovation and creativity team creativity team values team building burnout cultivating resilience emcee mc facilitator workshop leader consultant trainer workshops hr human resources executives