Rachel DeAlto
Engagement is falling, hybrid teams are fragmenting, and five generations now sit inside the same reporting line. Leaders who built their authority on competence are discovering that competence alone no longer holds a team together. The deficit is relational, and it is showing up in turnover, trust scores and the quiet exit of the people organisations most want to keep.
Rachel DeAlto is a communication and relatability expert who helps leaders and teams turn connection into a measurable driver of trust, retention and performance.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Rachel DeAlto
- She brings a working framework for relatability that translates a soft concept into specific leader behaviours, sourced from her own research and applied across Fortune 500, government and nonprofit settings.
- Her dual training in law and psychology gives her credibility with both legal-minded executives and people-function leaders, two audiences that often talk past each other on culture work.
- As Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, she works inside a business whose product is human connection at scale, which gives her examples that land with commercial audiences rather than HR-only ones.
- She holds the Certified Speaking Professional designation and has worked across more than 200 national media platforms, so the delivery is polished without sliding into performance.
- The work is built for multigenerational teams specifically, which is where most leadership programmes fail in practice.
Biography highlights
- Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, parent company of Match.com, Tinder and Hinge.
- Author of The Relatable Leader and relatable, both published by Simon & Schuster.
- TEDx speaker; Being Authentic in a Filtered World featured on TED.com.
- Television expert on Lifetime’s Married at First Sight and TLC’s Kate+Date.
- Certified Speaking Professional, National Speakers Association.
- JD, Seton Hall University; MA in Psychology, Arizona State University; BA in Communications, Syracuse University.
Biography
Most organisational culture problems present as engagement problems first. People stop volunteering ideas, hand-offs get sloppy, turnover ticks up in the wrong roles. The diagnosis is usually slower than the decline. Rachel DeAlto’s argument is that what looks like disengagement is often a relational deficit at the leader level, and that the deficit is fixable with specific skills rather than slogans.
Her two books, relatable and The Relatable Leader, both published by Simon & Schuster, build the case. The first sets out how people connect with each other under conditions of distraction, filtering and fatigue. The second turns the argument toward leadership and the practical question of how a senior manager builds trust quickly across a workforce that spans five generations and several working modes.
DeAlto’s background is unusual for the topic. She trained as an attorney at Seton Hall, holds a master’s in psychology from Arizona State, and now serves as Chief Connection Officer at Match Group, where connection is the commercial product. That combination shapes the work. She speaks the language of executives, draws on psychological research rather than anecdote, and tests her frameworks against a business whose users vote on connection every day.
The audience is corporate, but the substance is granular. Whitepapers on the multigenerational workforce, signature programmes on customer experience and sales relatability, and a Certified Speaking Professional designation that signals a craft-level investment in delivery. The closing claim is not that culture is everything. It is that culture is built from countable leader behaviours, and those behaviours can be taught.
Key speaking topics
- Relatability and human connection
- Leadership and team performance
- Multigenerational workforce dynamics
- Communication and emotional intelligence
- Customer experience and relatable sales
- Organisational culture and engagement
Ideal for
- CHROs and chief people officers building engagement and retention strategy
- Senior leaders managing newly hybrid or distributed teams
- Sales and customer experience leaders rebuilding trust in long-cycle buyer relationships
- Leadership development teams designing programmes for multigenerational workforces
Audience outcomes
- A vocabulary and a framework for relatability that turns a soft concept into observable leader behaviours
- A clearer view of where engagement breaks down inside multigenerational teams and what to do about it
- Specific tactics for building trust at speed in hybrid and high-turnover environments
- A shift in how senior leaders think about communication, from broadcast to connection
Talks
A keynote built on DeAlto’s proprietary leadership research, focused on how senior leaders build trust and performance across a multigenerational workforce.
Key takeaways:
- The leader behaviours that build relatability quickly inside teams under pressure
- How relatability connects to retention, engagement and discretionary effort
- Practical adjustments leaders can make in their first 30 days
A keynote on how authentic connection translates into customer loyalty and lifetime value.
Key takeaways:
- Where customer-experience programmes lose authenticity and what to do about it
- The link between internal culture and external customer experience
- Tactics for building customer relationships that survive product and price competition
An interactive keynote on breaking silos and strengthening cross-functional collaboration.
Key takeaways:
- How relatability changes the dynamics of cross-team work
- Signals that a team has stopped connecting, and the cost of ignoring them
- Practical exercises for restoring trust inside fragmented teams
A keynote for sales leaders on rebuilding authentic buyer relationships in a buyer-cynical market.
Key takeaways:
- Why traditional rapport-building has lost its grip on modern buyers
- How sellers build credibility quickly with sceptical procurement and economic buyers
- Adjustments that move a sales conversation from transaction to relationship