Tom Gimbel
Most companies say culture is set at the top. It isn’t. It is enforced, day to day, by middle managers who were promoted for individual performance and never taught to manage people. Talent leaves them, retention numbers slide, and the executive team learns about it from an exit survey.
Tom Gimbel is the founder of LaSalle Network and a hiring and culture authority who helps leadership teams treat retention, middle-manager development and company culture as P&L decisions rather than HR programmes.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Tom Gimbel
- Twenty-six years running a staffing firm gives him unusually direct visibility into why employees actually leave: it shows up in his content as specific tactical guidance, not generalised culture theory.
- He treats middle managers as the operating layer where culture is either built or broken, and gives leadership teams a practical agenda for upgrading that layer.
- His perspective on hiring, onboarding and retention is the perspective of a CEO who has had to make payroll, not a consultant selling frameworks.
- Inc. 5000 recognition for twelve consecutive years and a Staffing Industry Analysts Staffing 100 listing back the credibility of his operating record on talent.
Biography highlights
- Founder of LaSalle Network, a national staffing, recruiting and culture firm headquartered in Chicago.
- LaSalle Network named to the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for 12 consecutive years.
- Named to Staffing Industry Analysts’ Staffing 100 list of the most influential people in staffing, multiple years.
- Inducted into the Chicago Area Entrepreneurship Hall of Fame; named to Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40.
- Regular media commentator on hiring, careers and company culture across CNBC Squawk Box, TODAY, Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The New York Times and Entrepreneur.
- Board roles include American Staffing Association and Start Early; member of YPO, the Economic Club of Chicago and Entrepreneurs’ Organization.
Biography
People do not quit companies. They quit managers. That observation, which sits at the centre of Tom Gimbel’s work, sounds simple but is uncomfortable for most executive teams, because it locates the retention problem in the layer of the organisation where the least leadership development happens.
Gimbel founded LaSalle Network in Chicago in 1998 and ran it as CEO for 26 years. The firm reached the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies for 12 consecutive years and was repeatedly named to “best places to work” lists by Glassdoor, Fortune, Inc. and Crain’s Chicago Business. He was named to Staffing Industry Analysts’ Staffing 100 list of the most influential people in the industry.
That operating record is what makes his content credible to senior buyers. He is a regular commentator on hiring and culture for CNBC, TODAY, Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, The New York Times and Entrepreneur, and his core argument is consistent across those appearances: middle-manager capability is the real engine of retention, and most companies underinvest in it.
Gimbel’s keynote material focuses on the practical levers a leadership team can pull, hiring discipline, onboarding, manager development, the often-overlooked “B player” cohort, and how to build a retention-focused culture that survives growth. The audience is the CEO, COO and CHRO who already know they have a culture problem and want a sharp operator’s view on what to do about it.
Key speaking topics
- Company culture and retention
- Middle-manager development
- Hiring, onboarding and talent strategy
- Employee engagement
- Building and protecting workplace culture through growth
- The labour market and the future of work
Ideal for
- CEOs, COOs and CHROs leading high-growth or post-acquisition organisations facing retention pressure.
- Executive teams looking to upgrade their middle-manager population as a strategic priority.
- HR and talent leadership communities at industry conferences and association events.
Audience outcomes
- A clear-eyed view of why retention numbers move and which decisions actually shift them.
- A specific agenda for upgrading middle managers from individual contributors to people leaders.
- Tactical guidance on hiring and onboarding processes that protect culture as headcount scales.
- An operator’s perspective on company culture, distinct from consulting frameworks.
Talks
A practical playbook for treating retention as an operating priority, owned by leadership, not delegated to HR.
Key takeaways:
- The leadership behaviours that drive voluntary attrition.
- How hiring and onboarding decisions shape retention before day one.
- What a culture worth staying for actually looks like at the team level.
A direct case for treating the middle-manager layer as the lever that determines whether top talent stays or leaves.
Key takeaways:
- Why high performers are often weak managers, and what to do about it.
- The specific manager behaviours that drive retention or attrition.
- A practical agenda for upgrading the people-management capability of an existing manager population.
A counter-intuitive argument that the largest available performance gains sit in the cohort most leadership teams ignore.
Key takeaways:
- Why “B” players are the operating backbone of most organisations.
- The cost of over-indexing on top performers and exits.
- How to build development paths that move “B” players up.