Hayley Barnard
Most inclusion programmes never reach the decisions that matter. Hiring, promotion and performance calls keep producing the same outcomes, and those decisions are increasingly made by AI. The hard question for a leadership team is what to do differently in the next cycle, and what to check before trusting the algorithm that runs it.
Hayley Barnard helps executive boards improve the quality and fairness of the decisions their organisations make, by people and increasingly by AI, drawing on two decades running the inclusion consultancy Mix Diversity and, since 2025, the AI and culture transformation firm Mix Works.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Hayley Barnard
- Two decades advising executive boards at Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte and Lidl on how inclusion changes the decisions leaders actually make about hiring and promotion.
- Through Mix Works, her 2025 AI and culture transformation firm, she advises leaders on responsible AI adoption and on where bias enters both human and machine decisions.
- Treats bias as a decision-quality problem, so leaders leave with checks they can apply in the next hiring round or AI deployment rather than a values statement.
- Uses her own endurance record, a solo English Channel swim and a Baffin Island traverse, as working material on decision-making under pressure.
- Co-designed the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge, a gender-balance campaign that ran as a verifiable all-female expedition.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO, Mix Diversity Developers (2014); founder and CEO, Mix Works (2025), an AI and culture transformation firm.
- Founder of MixLEARN, a digital DEI learning platform.
- Non-Executive Director, YHA; Trustee, UFI VocTech Trust (appointed March 2025).
- Clients include Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Capital One, Lidl, Diageo, GSK, Virgin Media and Vodafone.
- Co-led the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge across Baffin Island, a DEI campaign built on a live all-female expedition.
- Solo English Channel swim (14h 12m, no wetsuit); 20 Bridges 46km Manhattan Island swim.
Biography
A hiring manager shortens a shortlist. A committee weighs two candidates for promotion. Increasingly, a screening tool ranks the first round before any human sees it. The biases that shaped those calls for decades are now being trained into the systems meant to remove them.
This is the territory Hayley Barnard has worked in for two decades. As founder and CEO of Mix Diversity, the consultancy she started in 2014, she advises boards at Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz and Lidl on inclusive leadership, unconscious bias and gender balance. The brief is operational: change how decisions get made, not add another module to the intranet.
In 2025 she founded Mix Works to take that question into AI. The firm helps enterprises adopt AI responsibly and examines where bias enters automated decisions, the issue leaders now face as hiring and performance tools move into machine hands. It extends twenty years of work on human judgement into how machines make the call.
Her route in was unusual. She ran Sir Chay Blyth’s Challenge Business at 23 and co-led the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge, an all-female Baffin Island traverse that doubled as the company’s gender-balance campaign. The throughline is decision-making under fatigue and pressure, the same problem on an ice cap as in a promotion committee. She has since swum the English Channel solo, no wetsuit, in 14 hours and 12 minutes.
Key speaking topics
- Bias in human and AI-driven decisions
- Responsible AI adoption and governance
- Inclusive leadership
- Decision quality and fairness
- Gender balance and women’s leadership pipelines
- Leadership resilience under pressure
- Cross-cultural team performance
Ideal for
- Executive boards and CEO-level teams setting direction on inclusion and on responsible AI.
- CHROs, CPOs and heads of talent accountable for hiring and promotion outcomes.
- Leadership teams introducing AI into hiring, performance or customer decisions.
- International Women’s Day and gender-balance programmes at enterprise scale.
Audience outcomes
- A read on where bias enters their decisions, including the ones now made by AI tools, with the moments named.
- Behavioural checks leaders can apply in the next hiring or promotion cycle.
- Questions to ask before trusting an AI-driven hiring or performance decision.
- A commercial case for gender balance that holds up in a board conversation.
- Language to challenge inclusion theatre without stalling real change.
Talks
A working session on using AI to test a leader’s own fairness, motivation and decision quality.
Key takeaways:
- Where AI can expose blind spots in how you hire and give feedback.
- Prompts that pressure-test a decision before you make it.
- A toolkit of prompts leaders can apply the next morning.
How bias shows up in both human and AI-driven decisions, and how leaders make better calls.
Key takeaways:
- Where bias enters automated hiring and performance tools.
- How to interrogate an AI recommendation instead of deferring to it.
- Which decisions should stay with a human, and why.
Staying focused and making good calls when conditions are hard, drawn from change work and extreme environments.
Key takeaways:
- Holding decision quality when fatigue and pressure rise.
- Lessons from a solo Channel swim and an Arctic traverse, applied to leadership.
- Following through on hard calls when it matters.
What the research shows about how women actually advance, and what organisations can do to even the odds.
Key takeaways:
- Why conventional career advice misreads how female progression works.
- Where to focus, on visibility, networks and promotion negotiations.
- What progressive organisations do to level the field.
How bias shows up inside the decisions leaders already make.
Key takeaways:
- Where bias operates in hiring, promotion and succession calls.
- Checks leaders can apply before a decision, not after.
- Team habits that surface dissent rather than suppress it.
Building performance in global teams through cultural intelligence and inclusive process.
Key takeaways:
- Where cross-cultural teams lose performance and trust.
- Adapting leadership style across regional norms without losing consistency.
- Especially relevant for European arms of US, Japanese or Chinese parent companies.