Hayley Barnard

Why organisations work with Hayley Barnard

• Two decades of board-level DEI advisory work inside enterprises that cannot afford ideology, including HSBC, Microsoft, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte and Lidl.
• A practitioner’s focus on decision points, hiring, promotion, succession, client meetings, rather than awareness-raising that leaves behaviour untouched.
• Runs MIX Diversity and the MixLEARN platform, so the keynote is backed by live consulting data on what actually shifts cultures at scale.
• Uses her own endurance record (solo English Channel swim, Baffin Island traverse, Manhattan Island swim) as operational material on decision-making under pressure, not as a motivational garnish.
• Co-designed the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge, a rare example of a DEI initiative that functioned as both internal campaign and verifiable expedition.

Biography highlights

• Co-founder and CEO, MIX Diversity Developers; founder of MixLEARN digital DEI platform.
• Non-Executive Director, YHA; Trustee, UFI VocTech Trust.
• Clients include Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Capital One, Lidl, Diageo, GSK, Virgin Media, Specsavers, Primark, Vodafone.
• General Manager of Sir Chay Blyth’s Challenge Business at 23; first board role at 26.
• Co-led LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge across Baffin Island, a DEI campaign built on a live all-female expedition.
• Solo English Channel swim (14h 12m), 20 Bridges 46km Manhattan Island swim.
• Work published in The Times and Hello! Magazine.

Biography

Inclusion policies rarely fail because leaders disagree with them. They fail at the moment a hiring manager shortens a shortlist, a partner picks who to take to a client meeting, or a committee weighs two candidates for promotion. That is the territory MIX Diversity Developers has worked in for two decades, and Hayley Barnard has built the firm around it.

As CEO of MIX and founder of the MixLEARN platform, she advises executive boards at Microsoft, HSBC, Roche, Mercedes-Benz, Deloitte, Capital One and Lidl on inclusive leadership, unconscious bias and gender balance. The work is operational rather than ideological: the brief is to change how decisions are made, not to add another training module to the intranet.

Her route in was unusual. She ran Sir Chay Blyth’s Challenge Business at 23, co-founded a communications firm with ocean rower Debra Searle MVO, MBE, and co-led the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge, an all-female traverse of Baffin Island that doubled as the company’s gender-balance campaign. She has since swum the English Channel solo and circumnavigated Manhattan Island in open water.

She uses that record on stage for a specific reason. Decision-making under fatigue, uncertainty and social pressure is the same problem on an ice cap and in a promotion committee. Boards book her because she can move an audience from nodding at the concept of bias to naming the moments in their own week when it operates.

Key speaking topics

• Inclusive leadership
• Unconscious bias in decision-making
• Gender balance and women’s leadership pipelines
• DEI strategy for executive boards
• Inclusive recruitment and promotion
• Resilience and performance under pressure
• Imposter syndrome in senior roles

Ideal for

• Executive boards and CEO-level leadership teams setting DEI direction.
• CHROs, CPOs and heads of talent responsible for hiring, promotion and succession outcomes.
• International Women’s Day and gender-balance programmes at enterprise scale.
• Leadership off-sites where the agenda is behavioural change, not policy review.

Audience outcomes

• A clear read on where bias enters their own organisation’s decisions, with the moments named.
• Specific behavioural shifts leaders can apply in the next hiring or promotion cycle.
• A defensible, commercial case for gender balance that holds up in a board conversation.
• Language to challenge inclusion theatre without stalling momentum on real change.
• A framework for thinking about performance under pressure that is grounded in operational, not motivational, terms.