Lisa Walden
Most organisations have run out of patience with culture work that does not change anything. Engagement surveys plateau, hybrid policies are contested, and five generations now sit on the same teams with conflicting expectations about trust, communication and what work is actually for. The cost of getting this wrong shows up in attrition, manager burnout and quietly stalled change programmes.
Lisa Walden is a workplace strategist and co-founder of Good Company Consulting who helps leaders rebuild culture around generational reality, trust, and post-pandemic ways of working.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Lisa Walden
- She translates over a decade of qualitative research on generational sociology into culture decisions a CHRO can actually defend at board level, not survey commentary.
- Two published books, including The Future of Work is Human and the Wiley “For Dummies” field guide on managing millennials, give her arguments a public, citable spine.
- She tackles the contested ground of hybrid work, return-to-office friction and Gen Z expectations without retreating into either nostalgia or hype.
- Her work on trust and psychological safety reads as operational, not therapeutic: barriers named, ingredients specified, applied across in-person, virtual and hybrid teams.
- She customises through pre-event interviews with client teams, so the keynote lands on the organisation’s specific cultural tension rather than a generic future-of-work narrative.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder of Good Company Consulting, a workplace culture and future-of-work advisory firm.
- Co-author of The Future of Work is Human: Transforming Company Culture for a Post-Pandemic World (with Hannah L. Ubl).
- Co-author of Managing Millennials for Dummies, part of Wiley’s “For Dummies” series.
- Advisor to organisations including BMW, Siemens, HP, Syntellis, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Texas A&M University System.
- Over a decade of qualitative research on generational dynamics and employee experience.
- Speaker on culture, trust, hybrid work, AI and human judgement, and cross-generational collaboration.
Biography
Five generations now share the same payroll, and the cultural assumptions each one brought to work have stopped quietly cohabiting. Trust expectations differ. Communication norms differ. The unwritten contract between employer and employee, the one that held through most of the late twentieth century, no longer carries the room. This is the territory Lisa Walden has spent more than a decade studying as a generational sociologist and workplace strategist.
As co-founder of Good Company Consulting, Walden advises organisations on how to redesign culture for a workforce that no longer agrees on what work is for. Her clients include BMW, Siemens, HP, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Syntellis and Texas A&M University System. The work focuses on the connective tissue of an organisation: trust, psychological safety, communication norms, and the specific operating shifts that make a hybrid or multigenerational workforce coherent rather than fractious.
Her two books anchor the public argument. The Future of Work is Human, co-authored with Hannah Ubl, sets out a post-pandemic culture playbook built around compassionate leadership and person-first management. Managing Millennials for Dummies, published in Wiley’s “For Dummies” series, gave her the early platform on generational management and remains a working reference for HR and people leaders.
What distinguishes her on a stage is the refusal to default to either the wellness register or the technology register when discussing culture. She treats generational difference as a design input for operating decisions, not a personality theme, and she addresses the friction points that senior teams usually avoid in public: return-to-office disagreement, Gen Z expectations of managers, and what AI adoption does to the human texture of a team.
Key speaking topics
- Future of work and post-pandemic culture
- Multigenerational workplace dynamics
- Trust and psychological safety
- Hybrid and remote work design
- Employee engagement and motivation
- Human-centred AI adoption
- Leadership communication across generations
Ideal for
- CHROs, people leaders and heads of culture redesigning post-pandemic operating norms.
- Executive teams confronting return-to-office friction and hybrid policy disagreement.
- Boards and CEOs of organisations with significant Gen Z and millennial workforces.
- Leadership development and talent programmes inside large, multi-generational employers.
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of where generational friction is actually costing the organisation, and where it is noise.
- A working vocabulary for trust and psychological safety that managers can apply on Monday.
- Specific operating moves for hybrid and in-person team design, not policy slogans.
- A way to talk about AI adoption that treats human judgement as a capability, not a leftover.
- Confidence to make culture decisions defensible to both a board and a Gen Z hire.
Talks
A keynote drawn from her book that sets out what compassionate leadership means in operating terms after the pandemic reset.
Key takeaways:
- The three cornerstones of compassionate leadership and how they show up in day-to-day management.
- Communication shifts that move teams from performative to intentional.
- What Gen Z is actually asking of employers, separated from the commentary.
A keynote on integrating AI into the workplace without hollowing out the human capabilities that make teams effective.
Key takeaways:
- Where AI adoption tends to erode trust and how to design against it.
- The emotional intelligence capabilities that gain value as AI spreads.
- Practical ground rules for human-centred implementation inside teams.
A keynote on trust as an operational capability across in-person, virtual and hybrid teams.
Key takeaways:
- The specific barriers to trust most leadership teams underestimate.
- The ingredients of psychological safety in distributed settings.
- How to build trust quickly with a team you rarely see in person.
A keynote on what has actually changed about work since 2020, and what that means for culture design.
Key takeaways:
- The cultural defaults that no longer hold post-pandemic.
- A people-first lens for hybrid and flexible policies.
- Where culture programmes most often stall and how to restart them.