Kristin Cobble is a co-founder and President of Groupaya. She has 20+ years helping C-level leaders, teams, organizations and multi-stakeholder groups realize their potential, through thinking bigger about what’s possible, and then making it a reality.
She is passionate about helping leaders learn how to create environments that tap into the knowledge, skills, talents and passions of their people, where everyone is smarter together than they could be alone. While most people see meetings as a waste of time, she loves helping leaders turn them into a place where real thinking, real decision making, and real relating happen. After all, if we are going to spend most of our time at work, shouldn’t we make our organizations, our jobs and our meetings something that renew us instead of drains us?
Recent coaching and consulting clients include: Two CEOs, an EVP of R&D, a Chief Commercial Officer, 1 Chief Financial Officer, 1 Chief Counsel, 1 Executive Directors, 1 head of Sales, and several heads of HR.
Prior to founding Groupaya, Kristin spent four years at Monitor and Global Business Network (GBN), helping clients to re-perceive and embrace uncertainty in order to achieve sustainable success through scenario thinking and planning. She also spent two years, as the Director of Strategic Change for Banana Republic, partnering with the president to create a high performing leadership team as well as a more innovative and collaborative organizational culture. In this role, for the first time in her professional life, she participated in leadership team meetings that she wasn’t facilitating, and developed a new level of appreciation for the challenges of being a C-level executive. Prior to that, she had her own coaching and consulting firm for seven years. Her organizational development career began as consultant at Innovation Associates, co-founded by Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. This work is foundational to how she sees the world – the importance of personal and collective vision, the need to think systemically, the value of slowing down to go fast, the power of learning to see and challenge our own and others’ assumptions.
Kristin is a Wellesley graduate, studied at the London School of Economics. She is a member of the faculty at New Ventures West, a globally respected coaching school. She has authored articles on organizational learning, systems thinking, conflict and coaching and has presented at multiple conferences. A recent article, How to Start a Meeting, was featured in TIME. She is also an emeritus board member of Global Footprint Network, an international environmental NGO.
