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Kari McLeod

Leadership and Team Coach

I’m inspired by…

nature, building connections with and between people, engaging learning environments, lifelong learning, and a big blank piece of paper.

The biggest opportunity for today’s leaders is…

creating pervasive leadership in their organizations, communities, and families. We are living in increasing complexity and we are individually not enough to understand this complexity and make decisions. Together, leaders throughout a system co-create greater awareness, knowledge and solutions.

Things that make me smile include…

hiking in my neighborhood woods with my dog, Ah-Ha moments, the longer-term manifestation of Ah-Ha moments, being in community with a group of people I connect with, coffee with friends, a meal with my family without bickering.

What matters to me…

my family, my friends, and my colleagues. Connecting people and their ideas, co-creating meaningful learning experiences (for myself and others), and facilitating and coaching awareness, discovery, and change.

Experience

  • Kari joined the Agile community three years ago and the Co-Active Coaching community a year after that. She was an active member of an Agile Leadership Institute learning cohort based on the work of Michael Hamman and Clive Prout. Through that experience, she met Antoinette Coetzee and William Strydom, with whom she co-leads a six-month virtual journey for scrum masters. Kari has been a facilitator at the Business Agility Conference for the past two years and looks forward to fulfilling this role in future events. She worked as a scrum master at Fannie Mae and currently works as a trainer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.Before becoming an agilist and coach, Kari was engrossed in graduate work that included research, writing, and teaching. She wrote a Master’s thesis on the stories told in different disciplines about a mid-19th-century physician and a dot map of cholera deaths and wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the American public’s understandings of health in the 1950s. She was a teaching assistant at Carleton University, a teaching fellow at Yale University, and an adjunct lecturer at George Mason University. Kari held a Hannah Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Medicine Department at the Johns Hopkins University.

    Kari has also taught music to Montessori students, done historical research for a history of the National Academy of Sciences, and identified plants in the middle of Alberta for rangeland technologists.

Training & Certifications

  • Certified Scrum Master (CSM) – The Scrum Alliance
  • Certified Agile Team Facilitator (ICP-ATF) – ICAgile
  • Certified Professional in Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC) – ICAgile
  • Kanban Management Professional (KMPII) – Kanban University
  • SAFe 4 Program Consultant (SPC) – Scaled Agile

Education

  • Bachelor of Arts in Geography, University of Alberta
  • Master’s of Arts in Geography, Carleton University
  • Ph.D. in History, Concentration in History of Science and Medicine, Yale University