About

Melissa has been an executive at high-growth companies for over twenty years.  She now works as an executive coach, advisor, and facilitator.

Her primary focus is helping leaders operationalize culture. For any organization and team to scale effectively, she works to get the organizational systems, processes, and practices right. She believes that we can impact individual development more effectively if we also focus on organizational development. They work together as a system. They are leverage points for each other.  

Prior to starting Daimler Partners, Melissa was an executive who experienced multiple leadership viewpoints throughout her career. She led HR for a fast-growing venture-funded startup. She created and built Learning & Organizational Development functions for Adobe, Twitter and WeWork. She built a coaching company while also the first employee of Coach University, one of the first leaders in the coaching field. Her experience as an executive includes coaching executives, helping teams work more effectively, and building scale-proof organizational processes.

Throughout her career, Melissa designed, built and implemented global initiatives that bridged innovative strategy with practical execution.  She is highly valued for asking the questions that nobody wants to ask and solving the problems nobody wants to address. She believes that work is the best place for us to transform ourselves. She helps leaders clarify what they are learning and integrating that into becoming better leaders, at work and in the world.

She is an enthusiastic contributor to the body of work exploring the integration of organizational and individual learning. She is a speaker, panelist, and contributor to broad industry publishers including Harvard Business Review (HBR), Huffington Post, Chief Learning Officer, and Chief Talent Development Officer magazines. Her recent article on operationalizing culture in HBR was one of the most popular articles of 2018, viewed by over 200,000 people globally (10x the average). She has served as a board member for the Association of Talent Development (“ATD”) and currently sits on the Advisory Board for the University of San Francisco, Master’s Program for Organization Development. One of the first coaches certified by the International Coach Federation (“ICF”), Melissa graduated from the Pepperdine University Graziadio Business School with a M.S. in Organizational Development.

Melissa can regularly be found in the bay area hiking somewhere with views of the ocean, or urban hiking in NYC looking for the latest piece of graffiti art.