Meet Kristin
Experience. Expertise. Passion. Alignment.
lignment Inc.®, founded in 2007 by Kristin Kaufman, was created to help individuals, teams, and leaders increase their overall levels of contribution, bottom-line effectiveness and personal fulfillment.To be a successful leadership coach, it is Kristin’s belief it is of great benefit to have been successful in business, and faced the ups and downs that every successful business leader has faced.
Kristin is a very warm and approachable person. Yet, what really cuts to the chase is her 25 years of expertise in Fortune 50 corporate and non-profit leadership roles.
And in 2009, Kristin pursued, and was awarded, the distinction of Professional Certified Coach (PCC) from the International Coaching Federation and also achieved the designation of Certified Leadership Coach through the esteemed program of Georgetown University – an exclusive, highly competitive, program. This leadership coaching certificate is distinctive from other executive coaching programs in that the focus and rigor was designed to help coaches and consultants learn how to help leaders reach their potential and achieved sustainable transformation through their work together.
The Foundation
Her greatest foundational experience was certainly her tenure at Hewlett-Packard Company as a sales executive, global sales leader, and general manager. She learned what makes a fully aligned culture competitively differentiated under the leadership of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard at the onset of her career – and she never forgot those golden principals. Ultimately, Kristin led the channels and partner program that supported Hewlett-Packard’s largest corporate accounts. This business represented a $3 billion revenue stream for Hewlett-Packard. She defined and directed a multi-channel distribution strategy while leading a highly-matrixed organization. Kristin was regarded as a leader at Hewlett-Packard and was selected as a member of their President’s Club, which is awarded to the top 100 employees of Hewlett-Packard for outstanding direct sales quota performance and sales leadership capability.
Serving as Worldwide Channels Vice-President on the Executive Committee of Vignette Corporation, a $250 million publicly-traded software company, Kristin honed her skills on optimizing resources and ruthlessly focusing to deliver results. Under her leadership, her team built an infrastructure that laid the foundation for a thriving channel/alliances organization, and strong relations in the industry. This experience in the fast-paced, small – yet rapidly growing – software industry, extended her pedigree from the large blue-chip experience of a Fortune 25 company.
lignment Inc.®Her last executive position in corporate America was as Group Vice President of United Health Group. This appointment leveraged her strong knowledge of the technology business and how to leverage multiple channels to market in the increasingly complicated world of healthcare and healthcare insurance. Kristin provided expertise for its go-to-market strategies, defined and created alternative channels to improve organic growth, and implemented sales effectiveness methodologies across all segments within United Health Group.
That is what makes Kristin and lignment Inc.® different.
- Kristin has been there for the good times and the not so good times.
- She gets it … that alignment to one’s strengths, passions, and ultimately to the organization’s vision will determine a person’s success.
- She experienced the reality of company politics, of cross functional and silo discrepancies, and the criticality to get everyone pulling in the same direction.
- Even more importantly, she knows how to achieve this while staying true to oneself and aligned to the organization’s direction.
- Finally, she has faced the music and left a very successful career to create the aligned life she wanted…..doing what she loves, what she is good at, and most importantly having it tied to something greater than herself.
Credentials
The International Coach Federation (ICF) offers the only globally recognized, independent credentialing program for executive coaching. Only 5600 coaches, of the more than 25,000 around the globe, have earned ICF Credential since the program began over a decade ago. In addition, according to the ICF Global Coaching Study conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, 52 percent of coaches report that their coaching clients expect the coach they hire to be credentialed.
Kristin Kaufman has been awarded the Professional Coaching Credential (PCC) and the distinction of PCC level of proficiency by the ICF, which is held by only a small percentage of practicing coaches around the globe.
In addition, Kristin has been graduated from Georgetown University’s world class leadership coaching program and has been awarded the Certificate in Leadership Coaching (CLC) by this esteemed university. This leadership coaching certificate is distinctive from other executive coaching and/or life coaching programs in that the focus and rigor was designed to help coaches and consultants learn how to help leaders reach their potential and achieved sustainable transformation through their work together.
The Georgetown University Leadership Coaching certificate program has a highly competitive admissions process and is certified as an Accredited Coach Training Program (ACTP) by the International Coach Federation.
The Coach Foundation interviewed coaches around the world, and have determined the ‘top 23’ who have been found to have their unique way and approach to helping clients navigate their lives and careers. Kristin has been chosen to be on the 2021-2022 list. Kristin works with leaders and their teams to find and build Alignment™, which Kristin succinctly describes as the intersection of loving what you do, being good at it, and most importantly having it tied to something greater than yourself. This trademarked concept and approach, anchored in psychological principles, helps individuals and businesses reveal their potential by aligning their values, talents, goals, and intentions to exceed their expectations. When people become aligned, individually and collectively, they are most certainly at their most powerful. Check out the Top Executive Coaches at Coach Foundation.com.
A prolific writer, Kristin’s first book, Is This Seat Taken? Random Encounters That Change Your Life, was released in 2011 to national acclaim, and endorsed by Stephen Covey and John Maxwell, among others. Her second book in the series, entitled Is This Seat Taken? It’s Never
Too Late to Find the Right Seat was released in 2015. It has been endorsed by notables such as Marshall Goldsmith, Sean Covey, and Doug Parker, CEO of American Airlines. This book shines the light on late in life reinvention and encore ‘second half’s’ of diverse individuals. The individuals are in some cases widely known and others are somewhat anonymous to the mass public. The common thread is their ‘post-50’ resurgence in life and in some cases their ‘fork in the road’ is quite serendipitous. Kristin’s third book, in the ‘Is This Seat Taken?’ trilogy was released in 2019 and made the best seller list in the first week of publication.