Meet the team
Michelle founded Leading Elephants to provide a proof point that achieving great impact and caring for the humans involved don’t have to be exclusive.
Prior to forming Leading Elephants in 2010, Michelle served as Senior Leadership Director for The Broad Residency, a fellowship program designed to place, train and develop talented leaders in urban education. In this role, she designed the Residency’s comprehensive leadership curriculum, led a team of transformational leadership coaches and managed communities of practice to support residents in maximizing their impact and development. Michelle began her career at PwC where she was one of only two women partners in the Firm’s US Mergers and Acquisitions practice.
She is obsessed with far-flung global adventures with her husband and twin boys and thrives on the adrenaline rush of a good skydive or powder day on the slopes.
CEO.
Breakthrough Coach. Org Culture Geek.
MICHELLE MOORE HERNANDEZ
Superpower:
Michelle gets at the heart of complex leadership challenges, surfacing unspoken conversations in ways that bring healing and possibility.
As Managing Director at Leading Elephants, Amber helps to extract the magic in human-centered leadership and create products that meet the array of organizational needs.
Prior to working at Leading Elephants, Amber served as a leader in several capacities at Achievement First. In her early years at the charter management organization, she led a team of data strategists and supported many cross-cutting initiatives. Later, Amber served as a chief of staff in the COO Office. Amber has also served as a coach, strategy consultant, and interim Chief of Staff with charter networks across the US. Amber’s early career was as an economic consultant at Analysis Group where she supported expert witnesses testifying in corporate litigation.
Amber is based in Menlo Park, California. She loves her family, travel, her faith, good food, and the impromtu, cheezy meme.
Managing Director. Strategic Leader. Jane of All Trades.
AMBER MACKAY
Superpower:
Amber turns messy, ethereal ideas into concrete, achievable realities.
As Operations and Communications Manager at Leading Elephants, Jessica supports the team in developing clear, efficient, and creative human-centered solutions for the organization and its clients. Prior to working at Leading Elephants, Jessica served the brilliant students of her community as the Network and Communications Manager for the Greater Delta Teach For America region. With community-focused projects and a multi-media lens, she shined a spotlight on the efforts in her community and the immense beauty, resilience, and importance of equity-driven work. Her professional career began as a social media manager and then project manager for her local United Way.
As a karaoke queen and foodie, she enjoys nights out on the town with her husband in Dallas, TX and spirited debates on any manner of topic with friends and family.
JESSICA WALKER
OperationS AND COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER. COMMUNITY BUILDER. STORYTELLER.
Superpower:
Jessica develops systems that empower others to work towards ambitious goals with confidence, courage, and care.
Our contributOrs
Leading Elephants works with a network of consultants and coaches with a range of experiences. Here are some of our colleagues that are currently engaged as consultants:
RENE MORGAN
EXPERIENCE CURATOR
Rene Morgan is an experienced executive coach, facilitator, and leader of initiatives focused on partnerships, strategy and organizational culture. She keeps equity at the center, sees the forest and the trees, and infuses adaptive and technical skill building into her coaching and facilitation to walk alongside leaders as they progress and transition through the stages of their career.
Rene is passionate about envisioning, planning and curating experiences for professionals to feel empowered, achieve their goals and live the lives they were created to live. She believes people have everything they need inside of them to be successful and thrive which she uses as the foundation to build their capacity and confidence.
Rene specializes in cohort-based learning, professional development design and facilitation, people management, compassionate leadership, team culture and full-cycle recruitment.
OUR COMMUNITY
At Leading Elephants, we expand the community of support to bring diverse and technical skills to complex challenges. Where appropriate, we partner with other organizations to help our clients receive help they need most.
PARTNERS With Deep Expertise
Diversity, Equity, And
Inclusion Partners
Academic strategy and
implementation partners
Board Expertise
Beloved Community
Dawan Julien
De-Lea Allen
Giovani Escudero
Illuminate Collaborative
Natalie Basham
Attuned Education Partners
Bellwether
Bellwether
Cristine Nardi
We seek to provide a seamless experience when our clients engage with multiple partners.
We work to jointly scope an initiative and what is needed. Often, our partner will bring deep expertise and technical credibility and will facilitate meetings and advise on the “what” of an initiative. Leading Elephants may support in the initiative design, stakeholder engagement, cultural healing, leadership coaching, and other elements of the “how” experience.
See how Leading Elephants works with our partners to meet each organization's unique needs.
Leadership Consulting Case Study
Our Client's
Story
Our Charter Network (OCN)* came to Leading Elephants for help with navigating:
1. Financial Woes
2. Leadership Turnover
3. A Fractured Culture
What Leading
Elephants did
—Conducted 1:1 diagnostic conversations
—Facilitated shared spaces to address culture challenges
—Guided development of new commitments, norms, and a set of new conversations to translate pinches and wins
—Provided differentiated support for key leaders through their phased decisions with coaching
What our
partner did
—Invested in their Central Office Team who became powerful, more optimistic narrators of the network's story
—Expanded the dialogue and transparency around real issues for their team and stakeholders
—Developed solutions to budgeting issues
—Fostered a network-wide commitment to a new, unified culture