Testimonials

For four years, Gayle Karen Young worked for me as Chief Talent and Culture Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, where she was responsible for all people-related practices including recruitment and on-boarding, goal-setting and performance assessment, compensation and advancement, engagement, wellness, and skills and leadership development. Gayle was a virtuoso. I have never met anybody with better people skills. A deft facilitator of people and process, universally trusted and capable of having tough conversations with grace and compassion, in her time with us Gayle dramatically strengthened the Wikimedia Foundation. Working with her was a joyful experience.

– Sue Gardner, Former Executive Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Gayle is one of those rare individuals who combine solid craftsmanship in their work with a broad horizon, excellent strategic thinking and deep empathetic connection. She is hands-down one of the best executives I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Her insights, drive and passion, combined with pragmatism and a "getting stuff done" attitude are truly outstanding. Plus she's just fun to work with!

– Pascal Finette, VP SU Labs, Singularity University

Gayle can solve problems I've never seen anyone else solve. Her strength lies in understanding relationships between people, especially in the context of organizations with a nuance and precision that I have never encountered in another person. She does this by listening. Profoundly. Drawing upon her vast training and background in organizational psychology, she creates and supports you through frameworks that are sophisticated enough to capture complexity and simple enough to deploy right away. She artfully guides people through hard conversation, facilitating thoughtful understanding rather than fiery debate. In the entrepreneurship training program we run, she has used these methods to save teams of cofounders from falling apart. She has helped birth extraordinary cultures and workplace environments. She has served as a voice of reason, support, wisdom, nuance, and insight as a member of our board. If you have the rare opportunity to work with Gayle, do it. For you will perhaps never meet as gifted, as warm, and as effective a person for bringing about cultural transformation in your organization.

– Teju Ravilochan, Co-founder and CEO, Unreasonable Institute

Gayle brings an improbable mix of empathy and intellect to her work, giving her the ability to perform at the highest level of leadership, while experiencing a felt understanding of each individual along the way. She is graceful in an emergency, confident in a conflict, and patient in the moments when you want to rip your hair out. With Gayle, you feel like you've known her forever after just meeting. She's free of bullshit and full of energy. I couldn't recommend her more.

– Evan Walden, CEO, ReWork

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. If you don't understand what motivates your people, the best laid plans will go awry. Gayle Karen Young helps organizations navigate the messy reality of creating alignment behind a shared vision, by building on shared values and passion. I've had the great pleasure to work with Gayle in building Wikimedia's engineering org, and her help was indispensable in managing countless tricky people & culture issues along the way.

– Erik Moeller, nonprofit entrepreneur; former VP of Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation

I occasionally wonder whether Gayle is a fictional creation of my unconscious, because she's the platonic form of everything I wish executives and cultural leaders were. When Gayle joined the Foundation our organisational culture was a joke - literally. Every dig or snide remark you've heard directed at a HR department or senior manager applied here. Almost immediately after arriving, Gayle had begun to turn things around. The way in which executives approached decisions began to change; the empathy and sense of moral responsibility they held towards employees increased, and vice versa. Beyond her direct work to improve the ethos of others, Gayle swiftly became a cultural and moral hub of the company in her own right, demonstrating not just through her suggestions but through her deeds what a good executive looked like. People looked at her not just as a source of advice, but as an example.There are a lot of people where I believe I was lucky to work with them. Gayle is not one of them. Instead, I believe I was blessed.

– Oliver Keyes, Senior Scientist, Rapid7

There were two Wikimedia Foundations imho. Quite simply, there was the Foundation before Gayle, and then there was the Foundation after Gayle. She created culture at our organization. For such a profoundly successful and community-driven project like Wikipedia, you would think identity and culture-making would be conventional. It wasn't. It was a Herculean and fraught task, but one I can't imagine anyone else but Gayle leading.

– Jay Walsh, Former Head of Communications, Wikimedia Foundation

Gayle is a dynamic, engaging speaker. We had the fortune of having her join our team at an All-Hands Meeting, and her insights and knowledge around culture, human behaviors, and organizational systems [to name a few!] are extraordinary. She drew parallels from her experience to create new connections for our team to think about how we can best serve our clients, in creative and innovative ways. I've also had the pleasure of seeing Gayle transform a room of change-makers with the StartingBloc community. She has done numerous talks, many around individual development and teaching core leadership concepts. Time and time again, Fellows have shared how impactful Gayle's talks have been in fundamentally shifting the way they perceive and think about the world, and coming up with ideas and solutions to our most complex problems.

– Christine Lai, Chief of Staff, Delivering Happiness // Fellow, StartingBloc LA'13

Gayle brings a level of authenticity, and a depth of knowledge, that are rarely found within one person. At StartingBloc, I have repeatedly seen her captivate audiences without fanfare or showmanship, simply based on the power of her words and the sheer usefulness of her professional insight. The Fellows in our program appreciate the competence and extensive toolset that Gayle brings to team dynamics, interpersonal work, leadership, systems thinking, human rights, and technology. They also come away inspired by Gayle's stories and the integrated way in which she leads her life. Gayle is consistently one of the highest rated speakers at StartingBloc, and I could not recommend her more highly.

– Cesar Gonzalez, CEO, StartingBloc

As our Famous Entrepreneur Series speaker, Gayle Karen Young enraptured our diverse audience of business people, students, cultural creatives, and community activists. With her global experience and an extraordinary blend of sensitive intelligence and a very smart heart, Gayle introduced our participants to the poetic, practical, and sometimes revolutionary inspirations behind the collaborative social media movement. She is able to address the broad and complex scope of this quickly changing phenomenon and in particular its relevance to marginal and political-dissident populations. And finally, Gayle offered her own story of leadership with a vulnerability and an eloquence that stirred people to want to lead and serve with more soulfulness.

– Rev. David McCallum, S.J., Ed.D, Former Dean of the Madden School of Business, Le Moyne College

Gayle is one of the wisest women we've had the pleasure of hosting as a Summit speaker. She joined us both to train our team and to share her story and expertise at one of our events. Gayle's poetic and deeply engaging style captivate everyone in the room. She gracefully explains the most impossibly complex topics and invites her audience to deeply consider their own experience as they learn new frameworks to approach their personal life, their professional life, and the life of their organization. There are few speakers who can hold the stage with such breadth and depth, and if you have the chance to have Gayle join you for an event or training, you are in for a great gift. I cannot recommend her enough.

– Shira Abramowitz, Content Director, Summit Series

There are certain, rare individuals who have the genius for understanding the essence of an enterprise and the way individual talent and communal zeal can be combined in one sustaining conversation to go where we might previously only have intuited we needed to go. Gayle Karen Young is that hard to find and consistently insightful voice who helps those at the highest levels of responsibility to create a proper foundation for the future, a life giving conversation among all concerned and very practical advice for how to bring this all about. I recommend her and her work without reservation.

– David Whyte, Poet, Philosopher, Best-Selling Author