leadingforlife.net

Karen Brown, Main Speaker

Karen has spent most of her professional life, about 19 years, working for PricewaterhouseCoopers based in London. She qualified as a Chartered Accountant and specialised in International corporate tax. However, after about 9 years and during a 6 month secondment to teach corporate tax, she realised that she enjoyed helping people learn more than she enjoyed the detail of tax work. As a consequence of that insight, Karen made a significant career shift into people development and helping people lead behavioural change projects.

Since 1996, she has been on a journey learning and growing and developing her expertise in organisational development and people development. Her roles in the last 12 years have included extensive work in Europe, leadership development, helping teams form their strategy and work better together and coaching. For the last few years, Karen has been supporting the UK Board of PwC helping them focus on the strategic behavioural challenges for PwC’s future. The type of projects she has direct experience of includes: developing a culture that differentiates PwC from its competitors, increasing employee engagement, talent management of senior global client relationship partners and developing emerging leaders.

Karen now works in a team helping companies with the people challenges when one company has acquired or merged with another company.

Apart from the ‘day job’, Karen is the Chair of Trustees for a charity called RETRAK that works in East and Central Africa with street children. “Our mission is to enable street children to realise their potential and discover their worth. We do that through building relationships with street kids and then working with them to find a sustainable alternative to life on the streets. It is an incredible project which brings new life in hopeless situations and in a small way seeks to re-establish the life that God intended for each child away from the fear of living on the street. It’s a privilege to be involved.”

Karen is single and lives in London, enjoying life in her local community with church and friends and when she can loves to be walking and exploring the great outdoors.