Kristin Kaufman is the founder of Alignment, Inc.®, a leadership coaching consultancy that she founded in 2007. Kristin has held senior roles at Hewlett-Packard, Vignette, and United Health Group, managed billion-dollar programs, and built global systems. Across large corporations, she has led major growth projects. At the NYC Leadership Academy, she coached school leaders across the city. Her corporate roles familiarized her with the many different sides of leadership and the importance of executing them. Kristin now works with top brands. She guides executives through change. Her Alignment at Work® approach creates remarkable results for executives, leaders, and other individuals who feel stuck. In this interview, she shares her journey, methods, and leadership insights.
Q1. Kristin, to begin, can you introduce yourself and share what inspired you to build Alignment, Inc. and focus your work on leadership transformation?
Kristin Kaufman: I am what I refer to as a ‘recovering corporate exec’ turned entrepreneur. I loved what I did the first 25+ years of my career, until I didn’t! As people (and professionals), we evolve; there came a day when I realized I had ‘lost the plot’ of my career trajectory. I was, as I now refer to it, ‘out of alignment.’ That was when I embarked on re-inventing how I wanted to contribute to the world; that was 20 years ago.
Through this personal experience, I tapped into and trademarked my concept of alignment, which up until then had been reserved for chiropractors and automobile alignment companies. I define alignment as ‘loving what you do, being good at it, and most importantly, having it tied to something greater than yourself.’ If any of those pillars are wobbly, then we are as well! Yet, once we become aligned, we are undoubtedly at our most powerful.
So, that is my mission: to help individuals, teams, organizations, and boards of directors become fully aligned. At my company, Alignment, Inc.®, we don’t pigeonhole our services as we believe each organization and individual’s need is unique to any given situation. Our Alignment at Work® foundational approach is customized for each and every client with whom we work.
Q2. You work with a wide range of executive assessments, from The Leadership Circle to MBTI and Lominger. How do you determine which tools best reveal a leader’s core patterns and blind spots?
Kristin Kaufman: I choose executive assessments by starting with why and what, not the tool.
First, I clarify the coaching objective: what the leader is working to develop and what outcomes matter most. Then I consider the executive’s role, context, and level of influence to ensure the assessment reflects the reality they’re operating in.
For example, a C-suite leader navigating enterprise complexity needs different insight than a newly promoted VP. Industry, scope of influence, pace of change, and stakeholder expectations all matter. The assessment must reflect the reality they’re operating in.
Some engagements call for broad self-awareness; others require deeper insight into behaviors under pressure, patterns of thinking, or interpersonal impact. I choose assessments that provide actionable insight, not overwhelm or labels. It is imperative that we match the tool with the depth required from the assessment.
The best assessments integrate cleanly into coaching. They should spark reflection, reveal patterns, and support alignment between values, behavior, and strategy. If an assessment doesn’t move the conversation forward, it’s not the right one. Self-awareness is the #1 most critical aspect of strong leadership. Assessments are designed to elevate and deepen that insight.
Finally, I select tools that provide the right depth of insight, integrate naturally into the coaching process, and support alignment between values, behavior, and strategy. Credibility and psychological safety are non-negotiable; the leader must trust both the assessment and how it’s used.
Ultimately, the assessment is a mirror, not the answer. Its value comes from how the insights are interpreted and translated into aligned action.
Q3. Action learning is central to your coaching. What makes action learning more effective than traditional training for driving lasting behavioral change?
Kristin Kaufman: Action learning is more effective than traditional training because it turns insight into behavior, not just information.
Traditional training often builds awareness in a classroom setting, but lasting change happens when leaders apply learning to real, complex challenges they’re facing right now. Action learning embeds development in the work itself.
It creates accountability through reflection, experimentation, and peer dialogue. Leaders test new approaches, see the impact in real time, and adjust, building capability and capacity through experience rather than theory.
Most importantly, action learning drives alignment, which is the concept on which my entire company and methodology are based. It connects thinking, behavior, and results, ensuring learning doesn’t fade after the session ends but becomes integrated into how leaders lead every day.
Q4. You’ve coached leaders across sectors, from healthcare and technology to education. What leadership challenges show up consistently across industries, regardless of scale or structure?
Kristin Kaufman: From my experience over the past 20 years in my current role, and prior to that, actually being a leader in the technology and healthcare spaces, leadership challenges tend to share a few consistent threads, regardless of size, sector, strategy, or industry. The top six, from my perspective, are:
- Leading through complexity and change: Leaders everywhere are navigating constant change, ambiguity, and competing priorities while still being expected to deliver results.
- Alignment between strategy, people, and execution: Misalignment between vision and behavior, goals and incentives, or leadership intent and employee experience, is one of the most common and costly challenges.
- Communication and influence: Leaders often struggle to communicate clearly, inspire commitment, and influence across functions without relying on authority alone.
- Decision-making under pressure: Making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information is universal, and so is the risk of indecision, overconfidence, or reactive leadership. Making the ‘hard calls’ is something every leader will face.
- Developing and retaining talent: Building strong leaders beneath them, giving effective feedback, and keeping high performers engaged remains a shared challenge. This will become even more difficult as the world continues to become more and more transparent and accessible; people have insight and visibility to ‘what is out there.’
- Self-awareness and executive presence: Many leaders underestimate how their behavior, stress responses, and blind spots impact others.
No matter the industry, the leaders who navigate these challenges best are the ones who build alignment within themselves, their teams, and the organization.
Q5. Having led multi-billion-dollar channel organizations at HP and served on major executive committees, how does your corporate background shape the way you guide leaders today?
Kristin Kaufman: My corporate background gives me a deep appreciation for the realities leaders face every day. Unless one has ‘worn the moccasins,’ it is hard to grasp the day-in and day-out challenges. My clients have repeatedly said that fact is what attracted them to work with me, and what keeps them as clients, in many cases for 15-20 years. They appreciate the credibility and insight experience brings.
Having operated inside complex organizations, navigated competing priorities, and felt the pressure to deliver results while leading people through change, I ‘get it’ in a way that many do not. That experience shapes how I coach, practically, not theoretically.
I understand the pace, the politics, and the consequences of decisions at the executive level. So my coaching is grounded in what actually works in real-world environments, not ideal scenarios or academic case studies.
Most importantly, my background helps me focus on alignment between strategy, behavior, and leadership presence, so leaders don’t just gain insight; they create meaningful, sustainable impact.
Q6. Your “Is This Seat Taken?” trilogy focuses on reinvention and purpose. How do you help senior executives reconnect with meaning so they lead with clarity, confidence, and alignment?
Kristin Kaufman: My books, specifically the first and the third, are both autobiographical and quite vulnerable; in book #2, I researched and told the stories of executives who created success, as they personally defined it, relatively late in life.
There are four themes that emerged through the writing of all three of these books:
- We define success on our terms. It is individual and is directly aligned to how we choose to contribute to the world. We define it, not the society, corporate position, or financial accumulation. And it is not stagnant. It evolves and changes as we evolve.
- We ALWAYS have the power of choice. We don’t control much (most) of what happens around us; however, we can control how we respond. That is probably one of the most powerful ‘ah-ha(s)’ we can grasp. As Viktor Frankl (one of my heroes) quoted in his seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: that last of human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”
- Incidental encounters are not incidental. Our lives are peppered with ‘incidental encounters,’ and every single leader I interviewed and/or researched in my second book stated that their lives changed due to the ‘random encounter.’ It was fascinating to learn; I have personally experienced this in my own life, as well. Our responsibility is to stay awake and be present to those serendipities. When we do this, we open the door to potential, opportunity, and to the miracles these individuals introduce to our lives.
- Finally, if we are alive, we have purpose. Period. It is simply ‘not over until it is over.’ As long as we have breath, we have the ability to contribute and to make an impact on the world. That single realization has helped more executives than you can imagine.
So, with that as the backdrop, I help executives reconnect with meaning by creating space to slow down and reflect, often for the first time in a long time, about what makes them tick, to get in touch with their interpretation of those four points.
We clarify what truly matters to them: their values, purpose, and the impact they want to have as leaders. From there, we examine where their current behaviors, decisions, and leadership style may be out of alignment with that meaning.
Through intentional reflection and real-world application, leaders begin to make choices that are more grounded, authentic, and sustainable. When meaning and action are aligned, leadership becomes clearer, more confident, and more effective, and the results follow.
AND they become ALIGNED, which, from my definition, ‘is when they love what they do, they are good at it, and most importantly, it is tied to something much greater than themselves™.’ THAT is when magic starts to happen.
Conclusion
Kristin Kaufman’s story shows how experience shapes purpose. She has moved from corporate boardrooms to coaching circles. Today, she helps leaders grow from the inside out. Her Alignment at Work® method combines reflection, action, and focus, which brings strong results for teams and individuals. Kristin’s work spans healthcare, education, technology, nonprofits, and other fields. Her clients trust her process and see real change in how they lead. Kristin reminds us that leadership is a daily practice, which requires honesty and courage.
