ALL THINGS CHRISTA HABERSTOCK

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BYLINE

Founder of See Agency; founder of Bookable Speakers; creator of The Obvious Advantage™; leadership keynote speaker; bestselling author.

BIG PROMISE

Christa helps leaders make better talent and role-design decisions by identifying where people create the most value, then building teams and systems around that advantage so execution, retention, and performance are more sustainable.

100-WORD BIO

Christa Haberstock is the founder of See Agency and Bookable Speakers and the creator of The Obvious Advantage™. For nearly three decades, she has worked inside high-performance speaking, talent, and leadership environments, helping visible experts, speakers, and organizations identify the strengths that are often closest to them and easiest to overlook. Her keynote work draws on experience across the classroom, sales, and building a $4.2M founder-dependent company, giving her a practical lens on role design, talent placement, and the performance risks created by misalignment. Today, she shows leaders how to stop managing only for weakness and start designing work around where people do their best work.

LONG BIO

Christa Haberstock is a leadership and culture keynote speaker, founder of See Agency and Bookable Speakers, and creator of The Obvious Advantage™. Her authority was earned inside the speaking, talent, and performance business, where she spent decades helping high-performing experts and organizations identify what makes them valuable, differentiated, and sustainable in the market.

That experience gave her a direct view into a recurring leadership problem: organizations often assume low energy, inconsistency, or stalled growth is a motivation issue, when the deeper issue is role and system misalignment. [page:2] Christa’s keynote work reframes that problem for executives, HR leaders, and people managers by showing how teams perform differently when work is built around the conditions under which people naturally create value.

Drawing on experience from the classroom, sales, and scaling a $4.2M founder-dependent business, she speaks to what leaders actually have to protect: execution, margin, retention, and capacity. Her core message is operational rather than inspirational: stop trying to “fix” people into fit and start designing roles, conversations, and systems around their Obvious Advantage™.

Christa serves corporate, association, conference, executive team, sales, HR, healthcare, education, nonprofit, and faith-based audiences across the U.S. and Canada.

KEYNOTE FEES

In-Person: $10,000

Half-Day: $12,500
Virtual: $7,500
Travel Fee: $1,500
Covers airfare, all ground transportation, and meals.
Client provides up to two hotel nights.

Fee integrity is maintained across all events to ensure clarity for planners and bureaus.

TRAVELS FROM

Dallas, TX

GREAT SPEAKER FOR

· Executive leadership meetings, leadership retreats, culture initiatives, and association conferences where leaders need a clearer talent-performance lens.

· Industries experiencing sustained pressure, execution complexity, talent strain, or retention risk, including healthcare, education, sales organizations, and people-intensive service businesses.

· Organizations dealing with misalignment, burnout risk, preventable turnover, stalled development plans, founder dependence, or overreliance on a few high performers.

· Audiences that include CEOs, presidents, senior executives, HR leaders, talent leaders, people managers, sales leaders, and culture-shaping decision-makers.

PRESENTATION TITLES & DESCRIPTIONS

Don’t Ignore the Obvious: Why “Fix What’s Weak” Fails Your Best People

Audience: senior leaders, executives, people‑leaders, event themes around leadership, performance, culture.

Protect your best people by stopping the fix‑your‑flaws culture.

In this keynote, Christa Haberstock shows how that belief slips into leadership: we promote people, pile on responsibilities, and then spend most of our time talking about where they fall short. The result is top performers who are always “proving” and rarely working from the part of themselves that actually drives results. Christa gives leaders a different way to look at performance: less time managing gaps, more time aiming people at the work where they create the most value.

Christa traces a pattern she’s seen beside top performers for decades.

When people work inside what they’re wired for, they have energy; when they don’t, they pay for it. Drawing on stories from the classroom, sales, and building a $4.2M founder‑dependent company, Christa shows how even strong leaders can design roles and systems that quietly exhaust their best people. She then connects that pattern to what senior teams care about most: execution, margin, growth, and not losing your best talent to the competition.

This session gives leaders a repeatable lens to realign work.

Leaders learn how to spot the difference between work that pulls people forward and work that just pushes them to keep up. They leave with questions they can use in one‑on‑ones, staff meetings, and planning sessions to make sure their highest‑impact people spend more time in the work that actually moves the numbers—and less time fixing what was never going to be their edge.

Key Takeaways (leader + culture focus):

See how “fix‑what’s‑weak” cultures quietly exhaust top performers and stall results.
Read the signals that your best people are pushing uphill instead of working in their lane.
Use strengths‑based questions to redesign work so high performers spend more time on what moves the numbers.
Reset expectations, metrics, and conversations to reward contribution, not constant self‑repair.
Leave with language leaders can use in meetings and reviews to protect and scale their best people.

Perfect for:

Executive and senior leadership meetings
Leadership conferences and summits
Sales and kickoff meetings focused on performance
Company meetings where you need to reset how work gets done at the top

Don’t Ignore the Obvious: Stop Wasting the Talent You Already Have

Audience: HR, Talent, People & Culture, employee engagement / retention / talent optimization events.

Unlock the talent you already pay for instead of chasing what’s missing.

HR and talent teams see it every day: people who are smart and capable, but stuck in roles that drain them. In this keynote, Christa Haberstock connects the dots between “fix what’s weak” cultures and preventable turnover, stalled development plans, and engagement scores that never quite move. She gives talent leaders a cleaner way to see where people already do their best work—and how to design around that instead of their gaps.

A pattern HR keeps bumping into.

Across leaders, teams, and industries, the same thing keeps happening: when people work inside what they’re wired for, they have energy; when they don’t, they burn out or leave. Christa uses real stories—from a $4.2M founder‑dependent business to elite performers in her world—to show how much performance and loyalty you leave on the table when roles are built around “what’s missing” instead of what’s already there.

A practical lens for talent, not another model.

This session gives HR and People teams simple language they can plug straight into performance conversations, development plans, and succession decisions. Instead of starting with “areas of improvement,” they learn how to surface each person’s Obvious Advantage and make sure at least part of their job actually uses it. The goal isn’t to ignore gaps—it’s to stop letting them run the whole talent strategy.

Key Takeaways (HR + systems focus):

Spot the roles, processes, and programs that drain high‑potential talent instead of using it.
Map where existing employees’ strengths are underused across the org.
Design development plans, succession paths, and internal mobility around Obvious Advantage™.
Use practical HR questions and tools to place people better and lift engagement scores.
Build a talent strategy that improves retention by investing in the people you already have.

Perfect for:

HR, Talent, and People & Culture conferences
Employee engagement, retention, or talent development initiatives
People‑leader trainings and offsites
Company meetings focused on “do more with the team you already have”

Don’t Ignore the Obvious: Lead from Your Advantage

Audience: C‑suite and senior executive leaders, VP/Director/Department heads, high‑potential leadership cohorts, and succession pipelines.

Design roles around real advantage so performance feels lighter.

Most accomplished people overlook the very strengths that make them indispensable — because those strengths feel “normal” to them. In this keynote, Christa Haberstock introduces The Obvious Advantage™ framework, helping leaders and teams see what they’re ignoring in plain sight and use it to accelerate performance, strengthen clarity, and reduce burnout.

Christa traces a pattern she’s seen beside top performers for decades.

Drawing on decades of performance, sales, and leadership experience, Christa shows how to diagnose where effort is working against someone’s wiring, then redesign work so people are pulled toward performance instead of pushed by pressure. The result is clearer execution, less friction, and teams that can scale without burning out their best people.

This session gives leaders and teams simple language to use right away.

Participants walk away with a repeatable framework and shared language to spot uphill work, surface hidden talent, and redeploy people into more impactful roles. They learn how to move from crisis-driven push motivation to pull-driven performance design, and how to build complementary teams instead of chasing artificial “well-roundedness.”.

Key Takeaways (advantage + role‑design focus):

Spot “obvious” strengths in yourself and others that feel normal but drive real results.
Use The Obvious Advantage™ to see when effort is uphill and why.
Design roles and responsibilities around natural wiring for easier, faster execution.
Lead by multiplying what works instead of fixing gaps.
Activate hidden talent to boost performance and retention across teams.

Perfect for:

Leadership team meetings at any level where you need clearer roles and better use of strengths.
Leadership conferences and summits exploring high‑performance cultures.
High‑potential and emerging leader programs that need a practical strengths lens.
Company or division meetings where you’re reframing roles, responsibilities, or org design.

RELATED SPEAKERS

Marcus Buckingham — comparable on strengths-based performance, but Christa’s lane is more explicitly tied to role design, culture, and leadership systems.
Cy Wakeman — comparable on workforce accountability and leadership realism, with Christa offering a more talent-alignment and strengths-placement lens.
Ashley Goodall — comparable on performance, feedback, and strengths at work, with Christa bringing a keynote-ready framework anchored in The Obvious Advantage™.

TESTIMONIALS

Compassionate Leadership That Resonates Across Sectors

Director of Donor Engagement, United Way MBMV

“Michelle’s powerful points about the importance of both leadership and compassion in the workplace moved me. She cares for both her colleagues and the community; I am honored to partner with her to help move United Way’s work forward.”

Trust-Driven Communication & Leadership Impact

VP of Development/Chief Development Officer, United Way MBMV

“I found Michelle to be an engaging speaker with a great message. She clearly earns the attention of her audience much like she earns the trust and confidence of her teams. It’s easy to see why she has been so successful in her work.”

Executive Alignment at Global Leadership Conferences

Chief Marketing Officer, NBTY

“Each year, NBTY invites our top leaders from around the world to come together in a special forum to share ideas, track our path, define our future goals, and energize the organization to be the very best global wellness company we can be. We were pleased and honored to have Michelle Stacy join us as a special keynote speaker to kick off this year’s NBTY Leadership Conference.

Our event focused on leadership and unlocking the power of true teamwork—two subjects that Michelle spoke to personally as a respected and accomplished leader in the consumer marketing space. Her presentation followed the opening remarks of our CEO, setting the stage for the topics that would follow during the two-day conference.

Michelle’s presentation was not only engaging but truly inspiring and thought-provoking. She provided our leaders with valuable insights that allowed us to take another look at our roles and skills as leaders while offering real-world advice on how we can energize and activate leadership at every level. Using simple yet powerful visual cues, she challenged the audience to look at day-to-day situations from different angles, allowing us to better understand the viewpoints of our peers and overcome common obstacles to effective teamwork.

Our post-meeting survey confirmed that Michelle’s content, presentation style, personal experience, and insights truly resonated with everyone in the audience, surpassing our goals and expectations for the conference.”

Organizational Engagement That Drives Real-World Change

EVP, iRobot Corporation

“Michelle’s insights on developing a culture of organizational engagement provoked discussions that lasted long after the end of her keynote speech. Her command of the topic and her experience as a CEO made the lessons she shared less about theory and more about the real and tangible impact for a successful business. She captured the audience with genuine style and powerful storytelling, bringing the topic to life by translating it into meaningful insights for the audience.”

Empowering Women in Law and Leadership

Ropes & Gray

“Michelle delivered a powerful presentation to Ropes & Gray’s Women’s Forum, whose members include women attorneys from the firm’s six U.S. offices. She offered valuable insights about how she was able to advance professionally while balancing an equally busy personal life. Our attorneys found Michelle to be inspiring, engaging, and candid.”

Industry-Wide Influence & Event Keynote Recognition

President and CEO, PCMA

“On behalf of the entire Professional Convention Management Association, I would like to express our sincere gratitude for your participation and support of our 60th Annual Meeting, Convening Leaders, in Vancouver. Through your efforts, Convening Leaders elevated industry standards and proved to be the premier education and networking event for the meetings and convention industry.”

MEDIA & ARTICLES

The Billion-Dollar Opportunity in Single-Serve Food | Harvard Business Review | 2015

https://hbr.org/2015/10/the-billion-dollar-opportunity-in-single-serve-food

For Breakthrough Innovation, Focus on Possibility, Not Profitability | Harvard Business Review | 2014

https://hbr.org/2014/06/for-breakthrough-innovation-focus-on-possibility-not-profitability

The New York Times: Keurig’s President on Stepping Back to Lead Better | The New York Times | 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/jobs/keurigs-president-on-stepping-back-to-lead-better.html

Leading Through Hypergrowth at Keurig | ArchPoint Group

http://archpointgroup.com/leading-through-hypergrowth-at-keurig/

Dartmouth Alumni Magazine: Michelle Valensi Stacy ’77 | Dartmouth Alumni Magazine

http://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/michelle-valensi-stacy-%E2%80%9977

Boston Globe: The Art of the Roundtable | Boston Globe | 2011