Maria Howard
Former Chief Revenue Officer, Linkage
Expertise
About Maria:
Maria Howard is the former Chief Revenue Officer at Linkage, where she oversaw the global business development and marketing teams. She brings more than 15 years of experience building and leading businesses in the professional services industry with a focus on synchronizing strategy and talent to drive business performance.
Maria’s area of expertise is leading organizations through transformation and growth by optimizing the client journey. She achieves this by leading cross-functional integration across Sales, Marketing, Product, Operations, and Consulting, empowering organizations to better serve and delight clients—and deliver significant revenue growth. Her passion for aligning the client experience to drive company strategy and execution is centered around unlocking our most important asset—our people. Creating high-performing, collaborative and innovative teams unified in pursuit of delivering excellence is the cornerstone of her leadership.
Maria is a highly sought–after leadership consultant and speaker, with deep expertise in Advancing Women Leaders, including the 7 Hurdles That Women Face in the Workforce. She has delivered programs, coaching and keynotes to thousands of leaders globally at companies including Synchrony Financial, Goodyear, AIG, Pixar, Willis Group and AstraZeneca. She was also a keynote speaker at Linkage’s Women in Leadership Institute™, an immersive experience which attracts more than 1,400 women leaders across the globe each year.
Background & Experience:
Before Linkage, Maria spent the last decade growing commercial businesses within Korn Ferry. During her time there, she led several post-acquisition integrations, driving double-digit growth across talent acquisition, assessment, development, engagement and rewards solution areas. She started a new global function creating blended offerings across KF Executive Search, Futurestep, Advisory and Digital businesses. Maria served as an executive sponsor for marquee clients across the life sciences, consumer, industrial and tech industries, and delivered global programs to clients and internal colleagues across NA, APAC and EMEA.
Education & Training:
Maria earned a Master of Arts in psychotherapy and organizational development from the Adler Graduate School, and an undergraduate degree in psychology and communications from the College of Saint Benedict.
Maria's Insights
The Toll of COVID-19 on Women Leaders | How Executives Can Reverse the Trend
How can we rise to the challenge of COVID-19 and mitigate the professional impact of an unprecedented health crisis? It starts with executive action.
How Women Can Glide Over the Hurdles to Advancement in the Workplace | 3 Takeaways from My Conversation with Sally Helgesen
Linkage’s Chief Revenue Officer, Maria Howard shares three critical takeaways from her conversation with Sally Helgesen, international best-selling author and women’s leadership expert during a recent webinar on the advancement of women leaders in the age of COVID-19.
How We Commit to Be Purposeful, Inclusive Leaders in 2020 and Beyond
Out of crisis comes opportunity, and strong and effective leadership is a cornerstone of our ability to rise to a challenge—within our organizations, communities, and in our world. The commitments of Purposeful Leadership, grounded in inclusion, become even more important as we all strive to lead in a permanently changed world. We must inspire, innovate, achieve, engage and become in order to meet today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.
Effective Leaders Are Inclusive Leaders — Organizations Navigating a World in Crisis Accelerate through Inclusion
It’s clear that inclusion can be the accelerator to our success. So, what can we do to activate the power of inclusive leadership at our organizations? We need to put an equal emphasis on creating the cultures of inclusion necessary to support a diversified workforce. And, we must put a common behavioral language behind what inclusive leadership is in action if we are to create a new standard of leadership that serves all people in our organizations.
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