Karen Kemerling

Karen Kemerling (Ph.D.) is an energetic and inspirational Agile leader and coach passionately applying Agile principles to build confidence in individuals, empower teams, and generate a competitive advantage.

She is the founder of K2 | Leadership Development – a leadership coaching and organizational development company.

She brings 30+ years of leadership experience heading all aspects of business in large global companies, smaller businesses, and non-profits. Her superior project management, implementation, negotiation, and consensus-building skills, focuses on delivering services that empower the business and promote productivity in the workforce.

Karen is a Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), as well as a Certified Agile Leader (CAL) facilitating the Agile Leadership Journey coaching practice for global leaders on-line. She is a Neuroscience Certified Brain Based Coach, and she is a Psychological Safety Certified Trainer and Coach. She uses these approaches in workshops and to actively coach leaders to develop a growth-mindset and foster psychologically safe teams and organizations.

Karen co-developed the Women in Agile Leadership (WiAL) program, supporting and encouraging women executives & leaders to find their voice and lead authentically in a complex multi-cultural setting.

Karen is a Scrum@Scale Practitioner (CSaSP) leading a companywide Scrum transition through facilitating executive backlog grooming, coaching multi-team sprints, addressing impediments, and facilitating cross-team collaboration.

In 2011, Karen was nominated by the Denver Business Journal as the CIO of the year in the Non-Profit Sector. In 2015, she was also voted one of the top 3 Businesswomen of the Year in Denver.

In 2002, Karen successfully completed her doctoral dissertation on the Productivity of Remote Teams and achieved her Doctorate degree in Management and Organizational Development.

In addition, Karen holds a Master of Science degree in Management of Information Systems (MIS) and a Bachelor of Science in computer science and a minor in electrical engineering.