Meet Valentina Iturbe-LaGrave, Ph.D.

Valentina's career is genuinely multidisciplinary; an example of continued growth and agility in people leadership. She began as a scholar studying systems of power and oppression in post-colonial contexts and developing the analytical lens she'd later bring to organizational leadership. She architected the first open-access repository of inclusive practice in American higher education during her time as Director at the University of Denver, and served as co-principal investigator on NSF-funded research into the professional identities of computer engineers in the United States. She then went on to spend nearly five years at Google, leading across critical areas of people development for its global workforce, from reimagining onboarding and orientation to skills-based learning, high-potential talent interventions, and supporting the application of the company's landmark performance management redesign. Now she's bringing her expertise to Save the Children as a Senior Advisor of Organizational Effectiveness and Employee Engagement designing systems for a workforce operating in some of the world's most complex and high-stakes humanitarian environments, where the measure of organizational effectiveness is not productivity metrics, but children served. Her work is centered around a singular conviction: that systems should work for people, not the other way around. This means building people systems that are neither performative nor eroded by informal power structures, grounded in participatory action research principles, co-designed with employees and continuously iterated to adapt alongside shifting organizational priorities. She calls this "radical human centeredness," and it's exactly the kind of thinking we need to drive the future of performance management.