Kristen Hadeed

Kristen Hadeed is a speaker, author, and the founder of Student Maid, a cleaning company she started at 19 while she was still a college student. She believes authentic, human leadership can change the world, and she's spent her career proving that the way leaders treat people shapes everything from trust to retention.

Her leadership story started with a hard lesson. Before she graduated, Student Maid landed a contract to clean hundreds of apartments. Kristen hired a team of 60 people to get it done, and within days, 75% of them quit. That moment sparked what she calls an obsession with learning how to be a more human leader. Over the next 14 years, she grew Student Maid from a small cleaning company into a business known around the world for its culture of belonging, its focus on people, and its purpose of building leaders.

Human leadership that builds trust, belonging, and engaged cultures

Today, Kristen works with leaders, teams, and organizations around the world to help them embrace their humanity at work. She's worked in just about every industry, in almost every U.S. state and several other countries, through keynotes, interactive workshops, and ongoing culture change partnerships. Her goal is always the same: to ignite the kind of human leadership that builds trust, belonging, and wildly engaged cultures.

Her work connects directly to what people leaders care about most. She shows how relationships, not perks, kept her team engaged at Student Maid, even though the work itself meant scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets. That lens makes her a natural fit for leaders working on culture, performance, and retention at the same time.

Kristen is the author of Permission To Screw Up: How I Learned to Lead by Doing (Almost) Everything Wrong (Portfolio, 2017), an honest account of her biggest leadership mistakes and what they taught her. Her first TEDx talk has more than three million views on YouTube, and her work has been featured by PBS, FOX, Inc., NBC, TIME, and Forbes.

Topics Kristen speaks on

• Igniting human leadership: why traditional leadership approaches are falling short, how to bridge generational gaps, and how to attract and keep the next generation of talent.
• Courageous conversations and feedback: delivering compassionate, clear, and timely feedback, and receiving it in a way that keeps people speaking up.
• Building meaningful relationships at work: using curiosity, vulnerability, and empathy to build trust and get more done together.
• Permission to be human: letting go of perfectionism, reframing failure as growth, and creating psychologically safe teams.
• Well-being and sustainable performance: combating burnout, setting boundaries, and setting more human expectations for yourself and your team.

Connect with Kristen

• Kristen's website: keynotes, workshops, and culture change work
• Kristen Hadeed on LinkedIn
• Kristen Hadeed company page on LinkedIn

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