About Michelle
Michelle Hoover launched Baem Leadership so she could advise the world’s top executives and founders, equipping them to become more astute and agile across increasingly fluid business situations. With a sense of humor and accumulated wisdom, Michelle ushers her clients through complex processes and challenging revelations. Always focused on accelerating performance, she helps senior leaders understand where their current performance resides, then guides them through aligning company talent to make their most audacious goals achievable. Each client emerges stronger, more agile, and with a renewed passion for their work.
An accomplished leadership development strategist, advisor, and executive coach, Michelle’s own expertise straddles the worlds of business and education, a combination that lends her work a potent one-two punch. Her business acumen gives her an unmatched depth of understanding in the corporate world, enabling her to see any systems at play today and identify how they can be leveraged for positive change in the future. Her executive education background gives her an acute ability to strategically address the structural and interpersonal issues that plague modern companies. A trusted thought-partner to CEOs and business visionaries, Michelle’s work consistently yields profound results. Michelle has designed, delivered, and facilitated talent development programs for more than 15,000 learners across five continents in her 18 years in leadership development. She is passionate about the process of learning, always ensuring her clients are prepared to listen deeply and embrace personal transformation. Working with her means never cutting corners; each leader she counsels learns to be open and honest about their individual strengths and opportunities.
Prior to founding Baem, Michelle established the Leadership and Learning function at Audible, an Amazon company, launching the company’s first suite of management-development learning initiatives. Before that, she led two years of 100 percent year-over-year growth at venture-backed educational startup General Assembly, overseeing four global functions responsible for product and service quality in the delivery of online and in-person learning programs. Michelle also served as Director of Executive Education for the Beijing-based Cheung Kong Graduate Graduate School of Business and spent eight years holding several roles at Duke Corporate Education, at the time the No. 1 provider of custom executive education as ranked by Financial Times and BusinessWeek.
A First-Generation Professional (FGP) herself, Michelle has begun focusing Baem’s work on developing and supporting emerging leaders. She recognizes FGPs as a motivated and hardworking group that will represent an increasing percentage of the talent market. Michelle believes any company prepared to embrace the positive opportunities created by this category of employees will gain a huge competitive advantage. She’s excited to support these forward-thinking organizations and the individuals who lead them.
A former newspaper reporter and editor, Michelle earned her B.A. in journalism from Penn State University and her Ed.M. in higher education from Harvard University, where she focused on organizational and leadership theory. She lives with her partner and his 8,000-piece vinyl collection in Manhattan, where she enjoys strong coffee, figuring out the most efficient ways to get around town, and the eternal wonder of Central Park.
