Kristin Arnold

For over 30 years, Kristin J. Arnold has helped over a 250 different organizations, facilitated over 450 distinct teams, and worked with over 16,000 leaders in a dozen countries around the world on the topics of team leadership, teamwork, team culture, and critical thinking, 

Kristin is a leading authority on panel discussions, a Master Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF-M), a CPAE Speaker Hall of Famer, and an award-winning author.  

Kristin Arnold blends the best of two worlds as a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), as well as a Certified Professional Facilitator | Master (CPF | M). Her unique background and personality have enabled her to work as a mainstage conversationalist™, engaging and involving the audience in shaping the content. She has engaged over half a million people around the world to think differently by invoking relevant, timely insights applicable to real-world issues.  She is equally conversant F2F as she is virtually or using a hybrid model.

Her most requested programs include (see further detail below):

• Smarter, Better, Faster - How to Make Good Decisions More Often
• Beyond the Usual Suspects: Springboards to Unleash Your Team's Creativity and Tap into Their Next Innovation
• Stop Working So Hard: The Leaders' Guide to Elevating People, Process, and Performance
• Supercharge Your Team: A Booster Shot to Leverage Your Team Talent
• Team Player or Spectator? How to Get Everyone in the Game
• So What? Now What? Translate Your Takeaways into Action
• Panel Moderation: Making Onsite, Online & Hybrid Conference Panel Discussions Extraordinary
• EmCee: Onsite & Online Digital/Virtual Master of Ceremonies

As one of the first female graduates of the United States Coast Guard Academy and the first woman stationed onboard a sea-going buoy tender, Kristin learned early on about working with others.  In 1990, she became one of the first USCG facilitators - and made every mistake one could!  Frustrated, she avidly researched this nascent skill called "facilitation" and found herself training a cadre of internal facilitators.  By 1992, companies were asking her to teach their people how to facilitate and lead teams!  Since then, she has been sharing her concrete approach to teambuilding with a treasure trove of practical concepts, tools and techniques her clients can apply immediately to see positive, substantive results. 

Kristin's passion for teams is reflected in her writing, speaking, facilitation, and consulting.  She is an award-winning author of Boring to Bravo: Proven Presentation Techniques to Engage, Involve, and Inspire Your Audiences to Action and several books in the Extraordinary Team Series (Team Basics, Email Basics and Team Energizers).  Her latest book, Powerful Panels, was written to raise the level of performance of panels at meetings, conferences and conventions.  Her next book, 125 Ways to Add More Pizzazz to Your Panel will be published in the summer of 2020.

Featured in numerous publications such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Update, USA Today, Selling Power, Kristin knows what it takes to lead, facilitate and participate on high-performing teams.  She was President of the National Speakers Association of the United States (2010-2011) and served as a National Director from 2005 to 2012.  She also served as President of the Downtown Hampton (Virginia) Development Partnership (2001-2), a nonprofit business organization attributed to turning Downtown Hampton from a quaint, sleepy town to a thriving entertainment, retail and residential center.  She retired from the USCG Reserves in 2002 as a Lieutenant Commander.

She has achieved the highest designations available within each of her core competencies:

• Certified Speaking Professional (CSP) from the National Speakers Association (2002) 
• Certified Professional Facilitator|Master (CPF|M) from the International Association of Facilitators (2020)
• Certified Professional Facilitator(CPF) from the International Association of Facilitators (2002)

She is also certified to administer several assessment tools that assist people in determining their thinking styles, personality preferences and management effectiveness  (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®, Kolbe™, Human Synergistics' Group Styles Inventory™ and Organizational Culture® Inventory).

When Kristin is not working with teams of people, she attempts to play golf in Scottsdale, Arizona and Prince Edward Island, Canada.