Hayley Barnard

Keynote Speaker

Hayley Barnard's Biography

After quickly rising to become General Manager of Sir Chay Blyth’s ‘Challenge Business’ at just 23, Hayley went on to achieve her first directorship in an Anglo-French business aged 26. Since then, Hayley has founded three companies and is also currently a Non-Executive Director of YHA, alongside her role as CEO of Mix Diversity Developers.

Hayley is a professional speaker, consultant and media commentator on subjects including gender balanced workplaces, inclusive leadership, unconscious bias, and cross-cultural leadership. She tackles issues surrounding unconscious bias and inclusiveness with humour, ensuring that her ideas have real value for audiences’ working lives.

One of the most innovative projects that Hayley has headed up is the LeasePlan Women’s Arctic Challenge in which she co-led a team of women on a traverse of Baffin Island at minus 40 degrees C. MIX worked with LeasePlan to develop this unique platform to communicate the gender balance issue and challenge unconscious bias within their company.

With her clients, Hayley combines the latest research on inclusion of diversity with first-hand experience, helping a wide range of companies establish what inclusion looks like for them, what their business case is and how to move the agenda forward. Hayley has:

• Designed Inclusive Leadership programs for companies such as Capital One, Experian, Lidl, Mazars, Boston Scientific, and many, many more.
• Advised the Irish government on the introduction of Gender Pay Gap Reporting legislation and how to help companies reduce their pay gap.

• Provided keynotes and board level briefings for clients including Microsoft, Vodafone, Nissan, Virgin Media, Roche, Teva, H&M, AstraZeneca and many others.
• Spoken at over 225 events across aerospace, banking and finance, construction and engineering, insurance, legal, retail, telecoms, technology, pharmaceutical and the energy sector.

Hayley is a prolific keynote speaker providing entertaining and inspirational speeches for company conferences as well as in-depth senior leader briefings and seminars. Her aim is always to be highly practical and demonstrate that everyone can immediately make an impact on how inclusive their place of work is through a number of small actions.

When not at work or at home Hayley can usually be found swimming in the nearest stretch of open water. She has successfully swum across the English Channel, taking 14 hours and 12 minutes to reach France. In 2018 she also swam 46 km around Manhattan Island in New York.