Christy Uffelman grows the person to grow the leader.
Christy has coached leaders for 20 years, helping companies align talent strategy with business strategy. After a successful corporate career as the head of HR in the construction industry, Christy launched EDGE Leadership and the east coast office of Align Leadership simultaneously in 2013. While serving as President of Align, the global company grew five-fold in seven years. Christy spun off EDGE Leadership in 2020 where she still serves as CEO. Her life’s work is pioneering group coaching to curate belonging and connection across genders, generations, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity. Christy believes that we need to turn leadership development inside out – the internal source from where our external behaviors are born – and that we accomplish this by growing the person to grow the leader.
An executive coach by trade, Christy leads a team of ICF certified coaches who leverage 1:1 coaching, experiential learning and group coaching to develop leaders personally as well as professionally. In 2013, she trademarked a 100% virtual experiential learning (EXL) platform called PEER Technology® which is proven across Fortune 500 companies to ignite the corporate talent pipeline. This innovative learning process is leveraged to facilitate organizational knowledge transfer, driving retention, promotion, mobility, engagement, and development, and can be deployed independently or connected across four tiers in an organization: early career, midcareer, senior leader, and officer/C-Suite.
EDGE Leadership is privileged to walk beside many innovative organizations including DPR Construction, Duquesne Light Company and PNC Bank, who are actively engaged in retaining and developing their talent pipeline to the C-Suite. Additionally, Christy can be found coaching regionally in Pittsburgh through the EDGE Experience, an annual women’s group coaching cohort targeting mid-career leaders with the Pittsburgh Technology Council, and nationally through the open enrollment experience, THRIVE.
A sought after speaker in the field of group coaching and women’s leadership, Christy is launching her first book, THE PEER Revolution, Group Coaching That Ignites the Power of People in Q1 2022. Her passion for people development and her work to inspire inclusive leadership in white, male-dominated industries has inspired several research projects including the 2015 white paper, Women Leaders Across Generations. Christy was honored to be the 2018 keynote for Harvard Medical School’s annual Women’s Leadership Conference, where she also facilitated a group coaching experience for Men as Allies.
Christy was awarded the ATHENA Young Professional Recipient and the YWCA Young Leader of the Year in 2012 and a Woman of Distinction in 2014. In 2016, Christy was recognized by Smart Business Magazine as one of Pittsburgh’s “50 Smartest Executives”, received the inaugural Spirit of Enterprise Young Professional of the Year award from Junior Achievement and was identified by Pittsburgh Magazine as a 40 Under 40 Honoree.
Business/Organizational Leadership Experience
Christy joined Mascaro Construction Company in 2007 as a Vice President and as an internal organization development strategist for workforce planning and integrated talent management. At Mascaro, she worked alongside the CEO to engage the organization in the launch of multiple successful mentoring and coaching programs focused on developing current executives and emerging leaders. The organization’s innovative and strategic talent management initiatives became the foundation of an intentional culture shift for the company, which was recognized nationally and regionally both inside and outside the construction industry. Before Mascaro, Christy owned the executive coaching firm Red Zebra Consulting. With both Red Zebra and Mascaro, she shared her expertise and passion for developing emotional intelligence with executives and their teams, challenging them to be intentional in their leadership choices and strategic in their corporate talent management.
Education and Training
A TED Speaker and NPR Millennial resource, Christy’s is recognized by The Huffington Post as a Fierce Woman and is both a board certified ontological coach from Newfield Network and a certified Master Human Capital Strategist from the Human Capital Institute. Christy served as the Chair of 50/50 Women on Boards from 2015-2019, a national nonprofit committed to increasing the percentage of female talent on Fortune 1000 corporate boards. Christy sits on the board of directors for Eat’n Park Hospitality Group, serves as chair of a foundation and sits on several nonprofit boards including the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD).
A graduate of Duquesne University with a B.A. in both Psychology and Corporate Communication, Christy lives in Mt. Lebanon, PA with her husband, Kevin, son, Eli, and a pair of white German Shepherd rescue dogs named Theodore Roosevelt and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.