Dr Karen Mitchell.

Karen is the founder and CEO of the Kalmor Institute. Her thirty-year career has included extensive work with executive groups and others across organisations on large scale culture change interventions related to cultural integrity, mergers, marketplace changes, diversity, and other issues, all of which have required deep insight into human motivation and engagement as well as commercial acumen. Karen has worked on building organisational leadership capability across all levels in areas such as values-based leadership, strategy, marketplace change adaption, addressing issues of sensitivity, inclusive leadership, and addressing organisational destabilisers.
 
Karen was the first culture change specialist in Australia to work with organisations on creating cultures that support women's advancement and achievement. This included a host of cultural interventions and included the development of a suite of programs for women designed to create highly effective career-management capabilities. The Kalmor programs address some of the unspoken dynamics in enterprises that impact women and how to overcome them, personal branding, and positioning women operating effectively in support roles, such as finance, law, and human capital, to take on P & L roles. It also includes program for leaders to understand and address unconscious bias.
 
Karen’s PhD research is the first in the world collected on high functioning psychopaths/narcissists/predators/coercive controllers (people of Dark Personality or DP) operating outside the justice system in areas such as corporates, medicine, religion including child sex abuse in the Catholic Church, coercive domestic violence, schools, the military, cults and so on, as well as within a forensic context.

She has created a highly nuanced model which applies to all people who are of Dark Personality, and which highlights their shared characteristics and how these manifests in a wide range of circumstances and contexts. It is the first work to identify the shared tactics commonly used by people of DP to manipulate and harm without being exposed and outlines these tactics in detail.
 
Karen authored the widely acclaimed and first of its kind book, Careers and Motherhood, Challenges and Choices, published by McGraw-Hill. She has been a finalist in the Telstra businesswoman of the year awards and has spent many years volunteering in the areas of micro-financing in third world countries and domestic violence where she has advocated for justice system reform and the legal acknowledgement of targets/survivors of coercive control. Her qualifications include a BAppSc, GradDipBus, MCom and PhD. She is a member of the American Psychology Association, the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy and the Institute of Company Directors.