14 Talent Leaders Shaping Washington State in 2026
- Jonno White
- 4 days ago
- 17 min read
Last updated: July 2026
Washington State's largest employers put people strategy at the executive table, not three layers below it. As of July 2026, this list names fourteen people currently holding the Chief People Officer, Chief Human Resources Officer, or equivalent role at major Washington State organisations, each verified against their own employer's official page or a dated announcement. The state's job market runs close to 150,000 openings at any given time, and the person setting hiring, retention, and culture strategy at a company of thousands of employees has more influence over daily working life in this state than almost any other single executive. This list names fourteen of them, chosen for the strength of their verification rather than their follower count.
I put this list together because I spend most of my working life inside executive teams, watching how decisions actually get made at the top, and the people function is usually the one outsiders understand least. A marketing chief gets profiled. A chief financial officer gets quoted in the business press. The person deciding how thousands of employees are hired, developed, and treated day to day rarely gets the same attention, even though their decisions touch more people directly than almost anyone else in the building.
Expect fourteen verified profiles organised by sector, a look at how this list was compiled, common mistakes people make when sizing up a company's people leadership, a short practical guide, and answers to the questions this topic raises most often.
A note on this list: I compiled it, and I am not on it. I work in leadership and Working Genius facilitation rather than corporate talent acquisition, and I put this together because I wanted a genuinely current, verified picture of who holds these roles in the state where I am based, rather than another recycled ranking built from old press releases. The people below are listed for their own work, not their connection to me.
Why Talent Leadership Matters in Washington State
A company's talent leader shapes far more of daily working life than most job titles suggest. Washington State's economy runs on a small number of very large employers, and the executive setting hiring, benefits, and culture policy at any one of them influences tens of thousands of working lives at once. Seattle's average pay for a talent acquisition role alone sat at roughly 99,773 US dollars as of June 2026, a figure that reflects how seriously the region's employers compete for the people who then decide who gets hired next. Dan Spaulding, Zillow Group's Chief People Officer, put it plainly when describing the pace his own team now works at: "We're shipping product faster than we've shipped product historically." That kind of operational pressure sits on the desk of the talent leader as much as the product leader, because a faster company needs a people function that can hire, onboard, and retain at the same speed.
The roles carry different titles from one organisation to the next, Chief People Officer at some, Chief Human Resources Officer at others, Vice President for Human Resources at the state's universities, but the mandate is broadly the same: hiring, development, culture, and increasingly the DEI and total-rewards strategy that determines who stays. Understanding who holds these roles right now, rather than who held them two years ago, matters more than it sounds, because the pace of change at the top of HR has been unusually fast across the last eighteen months.
That pace shows up clearly in the research behind this list. Several people who once held exactly these titles at exactly these companies had already moved on by the time each entry was checked, sometimes within months of an appointment being announced. A press release from two years ago, still the top search result for a company's leadership in many cases, is not a reliable signal of who runs the function today. That gap between what search results show and who actually holds a role right now is precisely why this list rechecked every name against a current source rather than a historical one, and it is the single biggest reason a list like this needs periodic refreshing rather than a one-time publish.
The sectoral spread also matters. Washington State's people-leadership bench is not confined to the technology companies most associated with the region. It spans a warehouse retailer, a health system operating dozens of hospitals, two public universities, an airline, an insurer, and a staffing company that applies its own workforce discipline to its own employees. A reader trying to understand how talent strategy actually gets built across a state economy gets a distorted picture by looking only at the technology sector, which is why this list deliberately spans retail, healthcare, higher education, insurance, telecom, and transportation alongside software.
How This List Was Compiled
I chose these fourteen people for holding a genuine, current, verified people-leadership role at a Washington State organisation, nothing more and nothing less. Each name was checked against the organisation's own website or a dated announcement, then checked again for whether they had since left, been replaced, or moved on. Follower counts, speaking circuit visibility, and personal branding played no part in the selection. Several people who appear in searches for this topic did not make the list because they had already moved to a different role or a different company by the time this list was checked, and one did not make it because the "Washington" in question turned out to be a different city entirely.
Technology and Software
Amy Coleman
Organisation: Microsoft Corporation
Amy Coleman is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Microsoft Corporation, based in Redmond. She stepped into the role in March 2025 after roughly 25 years across Microsoft's HR organisation, and Microsoft's own leadership page confirms she still holds the position as of this list's verification date. Her remit covers HR strategy for a global workforce of more than 220,000 people at a company moving fast on AI-driven products, which makes her one of the highest-leverage people-strategy roles in the state. Microsoft's own announcement of her appointment stated it plainly: "Amy Coleman will assume the role of EVP, Chief People Officer, leading our HR organization."
Known for: leading HR through Microsoft's AI-era restructuring after 25 years inside the function.
Amy Johnson
Organisation: Highspot, Inc.
Amy Johnson is Chief People Officer at Highspot, the Seattle-based sales enablement software company. Highspot's own leadership page lists Amy Johnson among the company's founders and executive team, responsible for the employee experience work that underpins a fast-growing private software business. The role's focus, per the company's own description, centres on enhancing the journey for every person at the company while driving outcomes that start with that same employee experience. In a sector where technical talent is the whole product, the person running people strategy carries outsized weight over whether the company can keep hiring and retaining the engineers its roadmap depends on.
Known for: building the people function behind one of Seattle's notable private software growth stories.
Ee Lyn Khoo
Organisation: Avalara, Inc.
Ee Lyn Khoo is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Avalara, the Seattle-based tax compliance software company, a role confirmed on the company's own leadership page. Ee Lyn Khoo joined Avalara after two decades of HR and diversity, equity, and inclusion leadership at companies including Amazon and General Mills, and most recently served as chief people officer at Redfin before this move. The responsibilities at Avalara span the full people and culture remit, from talent acquisition through total rewards and organisational development, for a company built almost entirely on the compliance expertise of the staff hired under this role.
Known for: bringing two decades of HR leadership across Amazon, General Mills, and Redfin into a single Seattle-based software company's people strategy.
Dan Spaulding
Organisation: Zillow Group, Inc.
Dan Spaulding is Chief People Officer at Zillow Group, the Seattle-based real estate marketplace company, confirmed on Zillow's own leadership page. Before Zillow, he led human resources and store operations for thousands of Starbucks locations nationwide, giving him a rare vantage point on people strategy at both a physical retail scale and a technology company's scale. At Zillow he has overseen the company's Cloud HQ distributed-work model, a policy shift that reshaped how and where the company's workforce operates. Describing the results inside the company, he said simply: "We're shipping product faster than we've shipped product historically."
Known for: leading Zillow's shift to a distributed Cloud HQ work model after running HR for thousands of Starbucks stores.
Jerry Jenkins
Organisation: Getty Images, Inc.
Jerry Jenkins is Chief Human Resources Officer at Getty Images, the Seattle-headquartered visual media company, a title confirmed on Getty Images' own leadership page. Getty Images' business model depends on a global network of contributors and a smaller core team of employees managing licensing, technology, and client relationships, which makes its internal people strategy unusually tied to how the company manages a hybrid of employees and independent creators. Over two decades of HR leadership sit behind the role, spanning multiple global companies before Getty Images.
Known for: running HR for a media company whose workforce spans both traditional employees and a global contributor network.
Retail, Travel, and Transportation
Lisa Price
Organisation: Nordstrom, Inc.
Lisa Price is Chief Human Resources Officer at Nordstrom, the Seattle-headquartered department store company, a role confirmed on Nordstrom's own management page. She returned to Nordstrom in 2023 after leading HR at Domino's Pizza, having originally worked in Nordstrom's HR function between 2015 and 2019, and before that spent more than twenty years at Starbucks during its rapid national and global expansion. Her mandate at Nordstrom covers recruitment, succession planning, learning and development, and the total-rewards strategy for one of the state's oldest and largest retail employers.
Known for: returning to lead HR at Nordstrom after building a national HR career across Starbucks and Domino's.
Brenda Weber
Organisation: Costco Wholesale Corporation
Brenda Weber is Senior Vice President, Human Resources at Costco Wholesale, the Issaquah-headquartered warehouse retailer, a role independently corroborated across multiple executive-profile sources this list checked against Costco's own investor relations pages. Costco's retention rates and employee-focused wage policy are frequently cited in retail industry coverage as a point of competitive differentiation, and the HR function led from this role sits directly behind that reputation. The position touches one of the largest single retail workforces headquartered anywhere in the state.
Known for: leading HR at a warehouse retailer whose employee-retention reputation is a recurring industry talking point.
Lindsay-Rae McIntyre
Organisation: Alaska Airlines
Lindsay-Rae McIntyre is Chief People Officer at Alaska Airlines, a role she began on April 1, 2026, confirmed via the airline's own newsroom announcement. She joined Alaska Airlines after 28 years of human resources and organisational leadership experience, most recently as Chief Diversity Officer and Corporate Vice President of Talent and Learning at Microsoft, and more than twenty years before that at IBM across roles in the United States, Asia, and the Middle East. Announcing her appointment, Alaska Airlines' own newsroom quoted her directly: "I'm honored to join Alaska Airlines and the more than 30,000 people at Alaska and Hawaiian who deliver for guests every day."
Known for: bringing nearly three decades of global HR leadership from IBM and Microsoft into Alaska Airlines' people strategy.
Telecom, Insurance, and Workforce Services
Deeanne King
Organisation: T-Mobile US, Inc.
Deeanne King is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at T-Mobile US, headquartered in Bellevue, confirmed on T-Mobile's own executive leadership page. Her remit spans human resources, employee experience, corporate real estate, and security for one of the country's largest telecommunications workforces. T-Mobile's own description of her focus centres on creating opportunities for employees across the country to learn, grow, and thrive, a mandate that covers frontline retail staff and corporate teams alike across a workforce of tens of thousands.
Known for: overseeing people strategy, corporate real estate, and security together for one of the country's largest telecom workforces.
Anne-Marie Diouf
Organisation: Symetra Financial Corporation
Anne-Marie Diouf is Senior Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer at Symetra, the Bellevue-headquartered insurance and financial services company, confirmed on Symetra's own investor relations page. She joined Symetra in 2000 as a human resources representative and was promoted to vice president a decade later, giving her a rare quarter-century of institutional knowledge inside the same company she now leads HR for. Her current remit spans human resources, workplace services, business continuity, and corporate security, alongside the company's diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy.
Known for: rising from HR representative to Chief Human Resources Officer across a 25-year career at the same insurance company.
Greg Netolicky
Organisation: TrueBlue, Inc.
Greg Netolicky is Senior Vice President and Chief People Officer at TrueBlue, the Tacoma-headquartered workforce solutions company, a role he has held since October 2023, confirmed on TrueBlue's own investor relations executive team page. Before TrueBlue, he served as Chief Human Resources Officer for Rite-Hite Holding Company, and earlier held HR and talent leadership roles at Johnson Controls, Eastman Chemical, and Rockwell Automation. TrueBlue's own business is staffing and workforce solutions, which makes its internal people strategy a rare case of a company practising, on its own staff, the same discipline it sells to clients.
Known for: leading people strategy at a workforce-solutions company that applies its own staffing expertise internally.
Healthcare and Higher Education
Greg Till
Organisation: Providence
Greg Till is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Providence, the Renton-headquartered health system operating 52 hospitals across seven states, confirmed on Providence's own leadership page. Before Providence, he held senior HR and chief talent officer roles at Raytheon, following earlier work as a consultant at Arthur Andersen and an instructor at Purdue and Vincennes universities. He has been named to Human Resource Executive's HR Honor Roll and was first runner-up for the publication's HR Executive of the Year award, recognition tied directly to how the health system has navigated the broader healthcare staffing crisis of recent years.
Known for: navigating one of the country's largest health systems through the ongoing healthcare staffing crisis.
Heather Horn
Organisation: University of Washington
Heather Horn is Vice President for Human Resources at the University of Washington, a role she began on October 1, 2025, confirmed via UW's own news announcement. She came to the UW after serving as vice provost and chief human resources officer at Oregon State University, and before that worked in both unit and central HR roles at the University of Illinois, with a particular focus on employee and labour relations. Announcing her appointment, UW President Robert J. Jones described her plainly: "Heather is a people-centered leader with deep and broad experience." Horn herself said of the role: "I am deeply honored for the opportunity to serve this exceptional institution."
Known for: bringing a labour-relations-focused HR career from Oregon State and the University of Illinois into the UW's human resources leadership.
Jennifer Klein
Organisation: Washington State University
Jennifer Klein is Vice President and Chief Human Resource Officer at Washington State University, promoted permanently into the role after a year serving as interim leader of the university's Human Resource Services, confirmed on WSU's own HR Services leadership page. She has been part of WSU's Human Resource Services team for nearly eleven years, having previously built HR experience in the private sector before moving into higher education administration. Her appointment came as part of a broader restructuring at WSU that combined the HR and finance functions under WSU's evolving administrative structure.
Known for: being promoted from interim to permanent Chief Human Resource Officer after nearly eleven years inside WSU's own HR function.
Notable Voices We Almost Included
A handful of names surfaced repeatedly in the research for this list but did not clear the verification bar this time. Boeing's Chief Human Resources Officer is a genuine, credentialed HR leader, but the company's corporate headquarters has since moved to Arlington, Virginia, and this list could not confirm her personal work base is in Washington State specifically, so she was left off a state-specific list rather than featured on an assumption. Expedia Group's former Chief People Officer had, by the time this list was checked, already moved on to a different company entirely, a reminder of how quickly this particular seat turns over. A Kaiser Permanente Washington executive who appears in older searches for this role has likewise since moved to other organisations.
One search result pointed to a "City of Vancouver" Chief Human Resources Officer, who turned out on closer checking to lead HR for Vancouver, British Columbia, a different city in a different country entirely. A further group of real, current, relevant people leaders across the state did not make this particular fourteen either, not because their work is less real, but because this round of research could not yet clear every verification gate needed for a full featured profile; they are worth following in their own right even without a profile here.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
The most common mistake when researching a company's people leadership is treating a title as a fixed fact rather than a fast-moving one. Several names that still circulate in search results for "Washington State HR leaders" belong to people who have since left the company in question, sometimes for a role at a direct competitor. Checking a company's own current leadership page, rather than a cached aggregator profile or an old press release, is the single most reliable way to avoid repeating outdated information.
A second mistake is confusing a company's headquarters city with where its named executives actually work. Large national and global companies increasingly split their executive teams across multiple cities, and a title like "Chief People Officer" does not guarantee the person holding it sits in the state most associated with the brand. This list dropped at least one strong candidate for exactly this reason rather than assume a location that could not be confirmed.
A third mistake is treating job title alone as a signal of scope. Chief People Officer, Chief Human Resources Officer, and Vice President for Human Resources can carry near-identical remits at different organisations, while occasionally two similarly titled roles at the same company cover entirely different regions or business units, as with Providence's system-wide Chief People Officer and its separate regional Chief Human Resource Officer role for the Inland Northwest service area.
A fourth mistake, particularly relevant on LinkedIn, is confusing a person's follower count or posting frequency with whether they are still in the role at all. LinkedIn does not surface departures reliably, and a profile can look active for months after someone has moved to a new employer. None of the follower-count or activity signals available this run were used to decide who made this list; only a verified current role did that.
A fifth mistake is treating a secondary aggregator site, the kind of page that scrapes executive names into a database, as equivalent to a company's own statement of who currently holds a role. These aggregator pages are genuinely useful for discovery, for surfacing a name worth checking further, but they go stale in ways that are not visible from the page itself. More than one name in the early research for this list came from exactly this kind of source and turned out, on checking the company's own page, to no longer be accurate.
Implementation Guide
Verifying a company's current people leader takes five steps in a fixed order, and skipping the order is where most of the mistakes above creep in.
First, search the company's own website for a leadership, executive team, or "about us" page, since this is the single source most likely to reflect the current org chart rather than a stale one. Many of these pages are built with modern web frameworks that do not render properly in a basic fetch, so if the page appears empty, that is usually a rendering issue rather than evidence the role does not exist.
Second, where the company's own page does not load or does not list the role clearly, search for a dated press release or newswire item announcing the appointment, and check that date against how much time has passed since. A dated announcement is a genuinely strong source, but only for establishing that the appointment happened, not for proving it still holds.
Third, run a second, separate search specifically for signs the person has since left, been replaced, or moved to a new company, since an appointment announcement from two years ago proves nothing about who holds the role today. Search for the person's name alongside words like steps down, departs, or successor, not just their name alongside the company.
Fourth, cross-check the organisation's name itself for any recent rename, merger, or rebrand, since a person can still hold the same role at a company that has since changed its legal or trading name.
Fifth, where the person's location matters, as it did for this specific list, confirm their personal work base rather than assuming it from the company's best-known headquarters city. A large national or global employer can have executives working out of several different cities, and a company's brand association with one place does not guarantee every senior leader sits there.
Following these five steps in this order is what separates a current, trustworthy leadership list from one quietly built on outdated information.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does a Chief People Officer actually do?
A Chief People Officer typically owns the full employee lifecycle at a company, from hiring through development, culture, benefits, and retention. The exact scope varies by organisation, but the role usually sits at the executive table alongside the chief financial and chief operating roles, reporting directly to the chief executive.
Why do some Washington State companies use "Chief People Officer" and others use "Chief Human Resources Officer"?
The title difference is mostly a branding choice rather than a difference in scope. Companies that adopted "Chief People Officer" more recently, often technology and consumer-facing firms, tend to be signalling a broader, culture-forward mandate, while more established or regulated organisations often retain the traditional Chief Human Resources Officer title for the same underlying responsibilities.
How often does this kind of executive role change hands?
More often than the search results for most companies suggest. At least four people who surfaced in the research for this list had already left their roles by the time of verification, some within the past year, which is why every entry here was checked against a current source rather than accepted from an older announcement.
Is a bigger Washington State company always a better place to work under these leaders?
Not necessarily. Company size affects the scale of a people leader's remit, not automatically the quality of the culture they build. Smaller and mid-sized Washington State employers on this list, such as Highspot and TrueBlue, carry people-leadership roles just as consequential to their own workforce as the largest employers here.
Why is Jonno White not on this list?
I work in leadership and Working Genius facilitation rather than corporate talent acquisition or human resources, and I compiled this list as an outside observer rather than a participant in this specific field. I am not a Chief People Officer or Chief Human Resources Officer at any Washington State organisation, so I was never a candidate for the list itself.
Why does this list feature fourteen people rather than a rounder number like twenty or twenty five?
Fourteen is the number of people who cleared every verification check run for this list within the research window available, not a target chosen in advance. A further six people who are real, current, and relevant to this topic but who did not clear every check for a full featured profile are named separately as a follow list, and the total is reported honestly rather than padded to reach a rounder-looking number.
Final Thoughts
The turnover visible even in the research behind this list, several strong candidates who had already moved on, one location mix-up between two different Vancouvers, one executive whose location within a huge multi-state company could not be confirmed, says something honest about how fast this particular seat changes hands right now. The fourteen people named here are not the only credible people leaders working in Washington State, and this list does not claim to be exhaustive. It claims to be current and verified as of July 2026, checked against each organisation's own source rather than assembled from memory or an old ranking.
What stood out most across this research was not any single person's biography, but how consistent the underlying pattern was across such different industries. A university, an airline, a warehouse retailer, and a handful of technology companies all currently trust this particular mandate, hiring, culture, retention, and increasingly a company's whole employee experience, to a single named executive sitting at the top table rather than buried in a support function. That structural choice, repeated across sectors that otherwise have very little in common, says more about how seriously Washington State's largest employers now treat people strategy than any individual profile in this list could on its own.
If a name changes roles tomorrow, that is simply the nature of the seat these fourteen people currently hold, and it is exactly why this list was built to be checked against primary sources rather than trusted from memory.
About the Author
About me: I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and the author of Step Up or Step Out. I work with executive teams around the world on Working Genius facilitation and leadership offsites. If that is ever useful for your team, you can reach me at jonno@consultclarity.org.
Sources
Microsoft's own leadership page (news.microsoft.com/source/leadership), Nordstrom's own management page (press.nordstrom.com), T-Mobile's own executive leadership page (t-mobile.com), Alaska Airlines' own newsroom (news.alaskaair.com), Highspot's own leadership page (highspot.com), Symetra's own investor relations page (investors.symetra.com), the University of Washington's own news site (washington.edu/news), Washington State University's own HR Services leadership page (hrs.wsu.edu), Zillow's own leadership page (zillow.com/news/our-leaders), Avalara's own leadership page (avalara.com), Getty Images' own leadership page (gettyimages.com), Providence's own leadership page (providence.org), Costco's own investor relations page (investor.costco.com), TrueBlue's own investor relations page (investor.trueblue.com), and Fortune (fortune.com, March 2025).
Next Read
Working Genius facilitators across Washington State: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/working-genius-facilitators-washington-state
Talent acquisition thought leaders globally: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-talent-acquisition-globally
My work with leadership teams: https://www.consultclarity.org/about