Allison Tsao

Allison was raised by hard working immigrant parents who taught her the importance of strong values and living by those values. Growing up in the USA, she spent her teenage years studying hard and working part-time jobs to enable her independent and slightly rebellious spirit. She moved to NYC to attend New York University’s Stern School of Business and graduated with a Bachelor of Science triple major in Management, Marketing, and International Business. Allison later was privileged to study with some of the great Organisation Development thought leaders at Pepperdine University, receiving her masters in Organisation Development (MSOD) in 2016.

Allison’s career has spanned previous lives at Merrill Lynch, Deloitte Consulting, Accenture, and American Express. She has worked as a Human Capital Consultant and as an internal HR Business Partner. Her global curiosity led her to move to Australia in 2014, joining Veldhoen + Company as a Senior Workplace Consultant helping organisations transform the way they work.

Allison’s consulting experience has enabled her to work alongside some of the greatest companies in the world (30+ organisations and counting) across various industries, geographies, and sizes, addressing some of their most pressing business and people challenges.

Throughout her 18 years of consulting, Allison has continued to experience the world changing at a rapid rate with growing complexity and chaos in modern organisations. Global trends such as technology automation, the increasing availability of information, and higher customer expectations have created a world where change agility is what is needed to continuously evolve and adapt to stay relevant in the world of work. This results in a need to fundamentally shift the way we show up at work – and lift our consciousness to be able to address the challenges of our time.

Allison believes that the way we can support this shift is by creating a more human way of working. In 2016, her experience and intuition led her to create Humans Who Lead, a global Organisation Development consultancy whose purpose is to revitalise the deeper wisdom and purpose in organisations so that we all take up our roles to make the world a better place. She works with organisations to design bespoke interventions to transform organisational paradigms to create more sustainable strategy, culture, and leadership – working at the individual, relational, and systemic levels to support holistic change.

Allison’s natural strengths have always been her curiosity, her balanced intuition and logic, her ability to thrive in strategy and execution, and her clear, empathetic, and human way of communicating with and relating to others. She is an experienced program manager, leadership coach, facilitator, and OD practitioner, bringing creativity and unconventionality to every engagement she designs and delivers. She is a certified Leadership Circle 360 coach, is trained in Liberating Structures (Keith McCandless), Transformational Coaching (Nicholas Janni), and Matrix Leadership Networks (Amina Knowlan). Her practice of OD draws from many fields, including complexity science, adult learning, behavioural science, systems thinking, motivational theory, coaching, psychology, ecology, wisdom traditions, and the healing arts.

Allison is also an active volunteer of her time – serving as a leader for Organisation Development Australia (ODA), a facilitator for the Deep Ecology movement, and a classroom support coach for Primary Ethics in NSW. She is a committed life long learner and draws inspiration from the simple things in life - meditation, her family and friends, hiking in nature, yoga, travel, cooking, and (occasionally) reading. She currently resides in Sydney, AU with her husband, three children, dog, and a few fish.