Karen Valencic, ME, President and Founder, Spiral Impact

Karen Valencic, ME

President and Founder, Spiral Impact

Karen Valencic is passionate about revealing the keys to mastering conflict so leaders can fast-track innovation and smooth the turbulence of change – thereby increasing momentum!

Karen’s extensive work in hospitals and healthcare companies makes her a favorite speaker at healthcare-related conferences. She works with individuals and teams at all levels including Physician groups, OR and Sterile Process, Oncology, Accounting, Finance, Construction, Facilities, Clinical Engineering, Chaplaincy, Nurse Recruiting, Nursing, Telemetry, Hospice, Community Clinics, and many other direct patient care teams. She regularly coaches C-Level Administrators and Physicians and facilitates Executive Board Retreats.

One of Karen’s gifts is making complex concepts simple and entertaining. It deeply matters to her that people leave her sessions with immediately applicable and practical tools. She is the author of “Spiral Impact: The Power to Get It Done with Grace,” soon to be released in a black belt edition, and “Giving Deliberate Feedback for Leaders.”

Karen’s eye-opening presentations are uniquely grounded in martial arts and physics. Almost three decades of experience developing high-performing teams informs her content. Karen is a 2nd-degree black belt in the martial art Aikido and a degreed mechanical engineer. She is the founder and president of Spiral Impact, a performance improvement company.

For three decades, Karen has been a devoted student of aikido, the Japanese art of reconciliation. She holds a nidan black belt; she studies and teaches at the Indianapolis Aikikai. Aikido is based on a spiral and the power generated from a spiral makes it very easy to move your adversary. Aikido finds power in position rather than force. Spiral Impact is grounded in these concepts to gracefully create movement from destructive conflict and to collaboration.

Prior to establishing Spiral Impact, Valencic spent ten years working as a project engineer in product development at Delco Remy, at the time a division of General Motors. She earned her BS in Mechanical Engineering from Tri-State University (now Trine University).

Recently, Karen served on the HealthCare Businesswomen Association (HBA) of Indiana Board as the Director of Mentoring. She is a past board member of Spotlight On Nursing, which raised funds for advance degree nursing scholarships.

She is also Past-President of the Central Indiana Chapter of the American Society of Training and Development, where she also served on the board for six years and a former adjunct faculty member with the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership. Karen has also served as a mentor in the Butler University College of Business for six years.