Libby Barden is an executive leader who brings more than three decades of leadership in HR and talent management. She previously served as Global Chief People Officer at Merkle Inc. and led the Americas Human Capital function for dentsu across all service lines. In both roles, she was responsible for scaling the practice and increasing the People/talent function professionalism and productivity.

Prior to Merkle, Libby spent nearly 30 years at Accenture in both client facing and senior HR leadership roles including North American HR Lead, Global Management Consulting HR Lead, Global Human Capital Strategy Lead, North America Delivery Center Director, and Canada Country HR Lead.   In most of these roles, Libby was responsible for teaming with and coaching the CEO and his/her Executive team - while also leading the development of People strategy and execution of HR/Talent functions for the business team. Libby has led HR teams numbering from 3 to 1200 in support of business facing teams as large as 45,000.  

Most recently, Libby has provided strategic HR advisory services through Performance People Strategies. She has worked with various clients assessing Talent function capabilities and developing Human Capital strategy.   She has also done CEO coaching, executive team coaching and 360 assessments and HR/Talent Lead coaching.    

She has served on some volunteer Boards - most notably Dress for Success in Tampa, FL and also Corporate Voices.

Libby holds a B.A. and an M.B.A. from the University of Colorado, Boulder.