About Michelle

Michelle Y. Hoover launched Baem Leadership so she could advise the world’s top executives and founders, equipping them to become more astute and agile across increasingly fluid business situations. With a sense of humor and accumulated wisdom, Michelle ushers her clients through complex processes and challenging revelations. Always focused on accelerating performance, she helps senior leaders understand where their current performance resides, then guides them through aligning company talent to make their most audacious goals achievable. Each client emerges stronger, more agile, and with a renewed passion for their work.

Michelle is currently writing a book on First-Generation rofessionals, leaders who build their careers without inherited professional precedent. Drawing on her own experience and two decades of advising senior leaders, the book explores how first-generation identity shapes ambition, risk, and leadership style. She publishes related writing and ideas-in-progress through her Substack, First-Gen Rising.

An accomplished leadership development strategist, advisor, and executive coach, Michelle’s own expertise straddles the worlds of business and education, a combination that lends her work a potent one-two punch. Her business acumen gives her an unmatched depth of understanding in the corporate world, enabling her to see any systems at play today and identify how they can be leveraged for positive change in the future. Her executive education background gives her an acute ability to strategically address the structural and interpersonal issues that plague modern companies. A trusted thought-partner to CEOs and business visionaries, Michelle’s work consistently yields profound results. Michelle has designed, delivered, and facilitated talent development programs for more than 75,000 leaders across five continents in her 20 years in leadership development. She is passionate about the process of learning, always ensuring her clients are prepared to listen deeply and embrace personal transformation. Working with her means never cutting corners; each leader she counsels learns to be open and honest about their individual strengths and opportunities.

Prior to founding Baem, Michelle established the Leadership and Learning function at Audible, an Amazon company, launching the company’s first suite of management-development learning initiatives. Before that, she led two years of 100 percent year-over-year growth at venture-backed educational startup General Assembly, overseeing four global functions responsible for product and service quality in the delivery of online and in-person learning programs. Michelle also served as Director of Executive Education for the Beijing-based Cheung Kong Graduate Graduate School of Business and spent eight years holding several roles at Duke Corporate Education, at the time the No. 1 provider of custom executive education as ranked by Financial Times and BusinessWeek.

A First-Generation Professional (FGP) herself, Michelle increasingly focuses Baem’s work on developing and supporting emerging leaders. She recognizes FGPs as a motivated and hardworking group that will represent an increasing percentage of the talent market. Michelle believes any company prepared to embrace the positive opportunities created by this category of employees will gain a huge competitive advantage. She’s excited to support these forward-thinking organizations and the individuals who lead them.

A former newspaper reporter and editor, Michelle earned her B.A. in journalism from Penn State University and her Ed.M. in higher education from Harvard University, where she studied organizational and leadership theory. She lives in Connecticut with her partner and his 8,000-piece vinyl collection, navigating life after Manhattan with curiosity and good humor.