Karin Stawarky

Founder and Managing Partner

Karin Stawarky is  Founder and Managing Partner of Spark Leadership Partners. From a young age, Karin's mindset and approach was shaped by a driving premise she holds about the power and potential of the human spirit. Everyone has the capacity for greatness and collectively, we have an ability to make aspirations - and dreams - a reality. In her professional career, she would time and time again encounter instances of how contributions - of individuals, teams, and organizational communities - were consistently blocked, undermined, or ignored. It is her mission to bring light and visibility to that possibility and unleash it. She seeks to help leaders understand and appreciate the potential that exists within themselves and others, then tap into that to be able to "show up" with the fullest of their abilities for maximum impact and engagement. 

Karin’s integrated “top down and bottom-up” philosophy to coaching reflects her belief in the integration of the thinking self, the feeling self, the physical self, and the energetic self to enable open-hearted leading and living, a way of being and doing that creates the conditions for maximum impact and fulfillment. She offers a new lens on what it means to cultivate thriving relationships with oneself and others to realize what you most want.

Karin is the creator and host of Klarity, a podcast launched in 2024. In Klarity, Karin explores the landscape of relational effectiveness, which she believes is the secret sauce to fulfillment in work and in life. It all begins, she advances, with the relationship with yourself. Klarity offers “snacks for the mind” in each episode, introducing an idea and providing a straightforward approach apply the learning real-time for yourself. Klarity is available wherever podcasts are found, including Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Buzzsprout, among other.

With over 20 years experience at the intersection of strategy and organization, Karin is a seasoned executive coach and advisor to CEOs and senior leaders. She is privileged to have coached leaders in 30 countries across 6 continents. As a former Partner at Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte), a global strategy consulting firm and as a corporate executive, she been privileged to work side by side with leaders as agents of change, creating organizational environments that engage the heads, hands, and hearts of employees.  She has a particular focus on settings where designing and executing transformational change is needed to support scalable growth and continuous innovation, and where meaningful engagement from the front line to the Board is critical.  She has worked across a range of industries with members of the Fortune 100 to early stage, start-up organizations across industries.  Her executive coaching practice reflects 1:1 work with executives (typically Vice President and above) as well as leadership teams. Karin is also an executive coach in Harvard Business School’s flagship executive education programs for global leaders as well as for the Center for Creative Leadership. She is a certified executive coach and is level 3 trained in Internal Family Systems (IFS). Karin is receiving additional certification in trauma-informed coaching as well as neuroscience, consciousness and transformational coaching. She is trained in a number of assessments and methods, including The Leadership Circle, Hogan, Immunity to Change, among others.

Karin serves as an expert business advisor to women entrepreneurs in Babson College’s early stage venture accelerator, Women Innovating Now (WIN) Lab. She is an Executive in Residence and adjunct faculty in Babson College’s Center for Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership (CWEL).  Karin is a Board member for the IFS Institute, founded by world re-knowned psychotherapist Dr. Richard Schwartz, an innovator in the field of psychology and our understanding of the mind as reflected the model Internal Family Systems. She was a founding faculty member of the Food Business School, part of the Culinary Institute of America. More broadly, she guest teaches in both executive education and MBA programs. She has a writing collaboration with faculty at the Center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in the areas of leadership effectiveness and organizational engagement. Karin is a speaker for corporations and professional associations, focusing on creating and sustaining high commitment cultures, and how the leader plays  a key role in bringing that to life.  Karin is honored to be selected by Marshall Goldsmith, a globally recognized executive coach and leadership thinker to be a member of his global MG100, the next generation of leadership catalysts for the world. She is an affiliate member of the Institute of Coaching - McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School as well as the International Coach Federation (ICF).

Spark Leadership Partners has a network of senior practitioners - executive coaches, facilitators, designers, and advisors - who share Karin's philosophy and approach to powerful, sustainable change. In addition, Spark Leadership Partners will often partner with other boutiques which bring complementary strengths and services depending on the client need.