At the intersection of people, performance, and purpose is where you’ll find Krista Skalde-Roy. She’s spent her career trying to help people understand that “people and business are not mutually exclusive concepts, they drive each other.” Wearing an internal HR hat, she champions the message that culture isn’t just “feel-good” work and HR isn’t just process, it’s the third leg of the strategic stool alongside finance and CEO vision. Today, as Chief Talent Officer and Operating Partner at Inovia Capital, she brings that belief to life with clarity, candour, and compassion.
Krista will be the first to admit she never set out for a career in tech or in HR. “I didn’t even know what HR was,” she laughs. Chance played a role: teaching English in Japan and Paris to business HR teams and consultants exposed her to the connection between people and business.
Back in Canada, her first corporate job lasted a week. After orientation, someone handed her stacks of binders to review as training. “There has got to be a better way,” she remembers thinking. That instinct led her to consulting with a Montréal startup on an early competency-management tool. Tech started to make sense. Shortly after, she was approached by Saba, a small SF company reinventing learning and performance management while everyone else was still on paper and stacks of binders. “That was when I thought, this is it, this is where tech actually helps.”
Her path wasn’t linear, it was a series of risks she always trusted herself to take. As she puts it: “Trust your gut and take the risk. Things work out.” She never measured herself against other people’s timelines, promotions, milestones, or neatly sequenced careers. “There are people who follow a path, like, ‘this is what each stage looks like,’” she says. “I saw people get intimidated by that. I never thought like that.” For her, her conviction was simpler yet stronger: “I knew I loved what I did.”
A pivotal part of Krista’s growth has been learning to say out loud what she’s good at. “As a woman, it’s intimidating. Men can so easily talk about what they’re good at. For women, it can feel arrogant.” She jokes that she can list “the ten things I’m bad at” without thinking, but naming her strengths took intention. “Leaning into that self-confidence, leaning right up to the borderline of arrogance without going over, that’s been a big one for me.”
That clarity came into focus when she worked under someone whose consulting style was the opposite of her “velvet hammer” approach. After receiving a “horrible, make-you-cry” performance review questioning her sense of belonging in the organization, she was recruited by a client whose team was doing work that more aligned with her style. With distance, she sees it plainly: “I wasn’t meant to reduce people to line items or argue just for the sake of consulting style.” What felt crushing at the time led to a moment that set her on the right path.
One of the leadership habits Krista values most seems simple but rare: listening. “You’d be shocked by how many people don’t listen,” she says. Not just to the words, but to the context and cues underneath. After years of virtual calls, she’s come to appreciate how “the little chit-chat in person is more fluid, more normal.”
When she hires, she looks for one thing above all else: self-awareness. “You can always tell when someone has it. It comes through in how they speak, how they understand the context and their audience.” It’s the trait she believes is hardest to teach, and the foundation for real growth.
The strongest sense of belonging Krista has ever felt was with her remote team at Saba. “It was the best team I ever worked with,” she says. Spread across Mexico, Brazil, the U.S., France, and Toronto, the team was led by a manager who was “extremely transparent and consistent. There was never chatter or drama. People were recognized fairly.” That level of rigour, transparency, accountability, and empowerment is still her gold standard, and she keeps in touch with that team to this day.
These values shape how she thinks about building culture in a fast-moving industry. She references the Deloitte concept of “stagility”: balancing stability with agility. “You want to give people some stability, but be transparent that things aren’t always stable,” she says.
If she had to describe her leadership style in three words, she chooses: systemic, empathetic, elevating. She sees the whole system, balances people and business, and sets a high bar that helps others reach their full potential. Her ongoing work is knowing when to empower and when to step in. “Sometimes people need space to figure it out, and sometimes they need someone there when they ask, ‘Can you help me?’ Listening for that is the key.”
When Krista imagines the future of tech, she immediately smiles and asks me if I’m old enough to know The Jetsons (I am by the way, and we laugh). “I dream of Rosie the robot,” she says. “I want a Rosie.” More practically, she wants an AI agent that can “go into my work and produce the update for the leadership team”, while also recognizing that “there’s a whole data cleanup needed before it can even do that.” She’s energized by experimentation in AI agents, especially after watching Zapier’s 10,000-person public town hall led Brandon Sammut, Chief People & AI Transformation Officer. “He’s doing really cool things,” she says.
But what excites her just as much is how tech and AI could change the way people build confidence in the workplace, especially for the tough moments. She imagines AI giving people a place to rehearse hard conversations, negotiations, or feedback, the kinds of things we usually fumble through with partners, peers, or not at all. “What if you could actually practice in a safe environment? That could be an equalizer for people who are more introverted, or who come from different cultural backgrounds.”
For Krista, the impact she hopes to leave is simple and deeply aligned with who she is. “Build good products with good people,” she says. “They’re not mutually exclusive.” To her, great businesses require both, the quality of the product and the humans behind it. One cannot thrive without the other.
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