Crystal Schaffer

founder & president, nu U

Crystal Schaffer is an experienced talent management expert who specialises in leadership, organisation development, and team and individual coaching methods that help people and companies achieve their goals. Most recently the director of Capgemini’s Les Fontaines Business Learning Forum, she has been working on strategic talent development issues since leading the International Workforce Management study in 1998. She is also the architect of the HIPOD talent development toolkit, built around the renowned i-Lead assessment methodology.

A 13-year veteran of Capgemini, Crystal was a pioneer of innovative learning methods and programs for both the company’s external learning forum, Les Fontaines, and its internal corporate university. She founded and built Les Fontaines’ external learning consulting business as well is its innovative GuruSchool, Relationship Selling, Brand Bootcmap, MasterClass, Change Agent and coaching programmes.

Prior to joining the Les Fontaines team, Crystal held a variety of team management roles at Capgemini in the human asset, communications, and marketing arenas. While working in the UK with Capgemni’s strategic consulting unit, Gemini Consulting, she created, managed, and delivered the company’s International Workforce Management Study in 1998—a massive research and analysis effort spanning 13 countries—to uncover the attitudes and issues of the industrialised workforce at the dawn of the millennium.

Crystal has researched and published numerous articles on the impact of people in the workplace, including studies on networked learning, treatises on the business value of work-life balance, and the unique development needs of high-potential talent. She was also the founder and editor-in-chief of the first business community e-zine, Focus.

Prior to joining the Capgemini family of companies in the strategic consulting division in 1993, Crystal counselled clients in the consumer products, food/nutrition, healthcare and non-profit industries (including Colgate-Palmolive, M&M/Mars, and Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories) on marketing communications issues. She counts among many eclectic assignments early in her career the search for “America’s Funniest Dentist” and the launch of the world’s first low-calorie candy bar—noting these consumer product influences as inspiration for enduring out-of-the-box thinking.

Crystal holds a BA in English and Communication from Rutgers College in the US. Married and the mother of three boys, her passions include American baseball, modern literature, and children’s advocacy.