What we talked about
Hanna Bauer is the founder of HEARTnomics Enterprises and a leadership strategist with nearly three decades of experience as a CEO, board chair, and executive director. She is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Baldrige Excellence Examiner, and faculty with Maxwell Leadership.
Show notes
Hanna Bauer opens with a simple credential that frames everything else: she’s a mom of five who survived four teenagers at once, which she considers proof her leadership methods work under real pressure. The framework she built from those trenches, HEARTnomics, applies the same logic she uses at home to the boardroom: you cannot give what you don’t have, so internal alignment has to come before external results.
What we covered
- Hanna makes a sharp distinction between goal-oriented and growth-oriented cultures. Most organizations are optimizing for task completion, she says, but the ones that retain people and drive lasting performance are the ones where individuals feel they are growing, not just executing. Leaders who multiply other leaders never feel lonely at the top.
- On learning from experience, she challenges the common assumption that experience alone teaches. Her argument: “We don’t learn from experience. We rarely learn from experience. We learn from reviewed experience.” She cites the 70% burnout rate among professionals as evidence that people are accumulating experience at speed without ever pausing to extract the lessons.
- The alignment framework she uses is called CORE, Cultivate, Optimize, Reach, and Elevate. She is explicit that you cannot optimize something you haven’t first cultivated: without a strong foundation of shared values and mission, every process change becomes more expensive, more ambiguous, and more likely to generate conflict. She draws on her Six Sigma black belt background to define optimization as continuous improvement, not a one-time fix.
- On the AI challenge for leaders, Hanna argues that the rise of automation doesn’t diminish the need for leadership, it increases it. “There’s no standardized pathway in the ethical governance of AI yet,” she says, which means every organization needs leaders capable of making judgment calls in ambiguous territory. She warns that high performers are starting to experience identity crises as tools complete in minutes what used to take days.
- She works extensively with nonprofit executive directors experiencing mission drift, and with organizations navigating mergers where two distinct cultures have to integrate without destroying the “special sauce” that made the acquisition worth doing. Both situations require the same intervention: getting explicit about which values are non-negotiable and which processes need to flex.
- On the Latin American workplace dynamic she and Federico explored, Hanna noted that hierarchical organizational structures, common in both traditional US institutions and Latin American business culture, create specific barriers to upward feedback. Her coaching approach for leaders in these environments involves helping people understand not just what to say, but the right structure and moment to say it, and reframing boundaries not as restrictions but as the space within which action is possible.
About Hanna
Hanna Bauer is the founder of HEARTnomics Enterprises and a leadership strategist with decades of experience as a CEO, board chair, and executive director across nonprofit and corporate environments. She is a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, Baldrige Excellence Examiner, and Maxwell Leadership faculty member.
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bauerhanna
- Website: https://heartnomics.com
Episode 139 of the PreVetted Podcast.