About Karen Bradford

As I was sharing the space with other business, school, and non-profit leaders at a national education conference in LA, I sensed there was a synergy in the air. I felt then that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. That is where my story began.

Starting my career as a teacher, I went on to become a mentor teacher, then a master teacher, and finally a school-level instructional coach. As a first-year instructional coach, my responsibility was to empower teachers using a framework based on reflective practice.

The framework allowed teachers to plan a lesson, teach it, and then analyze what went well and what they could have changed to help students master the material. The idea of guiding another person through a reflective practice to help them be better in their role felt incredible.

Helping teachers plan and execute a new lesson based on my feedback and observing their progress gave me a new outlook on my job. I realized little old Karen could combine the gifts of analysis and observation with her natural state of being to help teachers improve and build engaging activities.

After doing that for two years, The South Carolina (SC) State Department of Education recruited me. That is where my love for building relationships grew. My success with the framework allowed me to go from working with teachers at a micro level to working with state departments and the federal government in 2012.

It was a major macro shift that gave me confidence in my framework and ability. A few years down the line, I experienced a big shock. As I spent a lot of time on the road helping teachers and superintendents reflect and improve, I lost my daughter in a car accident in 2016. A seemly happy marriage with my 1st grade best friend fell apart shortly after that.

I left the job I trained hard for and went to school to get a degree in special education. It involved more paperwork, evaluative practices, and money. I did great, but something was missing.

I was unable to build relationships or coach anybody. I felt my impact was limited. I had no opportunities to see people use skills and empower them to do better. So after spending thousands of dollars on that degree, I walked away.

While I loved special education, the bureaucracy of public education wasn’t the road for me. I spent the next eighteen months pondering what to do next on sabbatical. In those eighteen months, I had the greatest epiphany.

I realized the students and teachers I grew and stretched over the years were not part of my purpose but rather a job that left me feeling partly unfulfilled. I got asked to become a Leadership Coach during my time away. It was a role that completely changed the trajectory of my life. Through that work, I realized I had three genius zones.

Firstly, I understood how to identify a leader’s unique gifts, talents, skills, and expertise, and bundle them into a transformative solution. Secondly, I understood how to build resilient teams. Finally, I knew how to create and execute action plans for continuous improvement. That inventory was worth 33,000 hours of experience.

Today, I get to call that my vocation. I have taught hundreds of people like you how to turn their genius into purposeful life work and be the authority in their industry. I now work with teams of people and build these teams with intentionality and strategy, at front of mind.

My time at the State Department of Education in South Carolina taught me to actively listen, observe people’s strengths, and strategically put teams together to work on my frameworks. One of my proudest accomplishments at the State Department was developing a systems framework for eighty-six school districts to use with reading strategies and behavior supports.

We partnered with colleges, community groups, and corporate stakeholders to support us. Building off of people’s strengths, implementing a plan, and being able to progress monitor as I did in previous years while applying those strategies, teachings, and structural changes to team building, transformation, and innovation continued to prove successful.

From 2012 – 2022 I got promoted every two years because I could grow, empower, and develop leaders and create or put together cohorts of teams to work on projects at the time. Once I developed a structure that worked well, I continually refined it methodically.

I am now excited to be in a space where I can put all that experience into my creation. LeadR+, which stands for Leading Beyond Yourself, is my signature program that will help forward-thinking leaders self-determine what they like and how they can clear a path for themselves to do that.