Wonder Woman in Business, Toni Cortese

Toni Cortese is passionate about developing leaders and teams to achieve their professional goals and guide organizations to greater success by increasing employee engagement, improving processes and culture, and impacting the bottom line. Prior to coaching, Toni led global technology teams during her 25-year tenure in investment banking. While at Barclays, Toni co-founded and led a highly successful employee engagement program delivered a novel approach to driving tangible firm-wide cultural change. She also ran a training company whose clients included a number of Fortune 500 companies. She leverages a degree in International Relations and 20 years of self-taught forays into behavioral and social sciences to help her coaching clients see things from different angles and create new opportunities with new tools. Toni is an avid supporter of diversity, which propelled her to be a founding member of three separate diversity networks at a major investment bank. She received a number of awards including Woman of the Year Award and the honor of ringing the opening and closing bells at the NYSE and NASDAQ. Toni has also partnered with the YWCA for over 17 years and was inducted into the YWCA’s Academy of Women Leaders for coaching, training, and mentoring battered women of all ages. The combination of her life experiences, approachable nature, and ability to see the broader context is what has led many colleagues to seek Toni’s counsel over the years.