Lena Kaltenmeier

Lena Kaltenmeier is a partner in Heidrick & Struggles’ Frankfurt office and a member of the Leadership Consulting Practice. She has extensive international executive experience leading large-scale transformations in aviation, media, healthcare technology, and financial services. She advises boards and executive teams on organizational effectiveness, leadership assessment and development, culture shaping, and the utilization of HR as a strategic value driver.

Prior to joining Heidrick & Struggles, Lena was the CHRO and executive vice president at a multi-billion-dollar family-owned international media company. As a member of the executive leadership team, she led the people and organizational agenda of their global transformation program, developed HR into a strategic business partner, implemented a new global target operating model, and led organizational redesign within an integrated matrix structure, while steering the workforce implications of restructuring and cost initiatives.

Earlier, Lena was the CHRO and a member of the executive board at an MDAX-listed, roughly 1-billion-dollar e-health technology company. She led the people strategy underpinning the company’s transformation in a fast-scaling, publicly listed environment, including culture and organization development, ESG, and sustainability governance, digitization of the HR landscape, and the implementation of modern workforce and performance frameworks to enable international growth.

Lena spent six years within Europe’s largest aviation group in senior HR leadership roles, including responsibility as global head of HR and corporate talent management. During this time, she played a central role in the people dimension of agile transformation initiatives, leadership model redesign, leadership assessment, and performance management, as well as pandemic crisis management.

She began her career in financial services, with responsibility for executive diagnostics, succession planning, and talent management—topics that had fascinated her since her university studies and have remained central to her career. 

Growing into a fully-fledged HR generalist leader, expanding her expertise across business partnering, organizational design, and leadership development, she played a central role in a major post-merger integration, advising senior executives on talent strategy and organizational design, and laying the groundwork for her lifelong focus on identifying, developing, and assessing leadership potential.

Technische Universität Dresden, Dipl.-Psych.