Michael Barriere

Michael Barriere serves as Chief Talent Officer for Talen Energy. A former human resources executive with high performing organizations across various sectors including Walmart, Alcoa, McKinsey, New York Life and Citi, Mr. Barriere has over 25 years of experience in successfully developing talent to position organizations for long-term growth and value creation.

As Chief Talent Officer, Mr. Barriere, oversees efforts to identify and support the next generation of Talen leaders at all levels in the organization through providing competitive compensation, benefits, education, and training opportunities as well as recruiting talented colleagues who will strengthen the depth of the Talen team for years to come.

Barriere is a senior partner with CEO Works, where he continues to help clients (including Talen) build leadership capabilities to create value. Before joining CEO Works, he worked at McKinsey & Company leading their global JV with CEO Works on building the talent to value platform. In this role he oversaw alignment of top teams with their value agenda at over 50 companies spanning retail, manufacturing, healthcare and financial services.

Previous to these roles, Barriere was Chief Talent Officer for Walmart, Inc. where he coached and advised high-potential executives and accelerated the development of the top 100 next generation leaders, supporting its business strategies and improving the slate of “ready now” candidates for the top 50 critical roles. As CHRO at Alcoa Corporation, he developed and applied predicative analytics that linked the compensation of executives to employee engagement, diversity, workplace safety, and sustainability goals. [While serving as Senior Vice President of HR at New York Life Insurance, Barriere prepared the company to enter into more complex business markets by designing and implementing a talent assessment and planning process that closed key gaps in the top 100 critical roles. In various senior executive positions at Citigroup, including CHRO for Citi Private Bank, he translated factors that differentiate top-tier performance in critical roles into competency-based processes which became the criteria for talent selection, development and rewards that were lauded across the global Citi organization for their impact on the bottom line].

Mr. Barriere holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from Hofstra University, Long Island, an MBA from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Science from Hofstra University. He also has certifications in executive coaching from the Newfield Network.