Sara Kay Gottschalk has spent more than 15 years helping leaders navigate pivotal moments in their careers. From first-time managers to senior executives, she has transformed the way organizations think about talent, leadership, and the human side of change. Through executive coaching, succession planning and organizational development, Sara equips leaders with the self-awareness and courage to make decisions that strengthen their teams, organizations and the people they serve.
Sara Kay’s journey began with a passion for learning inspired by her mother, who earned her PhD while Sara Kay was in elementary school. That early exposure to education instilled a lifelong love of learning that carried her through her undergraduate degree and later to UW-Stout, where she earned her master’s degree in 2014 while working full-time in human resources at Foot Locker, Inc. Stout’s flexible program, which combined online coursework with in-person sessions across the UW system, allowed her to immediately apply what she was learning to her professional work. This approach gave her an opportunity for accelerated growth and opened doors to increasingly strategic roles.
After completing her master’s degree, Sara Kay moved into leadership development at Foot Locker, Inc. in New York, eventually taking an international assignment as director of talent management in Amsterdam. There, she and her family lived abroad for three years, immersing themselves in Dutch and European business culture. Leading global teams across multiple countries deepened her perspective on how leadership styles, feedback, and communication differ across cultures. She emphasizes that self-awareness is critical for any leader, especially when navigating complex teams and environments.
“If there was one thing I could give every leader, it would be self-awareness,” she says. “Your ability to understand the impact you have on others—and adjust how you communicate, cascade vision, give feedback and show up as a leader—changes everything. You can’t lead those things well if you can’t first see yourself clearly.”
Sara Kay’s global experience directly influenced her later work at Amazon, where she shaped executive talent development strategies and lead international teams spanning across North America, Europe, Asia and India. Her impact included building organizations with purpose, designing leadership philosophies with impact and creating systems that help organizations identify and develop high-potential talent.
Through these efforts, Sara Kay’s work has strengthened entire organizations and empowered teams to achieve their full potential. She says, “The biggest impact I’ve had is helping systems think differently about leadership and who they are in the future. While Fortune 500 companies like Foot Locker, Inc. and Amazon can have people like me inside the company, I’m really convinced that there’s people outside of these big organizations who need the same support. Those are the organizations I want to be doing this work with.”
Sara Kay has taken the leap to make that vision a reality. As the CEO and founder of Studio Four14, a leadership development practice, she is dedicated to helping people discover their capabilities and expand their impact. She works with organizations of all sizes, bringing Fortune 500-level leadership insight to smaller companies that may not have internal development resources. Her approach emphasizes three important steps for leaders: identifying limiting stories, reframing them into actionable possibilities and summoning the courage to step forward.
“It’s the identification, the reframing and then the courage to actually do something different—that’s where most people get stuck.” The result is leaders who are more confident, intentional and capable of driving meaningful change.
Being #StoutProud, Sara Kay reflects, is about recognizing the foundation her education provided. “It’s being proud of the education that became a springboard for all the things I would do in my career,” she says. From Stout’s collaborative classrooms to leading diverse teams around the world, her journey demonstrates how the right support at the right time can unlock extraordinary potential.
