Meet Valerie

For more than four decades, Valerie Irick Rainford has helped leaders navigate complexity, lead organizational transformation, and make better leadership decisions.

Her career spans executive leadership at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and JPMorgan Chase, where she led large-scale operations, organizational transformation, leadership development, and talent strategy. Her final executive assignment at JPMorgan Chase was creating and leading Advancing Black Leaders, an initiative that demonstrated how disciplined talent practices can strengthen organizational performance while expanding opportunity.

Today, Valerie is the Founder and CEO of Elloree Talent Strategies, where she leads the firm's research, thought leadership, and advisory work focused on strengthening leadership decisions and organizational performance.

Through original executive frameworks—including Screening Integrity™, Competitive Slates™, The Fence Framework™, and TalentEQ™—Valerie helps boards, CEOs, and executive teams strengthen organizational performance by improving the quality of leadership and talent decisions.

Her work combines executive advisory, proprietary diagnostics, leadership development, executive coaching, and Executive Thinking Systems that translate insight into practical action.

She is also the author of Until The Brighter Tomorrow: One Woman's Courageous Climb From The Projects to the Podium, a memoir reflecting on the experiences and courageous choices that shaped her leadership journey, and What Leadership Looks Like, her ongoing leadership publication exploring the invisible decisions that shape people, culture, and organizational performance.

Today, Valerie's work centers on helping executive leaders answer questions such as:

What invisible decisions are shaping our organization?
Where are we unintentionally creating barriers to opportunity?
How do leadership decisions accumulate to influence organizational performance?
How can organizations strengthen decision quality in an era increasingly influenced by AI?
How can organizations strengthen performance while expanding opportunity for all?

A nationally recognized speaker, executive advisor, and trusted thought leader, Valerie serves as a Trustee of Fordham University and advises organizations across industries on leadership, organizational performance, governance, and the future of talent.

The future of every organization is shaped long before results appear. It is shaped one leadership decision at a time.

Profiled in Best-Selling Leadership Book

PROVOKE: How Leaders Shape the Future By Overcoming Fatal Human Flaws

Valerie Irick Rainford is one of three provocateurs profiled in this BESTSELLING leadership book by Geoff Tuff & Steven Goldbach.

The best leaders have conviction to act–even in the face of uncertainty–in order to “provoke” the future they desire. They are able to identify important inflection points earlier than others and then use actions to shape trends to their advantage rather wait for the change to arrive.

From the national bestselling authors who brought you Detonate: Why- and how- corporations must blow up best practices (and bring a beginner’s mind) to survive authors Geoff Tuff and Steven Goldbach explain why we act the way we do when faced with uncertainty and provide tools to do things differently. Rooted at the intersection between business and behavioral economics, Provoke is applicable to decisions in business, but also across many different aspects of the human experience, teaching people how to provoke as a mechanism to create a better future.