Carol Seymour
Founder and CEO
Carol Seymour is a sought-after business leader and catalyst for growth. As an executive advisor to businesses and executives around the globe, she has a passion for helping leaders perform at maximum potential in their professions and lives.
She founded Signature Leaders in 2013 at the request of a dozen global heads of HR and now runs multiple leadership-focused offerings. Programs FOR women, not about women. The Signature Premier program – for senior female executives, is a unique development initiative and peer collective with only 120 candidates per year. Today, more than 1400 global executives in the Fortune 1000 are part of Signature. Signature Leaders partners with more than 130 market-leading companies for their selective investments. Eastman, ADP, Ahold Delhaize, Ingersoll Rand, ServiceNow, Cardinal Health, Merck, UPS, Nestle, Southern Company, AT&T, and Maersk are a few of the representative partners.
Carol has a successful track record as a senior executive in large cap companies, startups, and private equity-backed organizations. She has led critical transformations, product/service innovations, and fast-track turn-arounds. Chief Marketing and Commercial roles at Accenture, Spherion, MeadWestvaco, and DBM led her to build World 50, the world’s premier senior executive networking organization. She launched six C-suite private memberships as she grew World 50. Prior to starting Signature Leaders, she was a managing director of G100, a private CEO collective for 200 CEOs globally.
Over the past decade, Carol has interviewed more than 1000 C-suite executives for their leadership insights. She has orchestrated executive discussions among some of the world’s most acclaimed leaders and CEOs. Several of her highlighted interviews include: Sergio Marchionne, CEO of Fiat/Chrysler, just two days after Chrysler paid off its government debt; and Hugh Grant, CEO of Monsanto and CEO of the Year. She has also facilitated discussions with Condoleezza Rice, Greg Norman, Fred Smith, Paul Azinger, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, among others, extracting high impact ideas for executives to action in their own organizations.
Carol is the author of Wisdom Warriors: Women with the Courage to be True to Themselves, a collection of 200 stories and lessons of leadership AND life from amazing, accomplished executives. The book is being used by companies, coaches, and executives to catalyze organizations to share stories. Carol also authored a custom version of the book for Cargill and CEO Dave MacLennan, and for Ahold Delhaize and CEO Dick Boer. Carol is also a top-rated speaker, named one of the Top 40 Women Keynote Speakers for 2020 by RealLeaders Magazine, spending most of her speaking time with women’s forums, industry conferences, and client leadership forums.
Carol is a Founding Member of Paradigm for Parity and uses Signature Leaders to do her part to address the gender gap in executive levels. “Two through You”, an on-line resource, was launched to help companies build their formal sponsorship programs.
Carol resides in Cashiers, NC and spent 34 years in Atlanta. She has two married children, two granddaughters, and a grandson.
