Adaptive HR Leadership for Growing Companies
Via Potentia loosely translates from Latin as "the path of potential." It captures what this work is fundamentally about: helping senior People leaders, HR teams, and the leaders they support realize what they're capable of — not someday, but in the work they're doing right now. The best People functions aren't built on best practices alone. They're built on a clear understanding of where the organization is, where it's going, and what its people need to grow into the next version of themselves.
Meet the Founder
Kate Jester
Founder & PrincipalKate Jester is the founder of Via Potentia Consulting, a practice serving senior People leaders and growing organizations across leadership development, fractional HR, talent strategy, and HR modernization.
Kate brings more than two decades of experience leading People Business Partner, Talent Development, and People Operations functions in high-growth environments, most recently as Vice President, People Business Partnerships & People Services, Americas at Slalom Consulting, and previously as Head of HR at Mapbox. She combines strategic vision with hands-on execution, equally comfortable shaping people strategy with the C-suite and rolling up sleeves to build the systems, processes, and team capabilities that make it real. Across her career, she has built high-performing People teams, coached senior leaders to operate with accountability and transparency, and created the conditions for peak organizational performance.
Kate's approach is heavily influenced by her experience at CEB, now Gartner, where she had direct access to HR best practices research and the opportunity to implement progressive, evidence-based people approaches in a values-driven environment. The combination of research-informed thinking and operational pragmatism — knowing both what good looks like and what will actually work given a company's stage, culture, and constraints — remains the foundation of how she works with clients today.
Kate's current consulting work focuses particularly on helping People functions scale, modernize and prepare for the AI era. Her hands-on experience implementing AI-enabled HR tools, leading AI fluency uplift across HR teams, and applying AI thoughtfully in her own consulting workflows is grounded in an executive certification in Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy from MIT Sloan. She works with executives who want a senior partner who can both do the work and build their team's capability to do it well.
Kate is currently completing an ICF-accredited Leadership & Performance Coaching Certification through Brown University and ACT Leadership. She earned her MBA at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business.
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