Introduction
Chris Clark was born with a speech impediment. He still navigates it today, in meetings, on stages, on this very conversation. Yet he built a career, from Google's advertising sales floor to leading global inclusion work to rebuilding Soho House's culture during the pandemic, on the strength of exactly that skill: communication. This is the story of how a kid who gave mock sermons in his living room became someone organisations call when they need to be heard, and be better at hearing others.
The young preacher who learned to say no
Chris grew up in Freeport, New York, and later Scarsdale, immersed in a family where church, music and ministry ran deep, an uncle and aunts who played piano at their churches, and enough of his own pulpit ambition that his family nicknamed him "young preacher." He describes the joy of reading his first Bible verse aloud to a full congregation as a formative memory. Alongside faith, sports, particularly basketball, taught him early lessons about how every role in an organisation contributes to the whole. That packed childhood, sports, music, student government, also taught him a harder skill early: recognising when he was overloaded and having the discipline to say no, a habit he traces back to high school and still credits with protecting his time today.
From ad sales to leading Google's Black Googler Network
Chris's career started in Google's advertising sales division, first working with small and midsize businesses, then moving into new business sales. Alongside that day job, he took on leadership within the Black Googler Network, Google's employee resource group for Black employees, starting locally before growing into regional and then global leadership. That role exposed him to the varied experiences of Black Googlers across offices in Dublin, London, São Paulo, Nairobi, Johannesburg and Accra, and to sister resource groups for Hispanic, Latino and LGBTQIA+ employees. Recognising that too few people were actively working to close the gaps he was hearing about, he moved formally into equity and inclusion work at Google in 2018, a role created specifically for him, drawing on an academic background in human development and organisational psychology alongside the sales and partnership skills he'd already built.
Structure turns ERGs from event planners into strategists
Asked how organisations can move employee resource groups from token gestures to genuine sources of influence, Chris points to one deceptively simple lever: structure. Without defined values, policies and clearly assigned executive stakeholder responsibilities, he argues an ERG defaults to being an event-planning committee, reacting rather than strategising. Give stakeholders an actual playbook of what's expected of them, rather than a vague sponsorship title, and ERG leaders shift from putting things on the wall to genuinely shaping culture on an organisation's behalf.
The hardest role of his career: rebuilding Soho House's culture post-pandemic
Chris names his time at Soho House, which he joined in early 2021 while still living under pandemic restrictions in London, as the hardest role of his career, harder even than founding his own company. Soho House's business model depends entirely on in-person connection, houses, hotels, spas, gyms, at precisely the moment the world had spent a year avoiding exactly that. The company had to rehire and retrain furloughed staff and rebuild its member base from a standing start, all under real urgency. As the executive responsible for employee culture and member inclusion, Chris spoke daily with everyone from housekeeping staff to the founder, absorbing the weight of what felt, in his words, like 10,000 people going through a collective reset. He credits the role with making him a more conscious leader and a more sustainable empath, able to hold space for other people's experiences without becoming fully consumed by them.
Speaking through a lifelong impediment
Chris is candid about a speech impediment he was born with and still manages, one that can worsen with fatigue or dehydration. He describes a specific memory of delivering a two-hour diversity training in an overheated, poorly air-conditioned room to an audience that largely didn't want to be there, and feeling an inexplicable surge of energy carry him through despite every physical condition working against him. He credits that same phenomenon, an impediment that seems to recede whenever he's given a platform to speak, with fuelling his continued drive to keep improving as a communicator, still actively studying how others do it well.
Building Harmony Consulting Group on what the market needed
When Chris founded Harmony Consulting Group in 2022, he was candid that risk tolerance had never come naturally to him. What made the decision possible was reframing it entirely: at the time, no one was publicly supporting people who had been laid off, and the market clearly needed that support, so he treated the business as a response to genuine need rather than a personal risk, helped by the fact that a consultancy required almost no capital to start. That calculation was tested again in 2023, when the repeal of affirmative action in the United States caused DEI consulting demand to collapse almost overnight, a shift he had to navigate without the insulation of a large employer, adjusting how the business marketed itself commercially while holding its underlying methodology and values steady.
The cost of rushing: a lesson in presence
Chris shares a moment he still returns to: rushing to a conference session in Atlanta and giving a young professional who'd approached him, excited to connect after following his career on LinkedIn, only a hurried, formulaic brush-off before disappearing into a room he could easily have skipped. He was able to find her again later, but the moment of misconnection, not any positive career highlight, is what has stuck with him. His broader point is that genuine communication requires real effort in every interaction, and that presence, choosing to slow down for one person rather than rushing to the next commitment, is a form of respect people remember far longer than words alone.
Leadership as helping someone else define their own success
Chris's definition of leadership has shifted from an earlier, more corporate framing, directing a large organisation in a given direction, to something he now calls hyper-personal and hyper-localised: being intentional about helping someone else achieve their own definition of success, acting as a compass or lighthouse for their journey rather than dictating the destination. His definition of success has moved in a similarly personal direction too: not balance, which he considers something of a fallacy, but harmony, work integrated into a life you actually want, measured by whether you wake up knowing what needs doing and want to do it, without dread.
