About

I’m Chris Kiklas. I run UKG Ready as Group Vice President and General Manager — the HR, payroll, and workforce platform UKG builds for small and mid-market businesses. It’s a multi-hundred-million-dollar business, and every part of it exists to serve companies where nobody has just one job.

That band of companies, roughly 75 to 1,500 employees, is the through-line of my career and most of what I write about. The other thread is leadership itself: how organizations get designed, how culture actually forms, and how leaders stop being the bottleneck their org politely works around. I hold those opinions in public and I’m comfortable being argued with.

Before UKG I was President of EmLogis, a workforce scheduling company, where among other things I built out our subsidiary in Asia. Before that I worked across services, support, and operations, and earlier still I did business intelligence work at Attachmate, NetIQ, and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. I got to general management the long way, through every function that has to live with the product after the demo.

Outside the day job I lead the Wisdom course at Landmark Worldwide, which shaped the no-blame, systems-first way I try to lead more than any business book has. I serve on the boards of Guidepost Consulting and Sky Ryders Arts & Education. Home is Houston, Texas.

The fastest way to reach me is the contact form. If you’re an editor or podcast host, bios and headshots are ready on the press page.