Anita Barksdale
Auditor, Privacy Professional, Lawyer, HR Consultant, Trusted Advisor
Anita Barksdale started her career as an Information Technology Auditor with KPMG LLP. Anita served clients such as the then-newly founded Department of Homeland Security and stringent clients like the Department of Defense. She honed her audit skills during the infancy of Sarbanes Oxley and learned to adapt to changing organizations and changing regulations. She identified business processes and controls to increase efficiency and effectiveness while mitigating risk. Her technology, logistics, and project management experience also includes serving as an intern at Goldman Sachs and Accenture.
As a lawyer, Anita has served as a trusted advisor, counselor and litigator. She has had to cultivate trust during complex investigations and has experience taking cases to trial.
She has led multi-plaintiff litigation strategy and established herself as an expert in cases involving the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA"), Americans with Disabilities Act ("ADA"), Family and Medical Leave Act ("FMLA"), National Labor Relations Act, non-competes, data privacy and technology.
She adds to that expertise through her human resources experience. She has served as a partner with management to use human resources to help support operational efficiency. She coaches leaders, and has advised and counseled managers and employees on challenging workplace issues. She has built policies, processes, and training to address complex human resource areas such as workers' compensation, FMLA, FLSA, and the ADA.
Her Story
But beyond her work, Anita has always believed in servant leadership. In 2001, when she served as Regional Representative in her sorority, she led women in the northeast, Germany, and the Virgin Islands in community service activities. She continued that leadership by serving on the sororities’ National Social Action Commission and its Long Range Strategic Planning Committee. Since then, she has led lawyers in the Houston Young Lawyers Association, Houston Bar Association, Texas Young Lawyers Association, and the American Bar Association.
Anita is an intellectually inquisitive, well-organized leader. She is an effective communicator, trainer, and implementer of projects that require nurturing of relationships and strong ethical values. She is an auditor, a business woman, a lawyer, and a consultant who is here to serve.
Her experience professionally has also come from learning how to balance in the midst of crisis. At 17, Anita completed her first semester of her last year in high school while her mother lay in a coma. She had to grieve her mother because although her mother survived a ruptured brain aneurysm and a stroke, she was physically and mentally disabled until she passed.
For seventeen years, Anita and her family balanced careers with caring for themselves and truly caring for her mom. This has helped her to understand tremedous grief in her personal life, tremendous pressure in her professional life, and tremendous growth and resilience to prepare her for whatever life brings. Over the years, Anita has faced significant personal and professional adversity; however, her coaching style and her personal mantra is based on continuous improvement, continuous resilience, and continuous self-reflection.
All people in circumstances similar to Anita choose their response, but few people in these circumstances choose the response to move towards life, love, and growth. Anita knows and understands how difficult it can be to maintain professional success in the midst of personal crisis, but Anita believes in helping others discover not only what they want, but how to get there in a way that is authentic and challenging, yet supportive.
Anita believes in helping you reach your goals by helping you discover what matters to you. "What do you want" is the seminal question and "how will you get there" is the journey Anita helps you take. Whether you want a new job, change a habit, or even new approaches to your time management, conflict management or communication skills--Anita has the experience, the teaching spirit, and the talents to help you get there.
Part of Anita Barksdale's professional and personal coaching focuses on helping people find out how to resolve their inner conflict so they can address their outer conflict. Her ultimate goal is to help you find your best path to the success that you truly want. Some coaches believe teaching someone or telling someone what to do is the solution--Anita has found truth in Galileo's proverb - you cannot teach a person anything, you can only help them find it in themselves.
Ready to start working towards solutions? Contact her today!
