How HR and L&D Leaders Can Stay Relevant in 2026

Melanie Naranjo is the Chief People Officer at Ethena, a scalable, all-inclusive compliance platform featuring a customizable training library, HR case manager, and phishing simulator.

With more than a decade of experience in HR, she’s been interviewed by FastCompany, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, and more for her unique insights and strategies. She runs a monthly virtual workshop geared towards educating HR professionals on low lift, practical strategies that work, with an emphasis on creating People strategies that prioritize the success of the Business first, and enjoys sharing her learnings with others while leading custom in-person trainings and participating in speaking engagements.

Her expertise spans a broad spectrum of HR fields, including performance management, training and development, executive coaching, and more.

She’s a graduate of Harvard University and a self proclaimed cat lady.

I’m the Vice Chair of LifeLabs Learning, where our mission is simple but powerful: to make the world’s most innovative companies even better by helping their people learn and grow faster.

At LifeLabs, we partner with over 3,000 organizations worldwide — including TED, Venmo, BlackRock, Kaiser Permanente, Andreessen Horowitz, Slack, JetBlue, Twitter, Reddit, Salesforce, Sony, Casper, Glossier, and Lyft — to teach what we call “tipping point skills”: the small, learnable behaviors that create extraordinary impact on performance, connection, and engagement.

I believe that learning is the most human superpower. My personal mission is to help people and organizations learn faster, better, and with more joy — so they can do more of what matters, lead with intention, and achieve their boldest goals.

At LifeLabs, we’re obsessed with turning science into practice. We draw on behavioral science, neuroscience, organizational design, and cognitive psychology to create learning experiences that are short, energizing, research-backed, and immediately useful.

As a leader, I strive to cultivate curiosity, feedback, collaboration, and inclusion — and to create the kind of environment where people feel empowered, inspired, and unstoppable in their growth.