About Shonna

Shonna Waters, PhD, is an organizational psychologist and business leader who redesigns the systems behind how people work, decide, and get paid. Her conviction is simple: every business problem is a people problem, and every people problem is a systems problem.

What sets her apart is the interaction of two things: the rigor of a behavioral scientist and the relevance of an operator. She has spent over 20 years not just studying these systems but building them. As a research psychologist and technical director in the federal government, she redesigned promotion, performance, and pay systems at enterprise scale. As a founding scientist and the first I-O psychologist at BetterUp, she helped grow the company from under $4M to over $260M in ARR and built the behavioral science function and models behind its platform. She went on to co-found and lead Fractional Insights, an advisory firm dedicated to making AI transformation human-centric and business-driven. Today she is the SVP of Executive Engagement and Insights at Syndio, defining how organizations manage the largest and least-scrutinized investment they make in their people.

She is a SIOP Fellow, a member of the Harvard Business Review Advisory Council, a Georgetown University faculty member, and the award-winning co-author of The Coaching Shift and The Practical Guide to HR Analytics. Her global research on AI at work has shaped how leaders think about adoption and the human side of automation. Her work appears in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Inc., CNBC, and Fast Company. She holds a PhD in industrial-organizational psychology from the University of Minnesota.