David Baumgartner
Founder of Tresane. Leadership and team coach in Lexington, Kentucky, working with leaders and teams across Central Kentucky and beyond, and the author of Leading Without Closure.
The work
David helps leaders and leadership teams align three things: themselves, their relationships, and their teams. He blends business strategy with human insight, and the aim is always the same: leaders who show up with clarity, curiosity, and presence, even in challenge, and teams that can carry the work without him.
He holds the SPHR and SHRM-SCP in HR, the PCC (Professional Certified Coach) from the International Coaching Federation, and EMCC Global's Individual Team Coaching Accreditation (ITCA), and he is a Fellow of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School Affiliate.
How he got here
David spent 25 years in HR, from 1995 to 2020, known for building culture and for connecting with leaders. When that career closed in 2020, he took Tresane full time that June. The years since went into learning coaching, then team coaching accreditation, and into seeing the change for what it was: the culmination of a career, not a detour. His book, Leading Without Closure (February 2026), reflects on that journey. What carried it was Carol Dweck's idea of "not yet."
Go deeper
- Read the book →Leading Without Closure: Leadership, Alignment, and Living Inside Complexity.
- Connect on LinkedIn →David's profile, career and credentials.
- The Tresane Model →The map the work is built on, in a few minutes.
- Our assessments →Where a person or a team sits in the model.
- Let's chat →Thirty minutes, no pitch and no slides.