Leah Goede

Leah Goede’s career has spanned continents, classrooms and corporate headquarters. But no matter the setting, her focus has stayed fixed on the same thing: Helping people realize more of who they could be.
“I am driven by a deep belief in human potential and am committed to helping people thrive at work and in their lives beyond it,” said Goede, 38, senior manager of leadership development at Albertsons Companies.
It is a philosophy she has put into practice across nearly every sector imaginable. Before landing at the Fortune 500 grocery giant, Goede designed and facilitated leadership programs at St. Luke’s Health System, built organizational development infrastructure at Boise State University, and started her career supporting the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s global gender grant portfolio, including site visits to Ethiopia and Tanzania. She has also spent time as a professional actress in Los Angeles, appearing as principal talent in national commercials for Microsoft and Dexcom, and was a volunteer cultural liaison at the Beijing 2008 Olympics.
That breadth, colleagues say, is not a distraction from her core work. It is the engine behind it.
Caitlin Copple, a Boise neighbor who nominated Goede for Idaho Business Review’s Accomplished Under 40 award, described her as someone “driven and inspired by the growth and development of people above all else.”
“She wants to see people thrive in their jobs and in their personal lives,” Copple wrote. “Her impact reaches across the community between her work … and her role as a mother of two young kids and a loving spouse.”
At Albertsons, Goede leads enterprise-wide leadership development strategy for director and executive-level leaders across the company’s sprawling operations. She also teaches in Boise State University’s executive online MBA program, where she brings an applied lens to leadership and organizational effectiveness. In 2025, she delivered a keynote to 250 attendees at the Meridian Chamber of Commerce’s Man and Woman of the Year event, and the year before addressed 1,500 people at St. Luke’s annual leadership conference.
Her graduate training in psychology, completed summa cum laude at Pepperdine University in 2017, gave Goede a framework for understanding why people behave the way they do under pressure, and how to change it.
“During my graduate degree in psychology, I realized that I loved focusing on the growth and development of people,” she said. “I was fascinated by the neuroscience behind human behavior and how that translated into the work world.”
That fascination now extends well beyond the corporate ladder. Goede serves on the board of Upward Inertia, a Boise-based nonprofit that combines occupational therapy, therapeutic yoga and mindfulness practices to serve populations that might not otherwise have access, including people in the local prison system. She is also a member of Centennial Rotary Boise and has volunteered as a youth exchange counselor through Rotary International for more than two decades, supporting high school students in cultural immersion and leadership development across more than 100 countries. She was recently appointed Rotary Leadership Development Chair for District 5400.
Goede holds a bachelor’s degree in international relations, cum laude, from the University of Idaho, where she also competed as an NCAA collegiate springboard diver. She lives in Boise with her husband, whom she credits as her most important collaborator, and their two sons.
Parenting, she says, has been her most instructive leadership school yet.
“It has been a journey of letting go of expectations, learning how to be OK with being imperfect, and trusting that your best effort will translate to them feeling loved, supported, and invested in,” she said.