Each Friday this summer, the Daniels Newsroom is telling the stories of the behind-the-scenes staff who empower students, faculty and the College at large. Read past stories on our blog.
Lexi Warden names everything she owns.
Yes, everything.
There’s her car, Maribelle. At home, a quartet of plants pays tribute to the Beatles, near a quintet honoring the Backstreet Boys. (A collective of *NSYNC plants is in progress.) And there’s her office calendar, Antonia, who, Warden makes sure to note, “likes to dance the Foxtrot.”
It could be because Warden (MBA 2022) is a self-described “odd duck” and that, in her words, “a little bit of whimsy never killed anyone.”
Or perhaps it’s that, for Warden, the assistant director of corporate and community relations at the Daniels College of Business, everything in life has always been personal.
“The only thing I’ve ever been really good at is people,” Warden said. “I connect with them well. I’ve always been able to get to know them.”
Relationships are a cornerstone of her role at Daniels. Her office works with companies, nonprofits, agencies and alumni to create a mutually beneficial bridge to business students.
Sometimes, that means ushering a corporation through the process of supporting a student fund or scholarship. In other cases, she looks for places to plug external partners into the curriculum, whether it’s guest speaking opportunities or class projects. Her fingerprints are all over some of the College’s most prominent events too, from Race and Case to the Sustainable Business Symposium to programming for the graduate Women in Business club.
“Lexi is amazing because she is capable of being very strategic as well as very tactical and execution oriented,” said Kate Dillon, senior director of corporate and community relations. “She can have a million different plates spinning at one time but manages to keep an eye on each project to completion. She is very thoughtful and intentional about her work, but can also pivot quickly and adapt easily. Not only is she amazing at the job function, she also brings so much fun and laughter and joy to our team and to the College in general.”
Finding her footing
Growing up in Littleton, Colorado, Warden was always involved in some sort of extracurricular activity (cheer, volleyball, track, theater), but could never shake the feeling of being different.
“I think I’ve always been a little weird around the edges,” Warden said. “I’ve always been othered. I sing to myself a lot. I find joy in catching people off-guard on stuff.”
She felt included and seen on the stage. When she was 16, her high school put on a production of “The Laramie Project,” a collection of stories memorializing Matthew Shepard, a gay college student tortured and murdered in Wyoming. Warden took on the role of Shepard’s best friend, Romaine Patterson, and was forever changed.
“It was brutal and terrible, but it made me fall in love with theater,” she said. “It’s the ability to make people feel things and hear other people’s stories. Being able to make people listen to that story and have them understand a little more about what people went through. I think it showed a little bit of what we can do through storytelling.”
She departed Littleton High School with a theater scholarship to Kansas State University and ambitions of being an actress. But Warden never found her footing on campus, due in some part, she says, to her short hair, tattoos and piercings that drew unfriendly attention in the Great Plains.
She left acting behind, transferring first to Arapahoe Community College and then to Metropolitan State University, earning a degree in psychology.
Lexi Warden never met a tiny door she didn’t like. “A little bit of whimsey never killed anyone,” she said.
Changing directions
Upon graduating, Warden worked with victims of violent crime, helping them navigate their way through the criminal justice system.
But after several years, she felt the desire to change things up. It started with her dream of opening a brewery in Scotland.
“I was looking at the visa requirements and I needed additional education to stand out in the visa process,” she said. “So I said, ‘MBA, why not?’”
She joined the full-time Denver MBA at Daniels and began to wed her love of beer with her desire to leave a meaningful mark on the world. The beer industry, Warden realized, uses a tremendous amount of water and leaves a large impact on the environment. So she centered a research project on sustainability in the beer business, leaning on interviews she conducted with brewers and brewery owners.
During her time on campus, Warden served as president of the Graduate Business Student Association and received the prestigious Daniels Graduate Student Award for Excellence in return. Her involvement also put her in close contact with the staff members who would soon become her coworkers, helping her shift her focus from building a brewery to the corporate and community relations space.
Pride in diversity
In two-and-a-half years at Daniels, Warden has found a place where she can use her deft interpersonal skills to do work that aligns with her values.
“Everything I do, I do with a lens of diversity,” said Warden, who also sits on the Daniels Values Committee. “When I first took this job, the one promise I made to myself is that I would do my best to make sure every panel I put together was diverse. We have students who are looking for people in this community who look like them and have similar experiences to them.”
Making those moments happen, she says, is what she is proudest of.
Outside of the office, Warden spends her time with a close group of friends, on the golf course or rolling a 120 average for her bowling team. But she insists she is an introvert, relishing the time she spends at home with her overweight cat, baking or learning to needlepoint. She loves taking herself out on a monthly date to the nail salon, a meal, and a movie or show.
Though her stomach has a hard time tolerating beer (the irony is not lost on her), Warden still enjoys a Saison or west coast IPA. And she still has her eye on pouring pints in Scotland one day, behind the bar at Tiny Door Brewery.
Obviously, it already has a name.