Experience
For over 30 years I have been engaged in dozens of client engagements too numerous to mention. This is a sample of client engagements to illustrate the breadth and depth of experience.
Strategic Leadership Development
Global Healthcare & Life Sciences Company - Led the design and delivery of an extensive and intensive action learning leadership development program for high potential leaders from the EMEA region of the company and designed to provide senior management with recommendations for growing the company brand in Germany. This included design collaboration with the global head of leadership development, assessment-based individual executive coaching, large group facilitation and coaching for action learning team effectiveness. The recommendations were heartily endorsed by the senior team and the cadre of leaders was energized with new insights about their leadership in the company.
National Healthcare & Life Sciences Company – Led the design and delivery of a best practice onboarding program for three newly-hired executives in order to accelerate their assimilation and role effectiveness. This involved developing individual transition plans informed by stakeholder interviews, leadership psychometrics, action coaching over a six month time period and an in-depth 360 evaluation of the entire process at its conclusion to inform the next stage of action planning.
France-based Global Wire and Cable Manufacturer - Led an international team of leadership consultants to provide a needs assessment, and design/deliver an intensive, multi-session, multi-geography strategic and customized executive leadership program for 150 top future executive leaders as well as dozens of new gen high-potentials from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. This included launching international action learning teams working on strategic company projects and coaching them to develop and leverage a global mindset and work as an effective global team. This program his now entering into its fourth year and has led to a strong leadership bench strength of future executives many whom have gone on to take over major businesses and functions within the company.
U.S.-based International Engineering Energy Services Company - Led a team to design and deliver a strategic customized executive leadership program for the top 150 executives of this fast-growing energy service company with operations in over 20 countries world-wide. This one week program, delivered three times a year over three years, had a focus on developing a mindset and set of capabilities and tools to be growth leaders for the future.
Regional Energy Utility Company – Led the design and development of a customized leadership program for 350 frontline and senior leaders over the course of 18 months to help the company build and drive a high performance organization. The program engaged large cohorts of leaders in a series of multi-day workshops, leadership psychometrics, peer coaching and project work over a four month period. The program was so successful it was highlighted as a significant factor leading to the company’s recognition as a Top 100 employer in Canada. This also developed and aligned the entire leadership cadre around the desired high performance culture they were seeking. This program is now being extended to be a focus in the current year’s leadership development planning.
Hear what our clients are saying about our Strategic Leadership Development solutions.
Executive Talent Management
Canadian-based International Energy Utility - Co-led the design and delivery of a comprehensive executive assessment process - one of the most significant investments in executive development ever implemented by the company. This included supporting the CEO and EVP HR to engage al seven members of the executive team (three of whom were deemed to be potential CEO candidates) and eleven other potential executive candidates in the assessment process, designing and conducting all the elements of an elaborate assessment centre, writing detailed assessment reports and conducting talent reviews with the senior executive team and HR committee for the Board. From the psychometrics, interviews and leadership profiles, final recommendations for both development and advancement were provided enabling the senior team and Board to manage their executive talent risks and be confident in their succession decisions.
Global Insurance Company – Developed a talent and learning strategy with the Head of HR of the national subsidiary of a global insurance company. This involved designing and facilitating the process to identify key gaps and opportunities, articulate the vision, mission and strategic imperatives and develop and launch an executive Advisory Council to support the talent/learning strategy. For the first time this work was able to bring the various learning and talent activities into a seamless integrated strategy.
Large North American Energy Company – Designed and launched a half-day career development workshop to help employees to take stock of their talents, purpose and values and take charge of their career direction through a career development map. This was in response to some disappointing scores in the company’s annual employee engagement survey highlighting career development as a key gap. This workshop was designed to be facilitated by company staff and is currently being offered to its 6000 employees with very positive results
Large Regional Not-for-Profit Community Organization – Led a small team to design and deliver an executive assessment solution to help the outgoing CEO and Board select a new CEO. This had to be done in the context of being a highly visible and scrutinized community organization while minimizing any internal disruption as it was to be focused on internal executive candidates. In collaboration with the current CEO we devised a very transparent best-in-class approach that included specialized interviews, precise, highly validated predictive leading edge psychometric instruments along with activity-based exercises. Detailed assessment reports were reviewed with the CEO and Board members along with development plans for all participating executives and a final recommendation for the leading potential new CEO candidate along with ‘upboarding’ development and communication plans for his transition. The recommendation was endorsed and implemented.
Hear what our clients are saying about our Executive Talent Management solutions.
Collaborative Strategy Development
North American HR Services Company - Co-led the design and facilitation process to help the CEO and an extended leadership team of 35 to articulate a new five year growth strategy to harness the synergies of a newly acquired company and leverage four lines of business. This involved creating the governance model to manage/direct the efforts of seven cross-functional teams, designing and facilitating several strategy workshops and supporting the completion of a strategy document presented to the Board for approval. The approach accelerated the understanding and commitment to the growth strategy by the leaders responsible for implementing it and provided a framework for business planning for several years.
Large North American Energy Company – Led the design and facilitated the process to help the company articulate their people and HR strategy. This involved conducting an in-depth needs analysis to determine the key HR levers for future competitive advantage. This also included developing an efficient and effective approach to deploy the HR leadership team to collect and analyze input from key internal stakeholders, followed by an offsite workshop to define the people strategy and inform the design of a new HR organization. This established a focus, direction and platform for value-added service for the next three years and the key priorities identified are currently being implemented in the new organization design.
Growing e-Health Company: I was engaged in the early stage of an e-health company to help the senior team articulate their growth strategy as an innovative disrupter in a growing health care sector during covid-19. Given the depth of experience that existed amongst the members of the top team I conducted a series of in-depth interviews to gather intelligence and data to inform how I would facilitate and generate alignment around the growth strategy. Given the challenges of in-person gatherings due to covid-19 I conducted a series of online workshops to define the vision, values, purpose and strategic priorities with action plans for this company as well as a senior team charter for defining how they would work together to execute the strategy. As they grew and after they were acquired by a larger private equity firm I continued to work with them twice more in the ensuring four years to refresh and update their strategy and strengthen the top team alignment to focus on strategy execution.
Hear what our clients are saying about our Collaborative Strategy Development solutions.
Executive Team Mastery
North American HR Service Company – Worked with the CEO to engage his senior executive members in a team development initiative. This involved leveraging insights from a series of individual interviews and a team diagnostic instrument leading to a custom-designed facilitated two-day off-site retreat. The output resulted in defining the value-added role of the senior executive team in driving new growth that was understood and committed to by all.
Large Health Centre in Atlantic Canada - Co-led the design/facilitation of a transformation process undertaken by the CEO and senior leadership team to shape the new direction of this health care centre. This included conducting a needs assessment, working with the senior team members to define their strategic change agenda and developing a leadership profile aligned with their vision. From this, we designed and delivered a series of leadership development workshops and facilitated large group sessions to engage institutional medical and administrative leaders in the strategic change process to accelerate understanding and buy-in.
International Energy Association: After a number of years of misdirection and governance challenges I was contacted by the new incoming Secretary General to help build a high performance leadership team to transform this large global association of energy companies. The initial data and intelligence I collected revealed a dysfunctional team in chaos lacking strategic focus and direction. As the members were in multiple time zones across the globe I facilitated a series of virtual workshops to support the team articulate a senior team charter which articulated their aspirations of high performance. This was done by maximizing the input from the team members themselves to define this new inspiring focus and direction. Four months after this phase the pulse check I did on their effectiveness in implementing their aspirations of high performance revealed tremendous progress in the overall team effectiveness and its transformative impact on member engagement and satisfaction within the global association.
Hear what our clients are saying about our Executive Team Mastery solutions.
Meeting Design and Facilitation
Regional Gas Storage and Transmission Utility - Led a team over eight years to work with the senior team and assist with their change and culture shift efforts through a variety of initiatives. This included designing and facilitating large group multi-day workshops for 90 top managers (and sometimes union leaders) to help them understand the de-regulated energy market, conducting workshops to build skills to lead a high-performance safety culture and facilitate union-management sessions to understand and live the corporate values. Also led projects that have included conducting a needs analysis and designing/facilitating interventions to increase the speed of adoption of a new structure, working with cross-functional teams to resolve safety issues while learning the role teamwork plays in building a safety culture and supporting the change management of a new work management technology implementation.
North American Professional Services Firm – Designed and facilitated a two-day conference of the top 80 senior leaders held annually by a large growing national professional services firm. The conference was focused on both motivating and engaging these leaders to transform the company as well as identifying and building shared alignment around the key long term strategies to achieve this. This involved designing multiple break-out sessions on specific topics, integrating the messages/principles from two major keynote speakers and facilitating the large group interaction in addition to supplemental activities
North American Energy Company – Designed and facilitated a strategic and innovative half-day workshop for the top 60 executive leaders as part of their annual leadership conference. The workshop was focused on strategic talent/career development as a primary lever to improve their employee engagement scores. The workshop included direct involvement of the company’s next generation leadership talent as well as practical sessions to equip executives to be true talent architects and coaches
Hear what our clients are saying about our Meeting Design and Facilitation solutions.
Strategic Leadership Development Testimonials
John partnered with me to establish a ground breaking and intensive development program to build global leadership capabilities in our future executives. Due to the success of this program, now in its third year with plans for continuing, he also worked with us to develop a program for leaders in unique global “transversal” roles to build capabilities to achieve results through influence. Thanks to John’s expertise, practical creativity, engaging facilitation style and ability to understand and challenge our culture he has definitely accelerated the development of our cadre of senior leaders
Corporate VP, Training and Career Management
Global France-based Manufacturer
As part of the transformation journey we are on to create a high performance culture John and his associates designed and delivered the most impactful leadership development program in our company’s history. So much so, it was featured as one of the key drivers behind our company being named a Top 100 employer. We’ve engaged John repeatedly over the past 10 years to produce innovative best practice learning processes that help leaders transform their behaviour. He is extremely responsive, and takes time to understand issues before he develops solutions. In every case, he has masterfully garnered the respect of our senior executives and leadership throughout the company.
Senior Executive
Large North American Energy Utility
John played a critical role in helping me to transition a number of newly-hired executives on my senior team. He developed an innovative best practice onboarding program which both accelerated their effectiveness into their roles and minimized the transition risks frequently the case in such situations he quickly won the trust of the people involved and his efforts created a smooth transition for everyone.
National Managing Director
Global Pharmaceutical Company
Executive Talent Management Testimonials
Our Board was asking us for answers to two questions: How ready are our potential internal CEO succession candidates? And how strong is our future executive officer bench strength? We engaged John and his associates to put together a development focused assessment solution to provide informed perspectives to these questions that we could be confident of. The process that was devised was one of the most effective I have seen in my long career in HR. John shaped best practices in an innovative and efficient manner that drove profound insights for evaluating our CEO and executive candidates. Those participating in this program considered it the most dramatic development experience they had ever been involved in. His personal approach put everyone at ease during the process, and bred additional confidence in the outcomes. The insights and informed points of view were a tremendous asset, and helped us arrive at an accurate and favorable outcome we continue to benefit from today.
CAO and EVP HR
International Energy Company
After ten years as CEO I notified the Board that I would be stepping down and a successor would need to be selected and I expressed a strong hope that an internal executive candidate be chosen. Given the highly visible public scrutiny this process would take in our community and to avoid a non-productive internal competition I knew we had to get the right help for this assessment and selection process. John and his senior associate and team were the perfect fit. They conducted a professional data-driven best-in-class assessment of our selected internal candidates. Their personable approach engendered a comfort amongst all the participants and high level of trust in the outcome. Their report and recommendations to the Board were enthusiastically received and implemented. An excellent internal candidate was not only chosen but highly endorsed by his colleagues and subsequently provided tremendous new senior leadership to our organization.
CEO
Large Regional Not-for-Profit Community Organization
Collaborative Strategy Development Testimonials
Six months into my new role, I felt it was time to review the focus and direction of our people strategy and HR organization. I engaged John to design and facilitate an efficient and engaging process to identify the key HR levers for competitive advantage within our organization and build an implementation plan including the HR organization design. The process enabled us to make strategic decisions that were informed and that we were confident were the right ones and, most importantly, built the shared commitment of my team. Through his innovative support, experience and disarmingly personable style, he fit right in with the team. And for me, he was a critical sounding board I turned to in helping me think through our people strategy and HR organization.
Corporate Senior Vice President, HR
Large North American Energy Company
With a new strategic acquisition we had just doubled the size of our company. It was obvious at that point that it was time to reset our five year growth and that we needed some outside guidance in doing so. John and his associates were our clear choice to help design, lead and facilitate a strategic planning process that would both harness the synergies of the now larger enterprise and also accelerate a needed cultural integration between both companies. His design fostered a collective focus that enabled us to build both relationship and commercial bridges across our businesses and establish a platform for growth. Execution was going to be key to success. John and his associates designed the planning process to engage all of our top leaders in cross-functional teams which accelerated a shared understanding of the strategic choices thus positioning all leaders to quickly move to implementation. In fact, the benefit of this process is still working well for us three years later. With a keen understanding of our challenges, John was able to devise a solution that our leadership teams have extracted lasting value from.
President & CEO
National Professional Services Firm
Executive Team Mastery Testimonials
In order to meet the opportunity for growth required us to take a more collective leadership approach, mindset and change in behavior we needed an experienced and trusted advisor to help us. .John and his associate used a data-driven approach, including team psychometrics and interviews, to analyze the current readiness of the team members to take this next step and also gather their ideas for the value added role of the executive team. They used this to design and facilitate a two-day retreat for this cautious group, helping to drive collective accountabilities, team goals and operating principles. Through this process, they were able to significantly deepen the candor amongst the executive team and develop outcomes which are truly owned and committed to by all.
President & CEO
National Professional Services Firm
Meeting Design and Facilitation Testimonials
Over the years John and his associates have developed and facilitated innovative meeting designs connected to a variety of different initiatives including senior leadership forums, planning and educational workshops, and company conferences. He has taken the time to ‘get’ our business and understands what we need, then goes beyond our original ask to produce amazing results. He genuinely cares about us, and helping us move forward. He is a willing, accessible partner. In every instance, he’s exceeded our expectations and won the respect of participants through his engaging and personable style.
CHRO Executive
Large Energy Utility
Testimonial
He is extremely responsive, and takes time to understand issues before he develops solutions. In every case, he has masterfully garnered the respect of our senior executives and leadership throughout the company.
John’s exceptional ability to form strong bonds with his clients is based on his capacity to evoke trust quickly. He does this by understanding and empathizing with a client’s issues and needs, then partnering to chart a way forward that is both practical and innovative.
Through his innovative support, experience and disarmingly personable style, he fit right in with the team. And for me, he was a critical sounding board I turned to in helping me think through our people strategy and HR organization.
I have known and worked with John as a professional colleague for many years, and he is a truly unique kind of consultant who invokes his personal style into his professional work. John’s exceptional ability to form strong bonds with his clients is based on his capacity to evoke trust quickly. He does this by understanding and empathizing with a client’s issues and needs, then partnering to chart a way forward that is both practical and innovative. Moreover, he stays the course with clients as they make it happen. His ethics, strong principles, good humor and willingness to confront challenging situations make for an enriching and fun journey for those lucky enough to work with him.