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People

Nick Craig

Nick has a unique ability to help leaders create strong cultures of execution balanced with grace,wisdom, and compassion. Nick brings his experience applying the Distributed Leadership Model at MIT’s Sloan School and his work with colleague Andrew McLean in the area of authentic leadership development at Harvard Business School. Nick has also worked for many years with Mike Beer, Director Emeritus of Harvard Business School’s Organizational Change practice, helping top teams have honest dialogues about the underlying issues that drive competitive advantage. Based on his collaborations, Nick has developed a body of work that helps leaders access their unique state of authentic leadership.

Nick has spent over 15 years consulting on large change efforts and working with executive teams. As a senior consultant with RHS&A he was involved in the creation and roll out of the GE-Workout process across many companies. In addition he designed and rolled out one of the most benchmarked and studied action-learning program, Siemens Business Improvement Projects. As part of every management development program in Siemens these projects drove new innovation and business results across long standing organizational boundaries. Nick enjoys working with executives and coaches to access their right brain intuition and creativity, as well as their fundamental capacity to lead for results.

Amy Avergun
Senior Consultant

Amy’s expertise is in training design and development , which she has applied to programs on topics ranging from team leadership and change management to customer service and meeting management skills.  She works with a wide range of industries and has most recently applied her talents to ensure the learning effectiveness of all ALI programs.  Her passion is to combine the latest thinking in leadership best practices with the latest thinking in how people learn to develop programs in unlocking the potential of individuals.

Previous Experience
For many years, she was the Director of Product Development for Zenger Miller (now AchieveGlobal), a large international training company.  In that role she led a team of talented people who developed award-winning programs.
Before joining ALI, Amy was an independent consultant, specializing in leadership development. Her clients include KPMG, Safeway, Bright Horizons Family Solutions, Thermo Electron and BP.  She has a reputation for developing highly interactive, engaging, and entertaining learning experiences that stem from her ability to empathize with what’s truly challenging for people about their role or situation.  She is increasingly called on by clients to help them develop creative approaches to learning that provide people with the break-through insights and motivation they need to let go of old habits and try something new.

Approach
She believes that building on people’s strengths is the soundest platform for individual and organizational development and is a student of the growing body of research that continues to substantiate that approach.

Sharon L. Brownfield
Senior Consultant

Sharon focuses on helping individuals and leaders build their capacity to lead change and drive personal and organizational success.  Using a variety of approaches involving large-scale change, action learning and computer-based simulations, she has created experiences that enabled leaders and staff to develop the knowledge and skills required to accomplish business strategies and overcome challenges. 

Sharon’s consulting clients have included the WK Kellogg Foundation, Leslie College, SmithKline Beecham, and McDonald’s as well as various community groups.  She has also held senior leadership positions inside the American Red Cross, GlaxoSmithKline, and Digital Equipment Corporation. 

Sharon received her Ed.D. from Harvard University in Human Development.

Wayne Caskey
Senior Consultant

Wayne is a three-time CEO with prior C-level operations and administration experience in two separate Fortune 500s. He has been coaching and facilitating CEOs, entrepreneurs and their immediate teams for the past eight years with the mission of helping his clients increase the authenticity of their leadership.

Coaching in Organizations and Macleans, the Canadian newsweekly, and he has written a monthly column for smartCEO magazine for five years.
Wayne holds a B.A. cum laude in economics from Harvard and a law degree from Yale.

Previous Experience
His coaching has been profiled in The International Journal of It is with great delight that he joins the True North facilitator team.

Wayne’s broad business background (manufacturing, services and commercial finance) and varied business settings (venture capital-backed start-up, fast growth and liquidation) have enabled him to effectively coach and facilitate clients across twenty-five separate industries.  Individuals he has coached have included a Principal at Alliance Bernstein and C-level officers at GMAC Home Services, Sylvan Learning Centers, Titan Steel, Rollepaal USA, and North American, African and Middle Eastern subsidiaries of AP Moller-Maersk. 

Jocelyn S. Davis
Senior Consultant

Jocelyn grew up professionally as a financial executive having practiced as a certified public accountant and then as a chief financial officer for AARP.  She has completed successful turn-arounds, built organizations for growth, developed high performance teams in a variety of organizations and provided leadership for financial management and accounting, financial operations, call center operations, and treasury operations.  Jocelyn’s consulting focus is on bringing empirical research on how we best perform to the workplace through the development of authentic leadership and positive workplaces.

Previous Experience
In addition to her ongoing work as a consultant, Jocelyn has served on several boards of directors:  the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations Fund (GAVI Fund) as Audit Committee Chair, Executive Committee Chair; American Psychological Association Audit Committee and Investment Committee as an independent, subject matter expert; and, Allmerica Investment Trust (a registered mutual fund company) as a member of the Audit Committee and Fund Operations Committee.  She currently serves as an independent member of the UNICEF Audit Committee.

Approach.
Jocelyn believes that each of us brings our unique strengths and capabilities to our personal and professional lives as individuals and as members of various groups, Jocelyn helps leaders and managers invest the time to know themselves: their strengths and their lesser strengths, their interests and their passions. She believes that cultivating, inspiring, and deploying the unique capabilities of each individual is the key to organizational success.

Karen Kathryn Keefe
Senior Consultant

Karen Kathryn Keefe has over 25 years of experience, commitment and passion in helping leaders achieve their full potential.  She has consulted in the areas of Leadership and Organizational Development and has extensive experience in diagnosis, design, and implementation of key talent management initiatives that improve business performance.

Karen is certified in the delivery of a wide range of coaching, career and leadership assessment tools including the DISC, MBTI, ECI, which measures emotional intelligence. Karen holds a PhD in psychology and an MA in Human Resource Development.

Previous Experience
Karen served in a variety of leadership roles at EMC in their corporate university and in their manufacturing operations and at Digital Equipment Corporation. For EMC, she created and led mentoring programs, formal development process, talent reviews.  During this time, she also served as an internal coach to 175 of the company’s leaders across various functions.  As a senior organization development consultant both at EMC and Digital, she specialized in translating HR best practices into useable tools for workforce development and effective collaboration to accomplish the business goals.

Hank Kinzie
Senior Consultant

Hank assists individuals and groups to build their own capacities for authentic leadership. Over the last 20 years, Hank has served in a variety of roles including an attorney, litigator, mediator, teacher and trainer. In his law career, he dedicated his expertise to client advocacy, which was illustrated when he represented a major trade association.  During that time, he worked with diverse interest groups focusing on collaboration to achieve common ground.

Previous Experience
He has been a longtime national leader of intensive trainings that help men discover and express clarity of purpose in their lives and in their work, and in the balance become better husbands, fathers and friends. He currently runs his own conflict resolution firm specializing in mediation and reconciliation for couples and organizations. 

Approach
He believes that leaders are made, not born, and assuming the mantle of leadership carries not only responsibility but has the rich potential for significant impact on the individual, the organization they work in, and the world. 

Grady McGonagill
Senior Consultant

In 25 years of consulting Grady has supported organizations throughout the world increase their capacity for authentic leadership, learning and change. He has distinctive expertise in leadership development through workshops on authentic conversations and coaching.  He has applied that expertise at McKinsey & Company, Siemens, A.G. and other organization through a number of executive education programs.

Grady has a master’s degree from Stanford University and a doctorate from Harvard. He is a contributor to the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, edited by Peter Senge et al. (New York: Doubleday, 1994) and the author of a chapter in Executive Coaching, edited by C. Fitzgerald and J. Berger (San Francisco: Davies Black Publishing, 2002).

Previous Experience
For ten years Grady was a key adviser to McKinsey & Company in the development of a culture of learning and coaching. To strengthen on-the-job learning, he helped the Firm institute new team leadership practices that have been adopted worldwide. In addition, he designed a high-impact coaching workshop that has become part of the Firm’s required curriculum and has trained a worldwide network of facilitators to deliver it. He has also supported Siemens, A.G. in a variety of initiatives aimed at developing leadership and fostering change.  From 1996-2000 Grady was the lead faculty member for a year-long Change Agent Program at Siemens A.G. that provided emerging leaders with opportunities to take on challenging projects while supported by a comprehensive curriculum of multi-disciplinary learning and coaching.

Grady’s  workshops on leadership, coaching, conflict management and influence skills have been offered through a number of executive programs, including Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management.  His two-day workshop “Assessing and Refining Your Leadership Style” is offered publicly through the Center for Management Research.

Andrew McLean

Andrew has been at the heart of research and teaching in the origins and impact of authentic leadership. Andrew brings his research at Harvard Business School and UCLA to colleague Nick Craig’s work in building strong cultures of execution. Andrew helped create the Authentic Leadership Development course at Harvard Business School with Bill George, Professor of Management Practice and Fellow. His work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review.

He has spent many years conducting onsite business research, bringing his training as a sociologist and anthropologist to the portraiture of organizations and leaders – where they have been and where they could be going. Based on his collaborations, research and consulting, he has developed a body of work that illuminates the value of authentic leadership and the paths that leaders take to reach it.

Lionel R. Shockness  M.S.W. Acc
Senior Consultant

Lionel has worked with senior leaders and teams from diverse industries including finance, education, and entertainment for over 15 years. His areas of coaching expertise include emotional intelligence, conflict management, team building, work/life integration, career planning and leadership development. He is certified in the delivery of a wide variety of coaching, career and leadership assessment tools and uses his knowledge of internal, interpersonal, and group dynamics, to assist organizations in achieving optimal performance by increasing the emotional intelligence of the organizations leaders and managers.

He then used his knowledge of internal, interpersonal, and group dynamics, to assist companies such as Hewlett Packard, JP Morgan Chase, Disney, Accenture, American Express, Moody’s, Essence, and Sony in achieving optimal performance by increasing the emotional intelligence of

Previous Experience
For fifteen years Lionel worked as a clinician and group psychotherapist. 

Lionel is founder and Principal of Shockness Consulting, a coaching service dedicated to helping people have more purposeful professional and personal lives. He holds a Masters in Clinical Social Work from Yeshiva University and a BA in Psychology from the State University of New York.  Lionel also holds an ACC credential from the ICF, certificates in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy from the Greenwich Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, and The Institute for the Study of Culture and Ethnicity. 

Approach

His style of coaching is based on the concepts of Appreciative Inquiry and the assertion that what we focus on becomes our reality; the language we use creates our reality.  His coaching approach has been described as solution focused, goal oriented, intuitive, honest and compassionate.  He strongly believes that through coaching, individuals attain a new level of consciousness.  They become inspired and motivated to make a behavioral change that transforms them and the people around them. The results are increased personal satisfaction and enhanced overall performance in work and life.

Susan L. Skjei
Senior Consultant

Susan Skjei (“shay”) has been consulting with leaders and executive teams of businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies for over 20 years.  She provides facilitation, training and coaching in the areas of leadership, strategic planning, organizational culture, and change management.  Susan has worked closely with CEOs, executives and managers to help them articulate personal and professional goals and to implement these goals effectively within their own organizations. She is the founder and director of the Authentic Leadership Certificate program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and is a founding member of the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Previous Experience

She has designed and led large-scale change initiatives for such diverse client groups as Hewlett-Packard, Phipps Construction, Rocky Mountain HMO, The Colorado Air National Guard, StorageTek and the Mental Health Center of Boulder County.  These initiatives have included the development of core values and purpose, leadership competencies and succession planning, strategic planning, process reengineering and improvement, goal alignment and organization design.  Susan is a Certified Organization Development Consultant (CODC) with Associated Consultants International.

In her last corporate position, Susan was Vice-President and Chief Learning Officer for StorageTek, a $2.4B provider of electronic storage solutions.  She was responsible for developing the learning and change management strategy for the corporation and implementing it across 40 countries and 8,500 employees worldwide.  She also implemented a virtual corporate university to provide education and training to employees, customers and partners of StorageTek throughout the world.  She has also served on the boards of several non-profit organizations.

She specializes in working with high-performance female executives.  Susan is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation.
Susan has a Master of Science degree from American University in Human Resource Development and is completing her Ph.D. at Fielding Graduate University.  In addition to consulting and coaching, she has designed and taught classes, workshops and conferences at Naropa University in leadership, strategic planning and organization development.