Too often employees don’t aspire to be leaders, to find themselves in the role of inflated responsibilities, expectations, energy and time commitments...
Author - Kathleen Ryan
Kathleen Ryan helps her clients achieve outstanding business results through the innovation which comes from collaboration and exceptional teaming. As a behind-the-scenes thought-leader, Ryan has been identified as "an organizational consultant with an instinct for translating complex human behavior into practical concepts."
Through The Orion Partnership, a consulting firm based near Seattle, Washington, she has been known for years for her work in turning fear-based organizations into ones where collaboration and trust are the keys to high performance. She is a mentor and executive coach with a wide range of consulting skills and expertise, including organization-wide change efforts, individual and organizational assessments, executive feedback and development, and senior level team development. Additionally, she provides shadow consultation to internal organization consultants. She is particularly skilled at helping individuals and groups address the difficult-to-talk-about, underlying issues that frequently block high performance.
Her third book, Extraordinary Groups: How Ordinary Teams Achieve Amazing Results, co-authored with Geoffrey Bellman was published by John Wiley in September of 2009. A companion assessment tool, The Extraordinary Team Inventory will be published by HRDQ in 2014. Her first book, Driving Fear Out of the Workplace: Creating the High-Trust, High-Performance Organization, was co-authored with Daniel K. Oestreich. Published by Jossey-Bass in 1991, it received the Society for Human Resource Management's 1992 Book Award; a second edition was published in 1998. Continuing her work with the issues of fear and trust, her second book, co-authored with Daniel Oestreich and George Orr, is entitled The Courageous Messenger: How to Successfully Speak Up at Work (Jossey-Bass, 1996).
In addition to her consulting work, Ryan is a founding member of The Community Consulting Partnership, a Seattle-based effort that helps volunteers improve their organization consulting skills while they provide service to a local non-profit organization (www.ccpseattle.org). She also serves as a strategic advisor to Organization System Renewal graduate program offered through the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.
Ryan received her BA degree (1969) from the University of California at Berkeley and her Master’s in Public Administration (1978) from the University of Southern California. In addition to her books, she has published on the topics of accountability, collaboration, organizational transformation, resistance to change, group process facilitation, sexual harassment, and peer pressure.
She has an extensive list of clients in the fields of technology, healthcare, science, local government, and philanthropy. Learn more about Kathleen at www.extraordinarygroups.com and orionpartnership.com. She can be reached at 425.429.6675 or orionkdr@live.com.
