My story
I am an organizational psychologist. For more than 25 years I have studied how people and organizations change, and worked with the people leading that change. I have reinvented myself on purpose many, many times, and I help others do the same.
Growing up
I grew up in a very rural place, in a school district people would call impoverished. I never felt that way. My mother and father came from very different backgrounds, one with money and one without, and I grew up with both in the same house. The side without money never wanted for anything, because they had a beautiful life. Seeing both up close, I learned early that what a person is worth has nothing to do with money. Everyone has something to offer. That is still my underlying value.
Learning
As a small child I did not speak, and some kinds of reading came to me only much later. So I sat near people who knew things and learned by listening. I had to find another way to take in the world. Scientific reading came more easily, and that helped. I still learn best by listening. Talking helps me learn, and so does teaching.
First work
I majored in American Studies because I wanted to understand how people actually live. After college I took a job in accounting, because I like math. I never got a degree in accounting. I took courses and learned it. I worked at Price Waterhouse and J.P. Morgan, in public accounting and then in banking and international tax in New York. The work ran from small-town companies to Fortune 500 companies. Some of it I did for no bigger reason than that it was hard.
Columbia
After a while I really didn’t like the work. I started taking classes, and I reached a point of asking who I was going to be. I went to Columbia for a PhD because I knew it would give me freedom to study what I wanted. I had never studied psychology, and I was surrounded by trained psychologists, so I learned as I went. I came in as an outsider and had to learn how people there talked and worked, but I never changed who I was. I earned my PhD in 2000, with distinction, and wrote my early papers with the Columbia psychologist E. Tory Higgins. While I was there I worked with PepsiCo, Citicorp and the New York Public Library, and later I helped run a master’s program at Columbia.
The tenure track
Later, I became the first woman in my college of business to have a baby while I was still on the tenure track, working toward a permanent post. It wasn’t done. You were expected to choose between an intellectual life and a baby, and I chose both. I like being in places where I’m different, and then I like to make a path for a different way. I served on the task force for maternity and paternity leave. Back then, a new baby was treated like a health problem. Now it is normal.
Ohio University
I have been at Ohio University since 2002. I am a tenured full professor of management and the founding director of the online Master of Science in Management. I teach management and leadership. I keep choosing new topics to teach. It is exhausting, but I want to be learning something new myself. Much of my teaching is helping people learn the way they need to learn.
Coaching
Alongside the university, I have coached executives and designed leadership education. I like the business world, even its insanity, and I like being a little outside it. I can sit in a room of very different people and work out what’s going on and who is allied with whom. I’m good at helping people find their strengths. I am an ICF-trained coach (International Coaching Federation) and certified in the Hogan personality assessments used in executive development.
How I work
The work comes in four parts. The first is quieting down. Slowing down in order to speed up gives the mind space. The second is the reassurance that you are already at a peak, with exercises that show you have managed hard things before. The third is taking your skill set and your values and putting them to a different use. Often it is something you have been doing all along that only needs a tweak. The fourth is trying things, with an open mind, because there are many ways to a goal and we get stuck when we only see one. You can’t really do this alone, so I do it with people, one to one and in groups.
Now
I founded Peak Reinvention, my coaching practice for accomplished people who are ready for their next climb. I like helping people reinvent themselves, and I don’t want anyone to have to work it out alone.
