KAPLAN DEVRIES - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Consultant and Adjunct Research Scientist
Bart Craig, Consultant and adjunct research scientist, focuses on the development of theory, methods and tools for improving leaders' effectiveness. Before joining Kaplan DeVries in 2000, Bart was a research intern at the Center for Creative Leadership. He is currently also an associate professor of industrial and organizational psychology at North Carolina State University where he teaches doctoral courses in leadership, training and counterproductive work behavior.
Bart's research has been published in scholarly journals and books, and presented at national conferences, and he is coauthor of the Perceived Leader Integrity Scale. Bart received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial and organizational psychology from Virginia Tech.
Job Titles:
- Clinical Social Worker
- Partner
Connie McArthur, Partner, entered consulting after fifteen years as a human resources executive in a Fortune 50 corporation. Her areas of consulting expertise include executive development and selection, succession planning, HR strategy development, and team development.
Connie is a licensed clinical social worker who has an M.B.A. and a certificate in international business from the University of Colorado. She has been with Kaplan DeVries since its inception.
Darren Overfield, Senior Consultant, is an executive coach and leadership development consultant with a passion for increasing the effectiveness of individual leaders, their teams and their organizations.
Darren began his corporate career with the General Electric Company (GE). He worked as a Six Sigma Black Belt and held leadership positions in information technology, e-business, and marketing within GE Capital. In addition, Darren was Director of Leadership Development at Discovery Learning and is an adjunct staff member at the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL). He holds a master's degree in clinical psychology from the University of Virginia and a master's degree in business management from North Carolina State University.
He is an avid distance runner, having completed two marathons and competed in a 200-mile relay race from Mount Hood to Seaside, Oregon. Darren lives in Greensboro, NC with his wife, Carrie and their daughters, Leslie and Emma.
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David DeVries, Partner, has devoted his forty-year career to helping leaders become more effective, especially by providing them with useful feedback that serves as a powerful stimulus to ongoing learning.
He joined Kaplan DeVries in 1993. From 1975 to 1990, he served in various management roles at the Center for Creative Leadership; today he remains a Senior Fellow at the Center.
He has published widely on selected topics in the psychological and management literatures. His Ph.D. is in Social Psychology from the University of Illinois. He taught at Johns Hopkins University, where he conducted research on self-managing teams.
Denise Lyons, Partner, focuses on leadership development, team performance, organizational diagnosis and diversity. She consults to individual executives and to executive teams. She also engages in building key organizational relationships, such as CEO-COO pairs.
With a doctorate in organizational psychology and a master's degree in counseling psychology, Denise brings a deep understanding of organizational systems to her work with individual executives. Her research on executive development won a national award from the American Psychological Association and was published in the Journal of Consulting Psychology. Her current research interest is the role of gender in executive development.
Karen Aznoian, Senior Consultant, is an executive coach and leadership consultant who specializes in the integral development of leaders. Integral development is grounded in the theory and practice that sustainable change requires development across multiple domains of intelligence, including cognitive, emotional and body based intuitive development.
Mary Nelson, Senior Consultant, focuses on helping senior executives and their teams to become more effective in their leadership. Mary has experience coaching C-level executives at large corporations as well as working with entrepreneurial teams navigating change. She has over twenty years of business experience including her work as a marketing director in the US and abroad for a major consumer packaged goods company.
She has also owned and operated a small business and has served as a board member for entrepreneurial firms. A coach and adjunct staff member at Loyola Family Business Center and a certified Hogan coach, Mary has an MBA from the University of Chicago as well as a Masters in Counseling Psychology from Northwestern University and is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor.
Mary's commitment to this work comes from a belief that good leadership makes a positive difference in people's lives and in bottom-line business results. She speaks passionately of the role of leadership development and the need to foster a diverse work environment and has delivered workshops and training presentations to The Conference Board, The Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology and numerous corporate audiences.
Job Titles:
- Cofounder and Author of the Bestselling FYI
Rob Kaiser, Partner, is an advisor, author and expert on the subject of leadership. He began his career at the Center for Creative Leadership. He joined Kaplan DeVries in 1997 to establish its applied research function, and later expanded his role into executive development and talent management advisement. In 2012 he formed Kaiser Leadership Solutions to develop and distribute assessment tools that set a new standard for innovation and impact.
Rob developed the patented Leadership Versatility Index with Bob Kaplan. He is a prolific writer whose work on leadership, executive selection and development, and assessment has been widely published. His books include Filling the Leadership Pipeline, The Perils of Accentuating the Positive, and with Bob Kaplan, The Versatile Leader and Fear Your Strengths: What You Are Best At Could Be Your Biggest Problem.
Rob is also a highly regarded public speaker who is often asked to deliver his unique, engaging and provocative presentations to professional audiences around the world. He has an M.S. in Organizational Psychology from Illinois State University.
Bob Kaplan's consuming interest in leadership has taken him down three related paths. He has consistently done research and writing that have resulted in four co-authored books and numerous articles in publications such as Harvard Business Review and Sloan Management Review.
He has consistently designed best-in-class tools and services that were ahead of their time. He has consistently taken a research-driven and deep approach to helping top management teams, individually and collectively, grapple with their internal and external challenges. He has been fortunate all along to work with excellent colleagues.
An honorary senior fellow at the Center for Creative Leadership, he received a B.A. in English and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Yale University. He lives in New York City with his wife Rebecca.
Sarah C. Albritton, Senior Consultant, has spent 25 years blending business knowledge with psychological expertise as an executive coach and consultant to senior leaders and teams around the globe. She has a reputation for delivering honest, targeted appraisals that challenge and inspire progressive transformations.
She is the co-author of I'm Not Crazy, I'm Just Not You!, an international top seller on psychological type. In addition to many certifications, Sarah is a Certified Daring Way™ and Rising Strong™ Facilitator. Both are highly experiential personal growth methodologies based on the research of Dr. Brené Brown. She holds degrees in Economics (B.A. Wake Forest University) and Educational Leadership (M.S. Florida State University).
Sarah and her husband Andy, and a seasonal assortment of their five children and four grandchildren, live and love near Winston-Salem, NC. All enjoy performing music and traveling to many places around the globe.