My email address is dennis@buildingfutureleaders.com. If you are a leader needing encouragement, challenge, support, or just a listening ear, contact me--no charge!My clients are managers and leaders who seek to improve already healthy cultures and processes and are moving their organizations in the direction of genuine excellence. I do my work online and in person in the Atlanta, Georgia area.Working with leadership teams, I coach each individual privately. We identify each person's strengths and limitations, then we build a personalized enhancement plan. I also conduct group sessions to enhance the team's awareness of critical leadership concepts. Each individual supports other leadership team members' unique strengths and growth areas.Many organizations have only an anecdotal approach to building leadership skills. While guiding leaders through an intentional step-by-step process, I train one individual to be the ongoing "owner" of the system of building future leaders. After my involvement for a year, you can use this process to develop the skills of any organization member (with no further involvement from me).My dominant talent themes (from the Gallup organization's StrengthsFinder Profile) are significant in the ways I support my clients!--maximizer--relator--learner--analytical--individualization--connectednessMy VIA Character Strengths are: --love of learning--gratitude--love--curiosity--honestyI was trained and certified as a coach in 2002 by the FranklinCovey Leadership Institute. Coaching is an unregulated profession. Anyone can claim to be a coach without taking the time or putting in the energy to gain the skills. I chose to attend a recognized school, do the work, incur the financial expense, and earn the associated accreditation so that you would have professional, competent, honorably motivated, and reliable service. Most of my clients come to me by referral from existing satisfied leaders (see their recommendations below)!

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, P&G sold the comminution pulp plant in Oglethorpe, Georgia, where I had worked for ten years, to fund the introduction of consumer products into eastern Europe, Russia, and China. I was identified as the Transition Manager to learn about and then educate our 400-person plant regarding the Weyerhaeuser culture. After several months, I started training Weyerhaeuser manufacturing site leadership teams (in the southeast and Pacific northwest) regarding leadership development opportunities and methods. I enhanced Weyerhaeuser's organizational development initiatives based on experience gained in Procter & Gamble. I taught the three-day "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" course approximately fifteen times over the six+ years in this role, and I applied the concepts to site strategic initiatives and annual plans. This was part of a larger Weyerhaeuser initiative to develop leaders more extensively, based on what Weyerhaeuser had learned about Procter & Gamble's approach to leadership development. The experience was both a superb application of my skills and experiences as well as a learning process about the political necessities of dealing with confident, competent leaders who significantly lacked interpersonal skills. (Characteristically, Weyerhaeuser plants were unionized, and the leadership teams relied on the union leaders to deal with conflicts between hourly workers and many of the conflicts between the managers and their direct reports. As a result, there was very little commitment on the part of the plant leaders or the workers to strive for excellence. By tying my work with the leadership teams with existing site strategic initiatives and annual plans, huge progress was made at each site I influenced.)

I led the site's recruiting effort for engineering graduates from leading universities. This role was typically handled by someone one hierarchical level above me. However, I had an interest and I was very experienced at finding and attracting excellent candidates seeking a career with a highly respected organization. In 1989, coincident with the publication of Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," I was trained to teach his three-day course. Over four years, I influenced over a hundred of the leading plant contributors by facilitating the course three times a year. I enhanced leadership skills among existing managers and technicians, implementing across the plant a new Manager Development initiative rolled out across all of Procter & Gamble. I was frequently invited to address opportunities for improvement in team cohesiveness, group problem-solving, and individual contributions. I provided organizational development guidance to the plant site's leadership team, including developmental feedback to the plant manager and each of his direct reports.

This was my first assignment at this, my fifth location with Procter & Gamble. I enhanced the quality of work life and productivity of many of the 400 team members at this plant. I led the transition to a work schedule for production technicians that provided more quality time off and less commute time. Working with the approximately twenty-five Team Managers across the plant, I supported and calibrated disciplinary problems with individuals who were not adequately performing. I served as the P&G representative in EEOC charges and discrimination lawsuits over a three-year period of time (the Federal District court suits were judged in P&G's favor). I collaborated with Organization Development Managers to enhance the socio-technical culture of operating a complex, capital-intensive, continuous-operation pulp mill. All of this involved extensive leadership and emotional intelligence training.

I worked in a variety of line and staff assignments at these four plants over these thirteen years. Procter & Gamble's approach to building leaders is to give them experience in production of consumer products and in staff assignments supporting line managers. In my line assignments, I was leading teams and other managers in producing shortening and edible oils, Pringles Potato Chips, Pampers and Luvs disposable diapers, and Jif Peanut Butter. In my staff assignments, I was teaching leadership skills and supporting line managers in recruiting, organization development, and related Human Resource opportunities.

As a Georgia Tech Army ROTC Distinguished Military Graduate, I was commissioned a Lieutenant in June, 1969. After six months of employment with Procter & Gamble, I began my active duty at the Air Defense Artillery school at Fort Bliss, Texas. I was assigned to Seoul, Korea to the 8th Army Chief of Staff for Communications and Electronics with responsibility for completing an upgrade of the line of sight microwave system that was installed by the United Nations during the Korean Conflict. My second and final active duty assignment was as an Officer of the 31st Air Defense Artillery Brigade, serving in the Army Air Defense Command Post on the Naval Air Station in Key West, Florida, overseeing aircraft activity emanating from Cuba. I was promoted to Captain while serving in the Army Reserve.