Karen Ellis has been working as an organisation consultant and executive coach for the last 17 years, following an early career in traditional management consultancy at Accenture and KPMG, and has been working as an associate of Performance1 for 10 of those years. Although her work has covered the full range of organisational and individual development interventions, she now specialises in working with people, top teams and organisations that are going through some form of transition. For an individual, this could be a shift to a different level of development, the move to a new role or career or simply dealing with some turbulence in their work environment.  For top teams, transitions might involve a shift to a more collaborative leadership approach, the need to manage a crisis or handling a change of leader.  At the organisational level, the transition can be around a change to structures, leadership and roles going into a new phase of growth or it can be the strategic shift necessitated by some new industry or policy imperative, where people have to find new responses to their changed situation.

Karen's expertise covers the full range from more formal business issues (facilitation of strategy reformulation, creative innovation, restructuring etc) to the more psychological and psychodynamic aspects of workplace behaviour and relationship/group dynamics (collaborative relationships, resilience, conflict and dilemma management).  She has a particular interest in how advances in the new human sciences (neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics) can be used to help people and organisations in their development.  Karen is also involved in a variety of teaching roles – as faculty on a number of leadership development programmes and as a teacher and supervisor of other organisation consultants.

In terms of industry focus, Karen works primarily in the professional services, financial services and technology/innovation sectors.  Recent corporate clients include Fujitsu (European top leadership programmes), CareUK (top team development), Royal and Sun Alliance (Executive team coaching and strategy development), Investis (long term executive team coaching), Virgin Media (top 100 assessment) and Aviva (corporate learning).  She also works extensively in the public sector at Board level and for the various leadership bodies – mainly in Local Government and the NHS.