Kerri Kearney is a senior consultant for Executive Development Associates and a faculty member and researcher/author in leadership and organizations. She has 20 years of experience working across a wide variety of organizational types and industries including for-profit, nonprofit, government and education.
Working with Bonnie Hagemann, CEO of Executive Development Associates, she served as Vice President and was a partner in building a successful boutique organizational consulting firm in 2001 – a firm that, under Hagemann’s leadership, later purchased the current Executive Development Associates. After becoming a research faculty member at Oklahoma State University in 2004, Kearney continued in a senior consulting role for EDA.
Using her strong background in assessment, management and leadership experience, and broad consulting expertise, Kearney specializes in executive and management coaching, change leadership, and identifying and developing leadership and management talent. She is of an entrepreneurial mindset and excels at building teams and bringing new concepts to fruition. With the additional punch of her organizational research training, she is adept at organizational analysis and problem solving with respect to the people aspects of complex organizational environments.
Choosing to work at the intersection of organizational research and practice, Kearney’s academic research is integrated with, and often stems from, her consulting work in external organizations. She is published in the field of organizational change and human transition – with a primary focus on the role and management of human emotion, a significant component of all successful leadership – and in various areas of qualitative research methodologies. She also strongly focuses on values-driven leadership – the role that leader-held values play in follower commitment. Emerging from this work is the way particular forms of leadership, for example, narcissistic leadership, are linked through the values that these types of individuals hold (or, more likely, do not hold); initial components of this work were recently published in the International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching (Kearney, 2010). In the university environment, Kearney teaches and advises at the graduate levels of leadership and organizational study and works almost exclusively with doctoral students who are professionals in education, government and related areas of economic development.
In addition to a research faculty role at OSU and organizational consulting with EDA, Kearney serves as an adjunct professor in organizational behavior and management for an Oklahoma City-based M.B.A. program. Prior to her current activities, she served as a senior management trainer in the “boom years” of WorldCom, including serving as lead for the people integration training efforts during the acquisition of MCI and establishing a corporate training presence in a critical post-acquisition environment in Chicago. Kearney served as a senior advisor to mid-, senior-, and executive-level corporate clients in career transition due to corporate acquisitions and downsizing and, early in her career, she created, staffed, and lead a successful assessment and consulting center within a technology education environment. She has been a Director of Marketing and Personnel and held numerous supervisory and management positions.
Kearney holds a Doctorate in educational leadership/administration with a minor of educational psychology, an M.B.A. with a management specialization and a Bachelor of Science in business education. In addition, she holds certifications and qualifications in the following: