Ellen L Moran, PhD, PCC, President

Overview

Ellen Moran is a leadership consultant, executive coach, trainer and speaker who makes her home in St. Louis, Missouri.

From early college years she was intrigued by the way people expressed themselves in different languages and the psychology of differences. Right after college these came together in a summer assistantship in the Psychology Department at the University of Munich.

In her early years of practice, she worked for the juvenile and adult courts conducting psychological evaluations. In several instances, she served as an expert witness in capital murder cases.  In private practice, other practitioners asked for her help in the diagnosis and treatment recommendations for patients with confusing symptom patterns.  She also was a therapist for adults.

Through a casual conversation on a grade school soccer field, Ellen’s career took an unexpected turn. Another parent described his helpful experience with psychologists in his outplacement firm, who gave assessments to find a new career.  A month after asking, “What’s outplacement”, she began working as an adjunct assessor for a global outplacement firm—Drake Beam Morin.

Working with displaced leaders she learned:

• Some had been working in roles that they could do, but never really enjoyed. Without having to leave, they never would have taken to opportunity to find out what they really wanted to do.
• Once they got clear on their personal assets and the type of company culture that would support them, they almost invariably found a better position.
• Some of the leaders who came had wonderful skills and attitudes, but they had some destructive thinking habits that got in their way of succeeding—tragically they would kneecap themselves in ways that subtracted value they could contribute. Sometimes coaching could equip them with new ways of thinking and behaving that put them on the path to success.
• Some of them lacked the communication skills that were important to succeeding with the variety of people they needed to motivate and influence if they wanted to advance.
• Most companies lacked processes for really understanding all the value an employee could bring to their enterprise, and how to set up the culture to nurture that value.  Even companies who do selection assessment, often don’t use it for onboarding development to accelerate the performance of new hires.

After six months in outplacement, she realized that she had a passion and a knack for helping companies discover and leverage the assets of their employees to generate greater value individually and in teams.

These discoveries led her to an organizational development firm. There she learned the tools of the trade to: select and retain the right talent; develop leadership capabilities; set up succession planning processes; and coach employees to prepare for their next positions. She finally had the opportunity to use her German language capability to work on a cross-cultural coaching process with a partner firm in Europe.  It was fascinating to navigate the different perspectives on how best to engage and coach the executives.

After nearly a decade with her firm, Ellen left to start her own firm, Leadership Dialogues. Through networking she secured her first big engagement with a global coaching firm, rolling out the German language version of their leadership development program in Switzerland.  She had several projects with German colleagues and is currently affiliated with a consulting firm in Hamburg.

As a curious and lifelong learner, Ellen holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and has learned, become certified, and successfully employed a wide number of assessment tools and coaching methods to better fit the needs of different client challenges she encountered.  In her coaching and facilitation, she sometimes uses hands-on tools such as photo images and LEGO bricks to surface the below-conscious wisdom and creativity of individuals and their teams.

Her current interests and projects involve:  due diligence assessments for VCs and organizations; career fit and leadership succession programs; and specific training and facilitation of leadership teams with tools and skills to drive an innovation culture.