Debra L. Howard
Debra Howard has helped hundreds of leaders and their organizations learn and grow so that they can deliver dramatic results and solve their most perplexing problems.
She coaches executives and their teams, trains talented managers, and redesigns complex companies and nonprofits that are struggling to grow or are suffering from growing too quickly.
With her "Hermione's handbag" of models, assessments, exercises, trainings, and workshops, she helps leaders work more effectively with the cast of characters in their professional life, and achieve results that truly matter.
Deb founded her consulting firm in 1991. She’s been coaching leaders since well before executive coaching became the gold standard for leadership development.
She helps four types of leaders reach peak performance: 1) rising stars who have ambitious goals and are seeking the skills, systems, and support to achieve them; 2) superstars who are derailing because they're so hard-charging that they're having an unintentionally negative impact on others; 3) seasoned, successful executives who are feeling uninspired, unhealthy, or unfulfilled; and 4) newly hired or promoted executives and CEOs who want to accelerate their onboarding to quickly succeed in their new role. The centerpiece of her approach is confidential, interview-based, 360-degree feedback that is candid, detailed, and actionable.
Deb understands what makes teams tick, and offers leadership team coaching, team-building workshops, and retreat design and facilitation to help teams and their leaders improve communication, increase trust, hit the reset button on unproductive patterns of behavior, and positively shift the aspects of their organizational culture that are holding them back.
Businesses, nonprofits, and foundations hire Deb to help them reorganize so they can remove bottlenecks, clarify management roles and responsibilities, and build the systems to support growth. She specializes in moving the right leaders into the right roles, without losing the senior contributors who didn’t turn out to be good managers, but who are talented and critically important members of the team.
After more than 20 years of working with leaders, and seeing how most had received little to no effective training or mentoring earlier in their careers, she designed a year-long Management Training Institute to give aspiring, new, and mid-career managers high-quality training and support to accelerate their development as the leaders of tomorrow. She delivered the first few in person, but since the pandemic, is finding that a mix of in-person and virtual works even better. The Institute was so successful, she spun off a similar 12-month program geared to matrix managers.
Deb is certified in the Myers-Briggs Step I and Step II, and has had advanced training in the FIRO-B personality preference instrument. She has also received extensive training in Bowen Family Systems Theory, and Waterline Action Learning peer coaching facilitation.
She is an expert in competency analysis and behavioral interviewing, and uses these to teach leaders how to make significantly better hiring decisions.
Over the course of her career, Deb has delivered hundreds of presentations at annual conferences; regional association meetings; and company, nonprofit, and foundation annual meetings and retreats. In addition to being an expert on leadership, Deb is a skilled facilitator who engages people to increase their insight, learning, and interaction with one another. In person, she has a contagious energy and ability to connect with her audience. When it's preferable (or necessary) for her to present virtually, she is adept at using a range of videoconferencing and online tools to maintain interest and increase participation.
For more than 25 years, Deb has worked with CEOs, owners, partners, and their teams from a range of organizations and sectors, including Breakthrough Energy, Cooley Dickinson Health Care, Creighton Manning Engineering, Crown Family Philanthropies, Davidson College, Jim Joseph Foundation, Johns Hopkins Department of Biostatistics, Kew Gardens, Natural Resources Defence Council, NRG Systems, Stanford University School of Medicine, Tetra Tech ARD, Universeum, and World Resources Institute.
Deb is one of a handful of executive coaches selected for the Leading Edge CEO Onboarding Program, an intensive and competitive leadership development program supporting new CEOs.
Deb was also one of seven coaches selected for the Noyce Leadership Institute (NLI) in California, a prestigious leadership development program for science and technology executives from around the world. During the seven-year program, she coached 18 NLI fellows from organizations such as the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Boston Children’s Museum, the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia, and the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem.
Before starting her own business, Deb was a consultant with Cambria Consulting in Boston, a human resource consulting firm that conducted job competency assessments and training for Fortune 500 and government clients. Before that, she was the director of program development for Training Concepts in Braintree, Massachusetts, where she designed stand-alone programs for telecommunications and high-technology companies, such as AT&T, SNET, and Polaroid.
She graduated from Brown University with a BA in semiotics and is currently writing a book with the working title How to Be the Boss Everyone Wants to Work For. When she's not working or writing, Deb enjoys landscape photography, skiing, and hiking. In between business trips, she can be found in her home office in Burlington, Vermont, or the Eastern Townships of Quebec.
