The Development Center
Who We Are
Frances Unsell, M.Div., LP
Leadership and Organizational Consultant
Frances Unsell has consulted for thirty years with senior and emerging leaders, teams, and organizations to address the root causes of organizational dilemmas and to take creative practical steps to affect lasting change. By working with her leaders gain clarity about their organization's context and culture, learn to manage themselves in extremely demanding environments, expand their leadership capacities, and claim and use their power, authority, and influence. She has a natural ability for helping leaders understand their jobs and to create and execute roles. Ms. Unsell brings a flexible approach to strategy formation, leading organizational and cultural change, and coaching for adaptive leadership.
Her clients can be characterized as cutting edge, resource rich, thoughtful, effective senior leaders of complex organizations. They are often thought leaders and public intellectuals who are visible in the public square.
Ms. Unsell also consults with experienced coaches and consultants who wish to hone their skills, deepen and broaden their approach or are in the midst of complex, often delicate engagements.
Throughout her career she has conducted scores of organizational consultations and designs for professional development. Representative achievements include the design and delivery of a change leadership clinic, including coaching for senior leaders of a large health care system; advising on the merger of two cross racial, ten-state organizations into a unified entity; consulting to a large national nonprofit on leadership strategy and implementation; and the design of executive coaching programs, one for the top sixty partners of a "Big Four" accounting firm, and planning and leading week-long organizational role conferences for senior leaders.
Ms. Unsell also works with leaders to build and lead highly effective teams which include persons from various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. To this work she brings an understanding of how society, people, groups, and organizations interact with and influence one another.
The New York Times and Voice of America have interviewed Ms. Unsell as an expert on women and work. She has directed a career program at Barnard College, Columbia University, taught leadership theory and practice at the university and postgraduate levels, designed experiential learning programs for second career graduate students and supervised them.
Frances is a member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations and the New York affiliate of AKRice. She is a graduate of Union Theological Seminary (Rockefeller Fellow, Concentration: Psychiatry and Religion), The Westchester Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis (Existential Psychoanalysis) and has trained with The Tavistock Institute, the Grubb Institute and AKRice (Organizational Systems and Behavior, Group Relations including the Tavistock Institute's Advanced Praxis Training for experienced change agents).
Frances Unsell, Founder and President of The Development Center, works in the U.S. and Internationally.
You can reach Ms. Unsell at 203.655.9419.
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