The Development Center
Who We Are - Affiliates
Frances Unsell, MDiv
Leadership and Organizational Consultant
Frances Unsell has twenty-five years of experience consulting with individuals and organizations on leadership, systems, and role. Leaders who work with her address the root causes of difficult dilemmas and take creative, practical steps for lasting change. With religious organizations, she specializes in coaching senior leaders and high potentials, consulting to denominational bodies and thriving churches, and in strategy, cultural and organizational change. She has worked with leaders in the United Church of Christ, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, United Methodist, Lutheran, and Anglican traditions in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
For twelve years, Ms. Unsell has led intensive organizational role consultation groups for clergy. These encompass the person, role, system, and context within God’s activity. She also served as primary staff to The Grubb Institute’s “Transforming Clergy Roles” conference in the UK. Ms. Unsell created and led a fifty-hour Advanced Pastoral Care Consultation that qualified participants for certification by the American Association of Pastoral Counselors. In addition, she has led continuing education for Princeton and Auburn Theological Seminaries, taught leadership at the university level, and led working groups on values in the workplace for The Grubb Institute.
Ms. Unsell directed a career program at Barnard College and, for eight years, supervised second-career female seminarians in organizational and group processes. As an NGO representative to the United Nations, she kept a 2.5-million-member denomination abreast of international women’s issues. The New York Times and Voice of America have interviewed her as an expert on women and work.
Her church consulting has included facilitating the merger of two large organizations — one primarily black the other predominately white — spanning ten southern states into a unified educational, training, and service organization; creating a strategy for an organization to relate to 10,500 congregations; advising on the design of an AIDS ministry training for South Africans; and consulting to a national body on leadership strategy for a 300,000-member organization. Currently, Ms. Unsell consults to Auburn Coaching Institute on the design and implementation of a coaching program fo religious professionals. Her work in business includes the design for an investment bank of a program for professionals with disabilities and advising a Big Four accounting firm on creating an executive coaching program.
Leadership materials she has edited or written have been translated into Spanish, Korean, and Arabic. Representative samples of her writing and editing are a national study on successful retirement of church professionals, an inclusive language study for a denomination, a study guide on the United Nations Women’s Convention, and articles on work for Church and Society.
Frances Unsell, a Presbyterian minister, is a licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations. She is a graduate of Hendrix College, Union Theological Seminary where she was a Rockefeller Fellow, and the Westchester Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She has completed advanced training in organizational systems with The Tavistock Institute, AK Rice, and The Grubb Institute. She is Founder and Director of The Development Center in Darien, Connecticut.
You can reach Ms. Unsell by telephone only at 203.655.9419.
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