John Pickering - President
John Pickering is currently President of the Commonwealth Center for High-Performance Organizations, Inc., a management consulting firm located in Charlottesville, Virginia, which he founded in 1989 to provide services to federal, state, and local governments, non-profit organizations, and the private sector. Since the original Center was founded, a number of other Centers for High-Performance Organizations have been established and have joined together to form a network called the Commonwealth Centers for High-Performance Organizations. Areas of emphasis for CCHPO are large-scale organizational change, development of high-performance executive leadership teams, building of high-performing units ("microbusinesses"), project management, executive coaching, emotional competence, values and ethics, organizational diagnosis and attitude surveys, design and delivery of executive development programs, and development and delivery of seminars for executives, including the Building High-Performance Organizations Seminar.
The seminar, and the HPO Diagnostic/Change Model associated with the seminar, have been used widely in federal, state, and local governments in the private sector. The HPO seminar is offered to federal agencies through the Federal Executive Institute's (FEI) Center for Organizational Performance (COP) and to state and local governments through the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, in its Senior Executive Institute (SEI) and its Leading, Educating, and Developing (LEAD) Programs.
Dr. Pickering is an adjunct faculty member at both FEI and the Cooper Center. Over 15,000 executives, managers, and employees in federal, state, and local government and the private sector have been exposed to the HPO seminar. Recent research is showing the CCHPO change approach to be effective in a variety of organizations. Before founding CCHPO, Dr. Pickering was Deputy Director and a Senior Faculty Member at the Federal Executive Institute (FEI) in Charlottesville, Virginia from 1982 to 1989. The Institute is the federal government's primary center for executive development. It runs intensive month-long programs for the federal government's highest-level career executives. Dr. Pickering came to the federal government in 1976, when he was awarded a fellowship by the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) to spend a year with a federal agency. He joined the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as an in-house management consultant and program evaluator in that agency's Office of Policy Development and Research. In 1978, he decided to stay with the government and was selected by the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing Programs to serve as the Program Support Officer (similar to a chief operating officer) for that organization within HUD.
Before coming to the federal government, Dr. Pickering taught at Memphis State University, Florida State University, Lamar University (Texas), and the University of Southern Mississippi, and he was Associate Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies and Research at Memphis State University. He has consulted extensively with federal, state, and local governments, non-profit organizations, and private sector companies. He is certified to administer Prosci Change Management tools, the Leadership Philosophy Questionnaire, and the Lominger Leadership Architect, as well as administer and interpret the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Dr Pickering has used this instrument with thousands of senior level executives to assess leadership style, improve teamwork, and enhance group problem-solving skills in the almost twenty years he has been administering it.
jpickering@highperformanceorg.com