From TLP

Declan Fitzsimons

Centre for Executive Learning at Cranfield Business School

Declan Fitzsimons is an academic leadership development practitioner and organizational consultant based in London. He is a doctoral candidate based at the Centre for Executive Learning at Cranfield Business School, where he is carrying out research on distributed leadership. He also works as an adjunct faculty member for Leadership Development Programmes at IMD International in Lausanne, Switzerland and at the Copenhagen Business school, Denmark. He is also. the International Consulting Director for Spring Valley, an Organisation Development Consultancy and Training company in Riga, Latvia

In 1994, he was invited to provide Management Development Training in Latvia, in the Telecommunications sector. He has worked extensively on several telecommunications Joint Ventures in Eastern Europe, Russia and Kazakstan. Most of his work involves the design and implementation of Organizational Development (OD) initiatives using project based Leadership Development initiatives designed in support of corporate strategy. These programmes take place within complex stakeholder environments involving the state, corporate foreign investors, international regulatory institutes, as well as the rapidly changing social and economic conditions in the post-Soviet era. His current clients are from a wide range of sectors including paper, energy, pharmaceuticals, FMCG companies, banks and precision engineering.

After graduating in Economics from Birmingham University and then taking a Diploma in Education, he worked in Japan for three years before returning to the UK to study Gestalt Psychotherapy at the London Gestalt Centre. This was followed by a Masters course in Management Development at Lancaster University (UK). In 2002, he completed a Diploma and later a Masters in Advanced Organisational Consulting at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London and City University. He is also a member of the International Transactional Analysis Association (ITAA), OPUS and the AKRI institute for the study of social systems, in the United States. He is a qualified practitioner of MBTI and Firo-B personality assessment instruments. He speaks Latvian and Japanese.

His OD work focuses on three interconnected points of entry – firstly the task that managers are individually and collectively to achieve (Project Management, Key Account Management, sales growth, business development), secondly the individual manager’s experience of trying to implement the company strategy (coaching and individual effectiveness and role clarification appraisal systems and competency models) and thirdly understanding groups (leadership, team and organizational dynamics, organizational learning, decision making and authority structures). The starting point for any work is always decided collaboratively with clients following an initial process of joint diagnosis. The approach emphasizes the design of interventions specifically for the client and the current situation and eschews the use of ‘off the shelf’ packages.