About Dr. Donna Montgomery
Hi, I'm Dr. Donna Montgomery. I am an Organizational Psychologist, which despite the name, does not imply anything about my ability to help you clean out your closet (nor to get to the bottom of why you still haven’t).
What it does mean is that I am a psychologist that focuses on systems, from those within an individual to entire companies. In fact, I am an expert when it comes to all things individual, and how people relate to their worlds. (I am also an expert when it comes to all things corporate culture, & designing leadership development programs, but we can talk about that later).
Experience
My practice as an internal consultant has spanned organizations such as Charles Schwab, Ernst & Young, Kaiser Permanente, & Pacific Gas & Electric, collaborating with leaders to design and implement programs and build new teams, often the first of their kind.
I have now had my own practice as an external consultant and coach for over 20 years, working with hundreds of senior leaders in companies such as Genentech, Google, California Life Sciences, Calpine, John Deere, BioMarin, Granite Construction, Mars, Chanel, Dell, Pfizer, Global Foundries, Cisco, and many more.
I have worked with start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, and at every level including the C-Suite, purposely working across industries throughout my career. I have private clients from all walks of life as well.
Current Practice
I am the person who can help you identify and change the patterns that create the obstacles to the life you want, both personally and professionally. I am the person you can trust to confide in about your thorniest problems, when you don’t know who you can trust at work. I am the person who can help if you are miserable yet can’t leave your job, to get back some sanity and finally learn to deal with the difficult people at work. I am the person who can help you create a more balanced life, helping to ease the demands of “doing it all.”
I am the person who can help you un-stick yourself, and make rapid progress in creating a fulfilling life.
Because of my training, I am able to easily move between traditional coaching, consulting, and my more recent certification in Immersive Coaching. All of my work now is informed by addressing the physiological aspects of change as well as the psychological, and this has produced even more more value and a faster rate of change for my clients.
At this point in my career, I limit my practice to only those who are truly at a point of “must” change to achieve their goals and dreams. They realize that working on themselves is the key, and they want to see change fast (within weeks, not months or years). They do not need therapy - a look to the past to resolve trauma - but do need help in moving forward in new ways. They realize the value in having a guide they can trust completely, and they are open and ready to learn ways to change they can apply for the rest of their lives.
Education
My education trained me as a “scholar-practitioner,” which left me with the best of both worlds: research informs my practice, and vice versa. I learned about consulting on the “sticky” issues of business - the people - and chose executive coaching for my internship specialty. My dissertation research was conducted at Hoechst-Celanese, where I studied formal mentoring programs and how to design them for optimal results.
I was also part of designing our doctoral curriculum, a skill which served me well in teaching over a thousand students in programs at Presidio Graduate School, UC Davis, California College for the Arts, University of San Francisco, and CSPP.
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