Team

Our consulting team is experienced and our work is grounded in driving tangible business results. Clients praise us for our flexibility, professionalism, attention to detail and down to earth, collaborative style.  On average, our consultants have more than fifteen years of operating, executive management and consulting experience each.  We have a core team of 15 people and over 50 other professionals who are part of our extended team.

Please read below to learn more about some of our team members.

Sara Roberts

Sara Roberts

Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Since she can recall, Sara has loved a good challenge (running marathons, public speaking, opera music performance) which might explain her fascination and zeal for taking on some of the gnarliest and behemoth-like business change initiatives around.  She is known to be pragmatic, results-oriented and down-to-earth (maybe it’s her Midwestern roots).  Sara is recognized for her work in transforming business culture and building differentiated brand experiences in global 500 companies.  You will find she’s in her element when she’s interacting with people whether it’s sitting with a client one on one coaching them on a sticky situation or delivering a keynote speech to 1,000 people.

Prior to founding Roberts Golden, Sara held senior consulting positions within companies including Sprint, Andersen Consulting and Ketchum. A few years back, she co-authored the best-selling book, "Light Their Fire: Using lnternal Marketing to Ignite Employee Performance and Wow Your Customers" and is a frequent keynote speaker at industry leading events on the topics of culture change, employee engagement and enterprise social networking.  She was recently named to the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Advisory Board and consults and presents workshops on collaboration in the workplace.  Sara received her M.S. in Instructional Technology from the University of Nebraska and she continues her executive education at the Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania.  She is grateful to have so many clients and team members that she calls friends.

Leah Reynolds

Tyler Durham

Senior Vice President & Principal Consultant

Leah is a recognized expert on young and experienced talent and the emerging workplace, with a specialization in the culture and organizational competencies needed to support social technology adoption. She is also the mother of a blended family of five children ranging in age from 10 to 29. She likes to say that she has her own Gen Y focus group right in her own home! Leah is former national lead for Generational Talent Strategies at Deloitte Consulting LLP where she specialized in future workplace trends and issues and had a ridiculous amount of fun collaborating with the bright, young talent Deloitte attracts. Leah’s passion is helping leaders realize the bottom-line benefits of adapting the workplace to meet the needs of today’s—and tomorrow’s—workforce.

Prior to Deloitte, Leah spent many years working in the HR consulting world, gaining a deep knowledge of reward strategies and other human resource-related programs. She is a frequent speaker and writer on generational and workplace change as a challenge and opportunity for 21st century organizations. Leah is also a singer, having her undergrad degree in vocal performance, and she and Sara will be ripping up a karaoke stage sometime soon. Leah is creator of the Emerging Workplace Profile™, an assessment tool that enables organizations to identify and prioritize future-focused talent initiatives. Leah was recently named “Communicator of the Year” by the International Association of Business Communicators for her thought leadership and contributions to the profession. She holds an M.A. degree in organizational communication from Eastern Michigan University.

Julie Cullinane-Smith

Julie Cullinane-Smith

Principal Consultant

Julie brings to our team a vast array of experience from her 15+ years spent helping companies successfully transform their business. From start-ups to Fortune 50 companies, from oil refineries to nursing homes to investment banks, and from mergers and spin-offs to technology implementations, her experience working across a variety of industries and with all levels in organizations enables her to provide significant insight and value to her clients. Although she is not able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, she is masterful at managing large, complex change programs, at aligning leaders and employees with business strategy and at developing creative ways of helping companies and their employees through major transformations, from the break room to the boardroom. Prior to Roberts Golden, Julie was a Managing Consultant at Towers Perrin (now Towers Watson) and also held in-house consulting positions at California State Automobile Association, Kaiser Permanente and Pitney Bowes. She received her MBA from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Jennifer Clevidence

Principal Consultant & Wellness Practice Leader

Jenny has been compared to a mind reader for her insightfulness, Mr. Spock for her rationality, and described as having “a way” with people by her clients (they really said these things, you can’t make this stuff up). You could say that her work as a Consultant has been greatly influenced by her work as a Life Coach and Yoga Teacher. You might find Jenny working out issues for Fortune 50 organizations to local school districts while on her yoga mat, but don’t let her sweet demeanor deceive you, her ability to face tough situations and be professional, shows up in one to one sessions and in the executive boardroom. Jenny has several years of corporate experience, her last being with Lowe’s where she managed the Leadership Development & Coaching Programs, the Succession Management Program, and New Leader On-boarding. Her breadth of consulting experience includes enterprise wide system implementations, change management, and the execution of talent management strategy. Jenny holds her BBA from Ohio University, a Master’s in Org. Development from Bowling Green, and an Integral Coach Certification through New Ventures West.

Pamela Kline-Smith

Julie Cullinane-Smith

Principal Consultant

Having been a French major in college, Pam looks at learning both organizational and tech-speak as adopting another new language.  Her skills are continually being honed thanks to her two pre-teen and teenage children who infinitely teach her new forms of language as well as the need for creative approaches to motivational and communications challenges.  With a career of helping launch new products and making the complex more simple and digestible, Pam brings a creative marketing bent to each new situation. Always trying to eke out a 25th hour in each day, she thrives on multi-tasking and high energy situations.

Most recently, Pam served as the Executive Vice President of Marketing at Teleperformance, the world’s largest call center outsourcer.  Previously, she held the role of the VP of Marketing for LiveOps, a pioneer in providing virtual work, as well as for Metreo, Inc., a leading supplier of pricing software, which was acquired by Symphony Technology Group and for Arcot Systems, Inc., a provider of authentication security solutions. Pam was a Partner at Regis McKenna, Inc/The McKenna Group for ten years. While there, she led the teams responsible for defining e-business for IBM, creating the first online travel solutions for United, USAirways, British Airways and Galileo, launching several successful start-ups and taking companies such as Rightpoint and Eloquent through successful acquisitions. Prior to McKenna, she was the Vice President at Prognostics, a leading market research/consulting firm that was acquired by NFO. Pam holds a B.A. degree in French magna cum laude from Harvard and a MBA from Harvard Business School as well as having attended the University of Paris–Sorbonne.

Mimi Denman

Senior Consultant

With an attorney as her father and a landscape designer as her mother, it's no wonder that Mimi Garrity Denman is a balanced right and left brain contributor. She's an experienced marketing and employee communications professional who also has a degree in graphic design and is an accomplished illustrator. She has helped both start-ups and established businesses with their branding, advertising and communications' strategies. Multi-year assignments/positions helped build her expertise in Intranets (E*TRADE), Corporate Social Responsibility (Cisco) and Adecco where she was VP of marketing for 10 years. She received a B.A. in art education and design from George Washington University and the Cocoran Gallery of Art. She also studied design at The Newhouse School of Syracuse University (MFA program).

Lori Fraser

Senior Consultant

Lori has more than 20 years experience in internal communications and employee engagement. Lori created the internal communication function or played key communication roles for some of the world’s largest and fastest-moving high tech companies. As the head of internal communications for E*trade, Lori’s work focused heavily on “doing things differently,” employing the most innovative programs to build the still-new brand within company ranks. As Director of Employee Communications at National Semiconductor, she was tasked with building the internal communication architecture. While there, she ran focus groups with stakeholders throughout Europe and Asia to develop culturally specific communication programs. She also ran the internal communication function at Raychem, later acquired by Tyco Electronics Lori’s broad-based experience in internal corporate communication strategy and process is enhanced by her special interest and experience in employee engagement. One of her particular skills is bridging cross-national cultural gaps. Her international experience has given her an acute awareness of subtle and not-so-subtle differences between locations and the adjustments necessary to ensure effective communication of key messages. Lori’s consulting work has encompassed project management, media production and human resource communication for a diverse list of companies, including Hewlett Packard , Yahoo!, McKesson, CSAA, Sun Microsystems, and Symantec. Lori holds a B.A. in Liberal Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Chantel Mandel

Senior Consultant

Chantel is a senior communications leader passionate about helping companies leverage employee insight and talent to drive growth and performance. She's had the privilege of working with a diverse range of companies and believes that the drivers of employee engagement are common across industries. With nearly 20 years of marketing and communications experience, she understands how to leverage engagement to drive the bottom line. Chantel started her career in the hotel and contract furniture industries, leveraging her PR degree to fill rooms and sell office suites. She likes to say that she grew up at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, where her tenure fostered her development as a product manager, brand champion, communication change agent, an HR professional, and an employee evangelist. She left the Fed to lead internal communications functions in the financial services and energy sectors developing communication strategy, managing culture change, implementing corporate intranet solutions, and crafting executive communication. She loves developing individuals and teams, gathering employee input, and coaching C-suite execs on how to leverage their talent.

Maya Razon

Maya Razon

Senior Consultant

Maya is a genuine people person and a veritable talent magnet (and not just on the dance floor). With over ten years' experience in learning and development, change management, organizational development and team dynamics, she is a human resource master (not to mention a party planner to rival Martha Stewart). Maya holds a BA in Anthropology from UCLA and a Masters in Social Work from Boston University. She has lived and worked abroad and is fascinated by people and cultures. Her approach is unique and innovative with healthy measures of fun and “get ‘er done.” Clients covet her keen ability to connect the dots and get results quickly. She has done a variety of projects from conducting needs assessments and gap analyses to designing long-term learning and development strategies and providing human resource expertise on core business process change. She has worked with Gap Inc., Gap Outlet, Old Navy, Jamba Juice, Safeway, McKesson, Deloitte, The Medical Foundation and more. When she's not working, she spends her time actively reveling in the Bay Area, sometimes chasing the mobile cupcake truck and Baby Jacob.

Jon Shuster

Jon Shuster

Senior Consultant

Not only has Jon’s ability to guide change across functions and geographies made him very popular with his clients, it’s helped him learn to say hello in over 7 languages. From mission development and organization design to business process improvement and change implementation, Jon excels at helping his clients improve their organization effectiveness to achieve business results.    A critical contributor to the Roberts Golden team, Jon has served in both external consulting (Watson Wyatt, Accenture) and internal (Levi Strauss & Company) leadership roles and most recently has consulted to Chevron Corporation and Safeway. Jon received a B.A. in social psychology from Cornell University and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

Anke Thiele

Anke Thiele

Senior Consultant

Anke’s unique blend of analytical thinking and a down-to-earth/bottom-line approach has “wow!-ed” many of her clients (as well as her kids and husband, proven by a well- organized family life). She has added value to her clients across industries through either designing the content of change initiatives – such as reorganizations, process redesigns, and other business transformations – or through managing and facilitating the ”people aspects” of such change processes. As a former HR executive at Bertelsmann and a senior management consultant at Towers Perrin she helped internal and external clients on three continents optimize their strategic HR programs as well as assess and manage the impact of change events. Anke received an M.B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, Haas School of Business, and an M.A. in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the University Darmstadt, Germany. She is fluent in English and German and conversant in Spanish.

Erica Carroll

Operations Assistant/Project Coordinator

Erica has provided administrative support and project coordination to the Roberts Golden team since January of 2009. She maintains and oversees all the day to day activities in the office to ensure all processes run smoothly and efficiently.  With her down-to-earth personality, Erica is able to “roll with the punches” and handle any task that comes her way with a smile; in fact, you’ll probably find her cracking a joke in efforts to make others smile with her. Prior to working at Roberts Golden, Erica held a recruiting position at an in-house staffing firm where she found her niche for helping to implement internal business processes. During her free time, Erica enjoys the outdoors and is often out on an adventure with her dogs or soaking up the sun while gardening at home.

Contact Us


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Call +1-415-641-5523
Fax +1-415-651-9295
info(at)robertsgolden.com

 

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