ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE EXPERT
EXECUTIVE COACH | ADJUNCT PROFESSOR
DR. RITA MEYERSON, Ed.D
Photo Credit: Mark Garrison
March 17, 2020
For twenty-five years Rita Meyerson has partnered with business executives around the world on matters of organizational transformation, culture, and leadership development. She has successfully driven countless large-scale, global organizational change efforts that both met business goals and built high-performance cultures.
Rita brings a unique and valuable perspective to each client project rooted in her academic training in industrial/organizational psychology and organizational behavior and her deep practice expertise. Taking a theory and practice consultative approach, Rita begins each project with a rigorous organizational diagnosis process and then co-creates a strategic action plan with key organizational stakeholders. Further, Rita approaches implementation by combining executive sponsor and change agent coaching with serving as a “boots on the ground” resource to ensure plan execution. In addition to her consulting and coaching practice, Rita serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University in the Social-Organizational Psychology Program at Teachers College. In February 2022 Rita joined the Advisory Board of the World Institute for Action Learning.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in biological basis of behavior from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in industrial/organizational psychology from New York University, Rita began corporate work in the mid-1990s as a change management consultant at leading global consulting firms Accenture (Andersen Consulting) and Willis Towers Watson (Watson Wyatt). She then served as a director in corporate communications and human resources at the American Express Company, supporting the global head of human resources and the global finance leadership team (business CFOs, financial planning and analysis, and treasury).
With 10 years of management consulting and corporate experience, Rita established her independent management consulting and coaching practice. During the last 14 years, she has worked across industries and geographies with senior business executives in Fortune 100 companies, hedge funds, leading non-for-profits, think tanks, higher education, and start-up enterprises, including Aquamarine Fund, BlackRock, Brammer Bio, Bruker Corporation, Claims Conference, IMS Quintiles, PepsiCo, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the International Council on Clean Transportation, Saint-Gobain, and the Sherwin-Williams Company.
In 2019 Rita earned her doctorate in Human and Organizational Learning from the Executive Leadership Doctoral Program at The George Washington University, where she researched the role of organizational history within the organizational identity dynamics of Sherwin-Williams following its acquisition of Valspar.
Rita’s organizational change communications work has received numerous awards from the International Association of Business Communicators. Rita was also recognized as a finalist in the case competition of the Hot Mommas Project in association with the Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence. Most recently, Rita was recognized with a PepsiCo HR Excellence Award for her innovative talent development work for PepsiCo’s Global Finance Organization in partnership with PepsiCo University and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Rita holds a professional coaching certification from the International Coaching Federation and is certified in the Hogan assessments and Hay Group emotional intelligence and organizational assessments and frequently works with the MBTI and FIRO-B on developing high performing teams. She is a member of the Academy of Management and European Group for Organizational Studies and serves as an alumni interviewer for the University of Pennsylvania.