Jennifer Garvey Berger

My clients are brilliant, successful, and often quirky. They tend to call me at a moment of change in their jobs (often a promotion to the C-suite), their organizations, or their markets. They know that they will have to make some fundamental changes, that the fantastic qualities that have led to their success so far will start to lead to their downfall. They’re ready to stretch into a new version of themselves—they just need a little help.

The once-scrappy start-up had grown to tens of thousands of employees around the world and was feeling the need to somehow rise to the challenge of this new phase. The leaders knew they needed to “mature their leadership” for all kinds of reasons: to be able to lead at scale, to be able to innovate as they were also delivering, and to be able to handle how quickly the environment around them was changing.

One of the leaders had read my Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps and had thought that I had named some of the key blockers to this new moment. They brought me in for a leadership conference to offer a 90 minute keynote/ workshop for their top 200 leaders. That work lit a fire in people including the CEO, who asked me to coach her.

Over time, our team—made up of their internal learning and Organizational Development people and a handful of Cultivating Leadership colleagues—collectively put more specific thinking and action around what it meant to “mature their leadership.” We created a program for the top 100 leaders, we coached the executive team, and we collectively built out a whole variety of culture-enhancing experiences for the entire organization.

The organization was able to innovate at a different level, make decisions more quickly, and find a way to use the complexity of the environment and the market to grow themselves instead of feeling like they were racing to just stand still. Perhaps most surprisingly, all of this happened while actually increasing engagement and well-being of the collective.

I think the thing that most shapes my work is that I love humans and I care about their success and happiness—and about how leaders foster the success and happiness of their employees, customers, and whole communities. I am deeply interested in human stories. I grew up with a dad who was an English professor and a writer, and a mom who was a psychologist who was on the cutting edge of the brand new field of executive leadership. How could I not turn out like this?

I‘m one of the co-founders, the CEO, and Chief Cultivating Officer

My clients and I work collaboratively, whether on a coaching engagement, a keynote speech, or a leadership program. I listen deeply to what is most needed–both the shifts my clients seek and also all that there is to celebrate in how they are today. We do a lot of thinking together, and often a lot of laughing on the way.

I love complexity at work and at home, it would seem. These days, when I’m not working you can mostly find me at home in the French countryside, where a dozen friends and I have bought a big domain together. We live in community in a big rambling house with our two dogs, two cats, three chickens and some undefined number of European pond turtles in the pond.

I’m often in the kitchen, mixing up a batch of fresh granola or baking someone a birthday cake. Or perhaps I’m going for a walk with my friends or hanging out with my mom who lives there too. This is perhaps the definition of complexity: enmeshed, entangled, glorious. Sometimes I just hide away in my study and write (you can follow along at my Cultivating Leadership blog or my personal blog at 25000dawns.com). Mostly, I delight in the complex joys of a life crafted around love and friendship.

I have a masters and a doctorate from Harvard University. I have written four highly acclaimed books for Stanford University Press.