Dr. Lisa Lahey and Dr. Robert Kegan are the co-founders of Minds at Work.
Along with their leadership team they’ve helped individuals and organizations achieve their goals for over thirty years.
Minds at Work helps people to close the gap between their good intentions and their actual behaviors. Our work is based on Kegan and Lahey’s breakthrough discovery of the hidden behavioral dynamic called the “Immunity to Change.” This highly lauded technique is now being used by executives, senior teams, and individuals in business, governmental, and educational organizations in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Lisa Lahey,
Ed.D.
In addition to co-founding and co-directing Minds at work Lisa Lahey, Ed.D. is a faculty member at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she recently served as the associate director of the Change Leadership Group, a national project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop greater internal capacity for leading organizational improvement in our nation’s public school districts. She has worked with numerous corporations and nonprofit organizations as well as working across the educational spectrum, from primary schoools to universities and their boards. Lahey is the author of Immunity to Change: How to Overcome it and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization with Robert Kegan (2009), and How The Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work with Robert Kegan (2001). She is also co-author of Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming Our Schools (2006).
Lisa is a passionate pianist and hiker; she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two sons.
Robert Kegan, Ph.D.
Robert Kegan is a psychologist who teaches, researches, writes, and consults about adult development, adult learning, and professional development. His work explores the possibility and necessity of ongoing psychological transformation in adulthood and its implications for professional development. In addition to co-founding and directing Minds at Work he also holds a faculty appointment at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Kegan serves as educational chair of the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education; as co-director of a joint program with the Harvard Medical School to bring principles of adult learning to the reform of medical education; and as co-director of the Change Leadership Group, a program for the training of change leadership coaches for school and district leaders.
Kegan is a licensed clinical psychologist and practicing therapist who likes to say “that it may help to know that I am also a husband and a father; influenced by Hasidism; an airplane pilot; a poker player; and the unheralded inventor of the ‘Base Average,’ a more comprehensive way of gauging a baseball player’s offensive contributions.”
Deborah Helsing, Ed.D.
Co-Director
Deb has coached individuals from many walks of life and consulted with organizations across several sectors to use the Immunity-to-Change approach to reach their most-cherished improvement goals. More recently, her role as Director of Coach Learning Programs at Minds at Work has focused on developing coaches’ and consultants’ abilities to integrate the ITC method into their own practices.
Deb holds a faculty position at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, teaching courses in Adult Development, Immunity to Change, and co-teaching a course in personal mastery for leaders. She provides executive coaching to high potential educational leaders as part of the Doctor of Educational Leadership program.
In her former role as Senior Program Associate at Harvard’s Change Leadership Group, Deb worked with her colleagues to better understand school transformation and to design high-quality professional development programs for educational leaders.
Deb has co-authored several articles and books, including: An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (2016, with Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, and Matt Miller); Right Weight, Right Mind: The ITC Approach to Permanent Weight Loss (2014, with Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey); The Immunity to Change Coach’s Guide (2011, with Lisa Lahey and Robert Kegan) and “Unlocking Leadership Potential: Overcoming Immunities to Change” (2010, with Lisa Lahey) in Extraordinary Leadership: Addressing the Gaps in Senior Executive Development.
Maria DeCarvalho, M.Div.
Co-Director
Maria DeCarvalho is an executive coach who works with leaders committed to their own personal development. She counts among her international clients key executives in healthcare, pharmaceuticals, software, transportation, manufacturing, telecommunications and foundations as well as the leaders of a number of faith communities, including an order of monks. She also has the honor of training and coaching other coaches.
Maria’s career trajectory has taken her through the public, private and not-for-profit sectors. She served the late U.S. Senator John H. Chafee on Capitol Hill, and as the director of his home office. Before her stint as a lending officer in the Commodities Finance Division, International Department of JP Morgan Chase, she was faculty for the bank’s rigorous corporate training program. In that role she taught credit analysis and specialized lending practices to all new Chase corporate hires and to mid- career lending officers sent for training from other global banks.
As an ordained Episcopal priest (1991) and Dean of The Cathedral of St. John in Providence, RI, Maria served a multicultural congregation whose attendance doubled and whose annual giving nearly tripled over her tenure. One educational initiative led to ongoing conversations with Jewish and Muslim neighbors about interfaith violence, out of which emerged strategies for interreligious understanding, such as the regular inclusion of a rabbi in Holy Week services and occasional shared worship with a local mosque.
Maria is asked to speak to a wide range of audiences and is the author of numerous articles in both the popular and professional press.
OUR TEAM
Katie Heikkinen, Ed.D.
Director of ITC Online
Katie Heikkinen is Director of ITC Online at Minds at Work, where she focuses on bringing the Immunity to Change process to online, virtual, and large-scale contexts. Along with Cara, she partners with organizations to design and facilitate enterprise-wide digital experiences of the transformative power of the Immunity to Change framework.
Katie earned her doctorate in Human Development from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she studied the assessment of development, with a particular emphasis on Kurt Fischer’s Skill Theory, Theo Dawson’s Lectical Assessment System, and Robert Kegan’s Subject-Object Interview.
A certified Immunity to Change Coach, Katie’s experience with online education is broad and diverse. She has taught personal development online through Professional Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, at HarvardX, and at the Harvard Extension School. She previously taught on the faculty of the Integral Theory program at John F. Kennedy University. She has designed online programs for educators in topics ranging from early childhood literacy to differentiated instruction.
Her passion for personal development started early. After graduating from Harvard College where she studied the neuroscience of meditation with Sarah Lazar and Steve Kosslyn, Katie moved to Sweden to explore alternative education, and then to Boulder, Colorado, to work for Ken Wilber’s Integral Institute. She received a Master’s degree in Mind, Brain, and Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2007. She lives in Lunenburg, MA with her partner, son, and their two dogs.
Catherine Sullivan, MBA
Director of Operations
Catherine is responsible for day-to-day business and finance operations. She manages the operations staff and oversees delivery of our public and customized learning programs. Catherine also manages our contracts and vendor relationships for new business and program delivery.
In her former role managing People Development at a healthcare start-up, Catherine designed and implemented HR infrastructure as the organization grew from 20 to over 100 people in three years, and advised managers and the Leadership team on employee and culture issues.
Catherine earned her MBA from the D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University and received her Bachelor’s degree from Denison University.
Kaylee Slafkosky
Program Coordinator
Kaylee Slafkosky is the Program Coordinator at Minds at Work. She is responsible for managing program enrollment and registrations as well as assisting with program delivery. She also assists the ITC Online team with daily operations and customer care. In her former role managing operations at a higher education innovation center, Kaylee managed daily operations activities and member relationships as the center quadrupled in membership. Kaylee graduated Manga Cum Laude with a Bachelors of Science in Management and a concentration in Entrepreneurship. While studying for her Bachelors Degree, Kaylee spent a year at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
