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.

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She has worked with numerous corporations and nonprofit organizations as well as working across the educational spectrum, from primary schools 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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OUR TEAM

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.

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Kaylee Slafkosky

Program Specialist and Executive Coordinator

Kaylee Slafkosky is the Program Specialist and Executive 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 Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science in Management and a concentration in Entrepreneurship. While studying for her Bachelor’s Degree, Kaylee spent a year at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

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