Catalyz is a catalyst for leaders, teams, and
organizations when they realize that to achieve
their objectives, it is essential that they change.

Greg Collins is a change management consultant and leadership effectiveness coach. He helps clients develop growth strategies and build teams capable of implementing those strategies to achieve sustainable revenue and profit growth. His work focuses on aligning a client’s executive team as a critical first step in clarifying and implementing any strategy. Greg focuses on both individual and organizational change as the means of delivering extraordinary results.

Greg designs and leads engagements that combine perspectives and tools from Strategy, Organization Development (OD), Adult Learning, and Coaching:

• In his strategy development work, Greg utilizes a fact-based problem-solving approach that relies on classic strategy tools used by firms like McKinsey and Bain.
• In his OD and Coaching work, Greg places significant emphasis on enhancing the effectiveness of his clients as individual contributors, as managers, and as leaders.
• In all of his work, Greg pays close attention to the language people use as a lens into the way the organization and its people avoid, accept, or confront difficult issues.

Greg works with an organization’s leader and leadership team concurrently both in their work setting and in offsites that he designs and facilitates. He helps clients increase their individual and team effectiveness. Greg has the ability to sense and make explicit subtle “disconnects” among members of a team. Much of this work centers on influencing the members of client teams to expand their candidness with one another and to take greater responsibility for their actions as team members. He achieves this goal through a combination of attentive listening and observation, candid discussion, and thoughtful intervention, as well as building self-awareness and the capability to lead more effectively in his clients.

Greg believes that most consulting and coaching provides little lasting value to the client organization because most consultants and coaches, although adept at engaging their clients’ brains, fail to adequately engage the heart, spirit, and imagination of their clients and their organizations or don’t sufficiently appreciate the context within the team or within which the business operates.

Instead, Greg helps his client appreciate that leadership and strategy development are active, on-going, and dynamic processes. Leaders and leadership teams that don’t have this appreciation can unintentionally harm their organization’s ability to adapt and achieve its goals. Greg’s differentiating strength is his ability to helpfully take challenging stances that enable his clients to be more reflective and intentional as they develop strategies to deliver tangible results. He does so by having a point of view and being willing to share it as a means of getting difficult issues out in the open.

Greg’s experience over the last few decades is split between consulting and having P&L responsibility in a variety of businesses. Greg was previously a founder and Partner in Axia Ltd., which was bought by Accenture. And before that he was a member of the management team of two other Boston-area consulting firms. Having been an entrepreneur and operator, he is well versed in most aspects and phases of developing and running a business. These experiences enable Greg to appreciate both the context within which his clients operate as well as engage in substantive discussion about real day to day operating and management issues. His clients appreciate Greg’s operating background and his ability to “walk in their shoes.”

Greg has more than twenty years of due diligence and acquisition integration experience. He has developed a robust model and a set of tools to assist his clients in effectively integrating acquisitions. His model is different in that it emphasizes culture, communication, employee transition, and on-going organizational learning. Most integration approaches focus too heavily on the transaction - and, for a lack of focusing on the more difficult and important people issues, fail to capture the value upon which the purchase price was predicated.

His clients operate in both the for-profit and the not-for-profit sectors and range from start-ups to Fortune 50 global companies. A partial list of clients includes: Pfizer, Philips/Intermagnetics General Corporation, Motorola, Cadbury Schweppes, Adidas, Dover Corporation, Sumitomo Heavy Industries, Energizer Holdings, Phat Farm, Seven Cycles, The Kraft Group, Ultimate Medical Academy, Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, SquashBusters, and the Boston Police Athletic League.

Greg holds a Master’s degree in Public and Private Management from the Yale School of Organization and Management and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Cornell. He has also done work in Change Leadership and Adult Learning with the faculty from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.