Bio

Sherryl Dimitry, Ph.D. helps companies maximize their key talent investment by ensuring effective succession planning and high potential identification and development. She helps companies close the gender gap in mid-senior ranks by identifying systemic barriers and key leverage points for driving change, while also working to develop emerging female executives to become successful in higher level roles.

Applying her expertise in systems thinking and complexity, human resources, organizational behavior, and industrial/organizational psychology, she enables her clients to address challenges emerging from processes, organizational structure and human behavior. Sherryl has helped nearly 200 high potential managers grow and develop into successful executives by focusing on increasing cognitive complexity, emotional intelligence and business savvy.

Her first internal role as an OD consultant was at corporate headquarters for Fortune-50 titan State Farm Insurance. Sherryl then spent fifteen years leading Organization Development & Talent Development functions in two global multi-billion companies. While at those companies, she directed all aspects of building and supporting the leadership pipeline including succession and management development for over 10,000 employees and overhauling obsolete performance management processes and systems. She has managed extremely complex organization-wide change efforts, helping her company retain 90% of core and critical talent a year post-acquisition. Her organizational design capability resulted in dramatically improved internal talent utilization, reducing layoffs and increasing transfers by implementing a formalized matrix structure. She has also managed ERP implementations and culture change initiatives.

Sherryl’s career started as an entrepreneur, growing a small industrial advertising and printing business to 20 employees and over 400 national clients. After selling the business to employees, she managed communications and operations for two global non-profits, and then expanded from communications consulting to organization development and business strategy consulting. At the same time, she was focusing her graduate research in systems theory and complexity sciences, becoming a member of the International Society for the Systems Sciences and an International Systems Institute Fellow.

Sherryl holds a B.A. in HR Management, an M.A. in Organization Development, and a Ph.D. in Organizational Systems from Saybrook University in San Francisco. Her doctoral research encompassed a rare systemic analysis of the gender gap in corporate executive ranks, identifying key leverage points in the system for companies and the women who work in them to target change. Her work in leadership development, gender equity, culture change and systems thinking has been published by research and professional journals worldwide, and she has presented her work at major conferences across the country.