Barbara White draws on over 30 years of professional experience in multiple industries and disciplines as she works with clients to achieve outcomes of enduring value. She has partnered with clients in healthcare, health services, pharmaceuticals, human services, finance and trade, and digital design and development.
Barbara’s coaching of executive leaders focuses on the whole person and how all the elements of who they are impact their work and leadership. Her holistic approach draws heavily on her training in personal and group dynamics.
Barbara believes successful senior level executives must demonstrate a very high level of strategic thinking, technical acumen, and execution excellence, along with superior leadership skills that drive results and engender “followership” among those who work with them. The linchpin is emotional intelligence. That is a keen awareness of who they are, how they interact with others, and mastery of how to build strong, collaborative relationships.
Senior executives often excel at the hard skills of their role because of the way they are trained and rewarded. As such, many have blind spots with respect to those attributes of leadership and behavior that can help them increase their overall effectiveness. Barbara works with executives to help them see their blind spots, understand how they are perceived by those around them, and to develop new approaches to how they work with members of their organization. She provides strategies and tools that are tailored to the executive to help them sustain and build on what they have learned. These might include simple, but effective, working tools the leader may use to increase their facility in active listening and reflective response, strategies that employ the dialogue approach as a means to improve their communication, and methods for continual self-assessment and developmental planning.
Barbara’s talents in human resources, organizational development, coaching and business are broad and deep. Prior to moving to consulting she was a Vice President of Human Resources, North America, for Dun & Bradstreet, and served as the primary architect of their 12-month, comprehensive Leadership Development Program. The program integrated classroom and experiential learning to build core leadership and management skills in emerging leaders. Faculty was primarily D&B senior leaders. The impetus for the development of the program was to increase their exposure to senior leadership and to surface learning opportunities for high potential women and people of color.
Barbara spent eight years in the pharmaceutical industry in several roles, including Vice President of Human Resources, North America for Pfizer Consumer Healthcare. She was responsible for Training and Development, the HR Business Partners, and Recruiting. While at Pfizer, Barbara also served as a Senior Director and member of the leadership team for the Worldwide Organizational Effectiveness and Consulting Services group. She was responsible for the client relationship with the JAALA region (Japan, Asia, Africa/Middle East and Latin America).
Prior to moving to the pharmaceutical industry, Barbara was with Prudential Healthcare where she was responsible for Diversity and Inclusion, EEOC Reporting and Planning, and Executive Recruiting. She was the Chief Financial Officer of Group Systems before transitioning into human resources. Her finance career also included multiple roles in a variety of other organizations, including serving as the Chief Financial Officer of Teach for America. She began her career as an auditor for KPMG.
Barbara has a MS in Organizational Development from American University, received a BA in Accounting from Rutgers University, is an inactive Certified Public Accountant, and a Coach Core Essentials Graduate of Coach U.
Barbara is based in New Jersey and works with clients across the United States.
“I believe in the adage ‘what got you here, won’t get you there’. Core to my role as a coach and as an organizational development professional is partnering with clients to enable them to transition from the known and comfortable, to the expectations and demands of their new challenges. That partnership is a mutual relationship built on deep listening, deep learning, curiosity, trust and understanding.”