Cherri Holland

Institute Fellow

Cherri Holland is a performance and change specialist who has worked over the last 20 years, with clients in nine countries, to improve performance and create a partnership approach to business success. Influenced by leaders running successful staff-driven businesses, she has worked with hundreds of groups to move past entrenched ways of working into self-leadership, high performance and flow.

Described as commercially-savvy, engaging and inspirational, Cherri quickly assesses what people and organizations need to fulfill obligations to their full range of stakeholders. Her clients have consistently said that high expectations of change outcomes have been exceeded. As metrics become increasingly focused on the financial impacts of staff and customer disengagement, outdated management approaches and reputation damage, businesses increasingly need quick ways to change service perception and reputation.

Cherri has sat alongside leaders undertaking organisation-wide transformation to develop a staff-driven, high performance culture. What distinguishes her approach from others is her co-creation of solutions with people which she has found works better than externally-imposed models (or top-down decisions) that people inevitably resist leading to costly failure of change programmes. Drawing on both neuroscience and neuromarketing, she is able to mobilize human ingenuity to respond effectively to market pressures and/or technology disruption.

Typical assignments include working with leaders or whole teams to:

plan and embed change so that programmes realize expected benefits
sell and influence – get key audiences responding as required
improve personal impact and results
succeed in response to complex workplace challenges and stakeholder demands
communicate effectively, ensuring messages are received as intended
resolve conflict and negotiate so all parties’ needs are met
ensure service reputation is world class
develop inner resolve and resourcefulness, remaining ‘calm under fire’.

Since graduating with a psychology degree, sub majoring in Industrial Psychology, Cherri has continued to research ways to tap into latent mental reserves for super-performance; she has shown these approaches work across diverse cultures and industries.