Kelly Kienzle, founder of Open Circle Coaching, provides leadership coaching and facilitation to individuals and teams to improve organizational performance.  Kelly is a people development specialist with over 28 years of experience in the field of professional development.

Kelly works best with leaders who want to…

  • Define their leadership style and what they want to achieve from their career
  • Motivate a team that is stuck or lacks clarity on direction
  • Learn how to reach colleagues who seem unreachable
  • Flex to the different styles of their colleagues
  • Receive feedback, regardless of how it is delivered, in a productive way
  • Feel self-confident in the midst of change or upheaval
  • Recognize old stories that are no longer helpful and create new stories that are more helpful
  • Challenge old thinking and discover new ways in which to view themselves as a leader and as a person

She helps clients build skills in self-identified areas including communicating effectively, mentoring, building trust, navigating change, team development, leadership presence and vision-setting.

Clients work with her in both one-on-one coaching sessions and highly interactive team workshops.  Her company also designs and delivers leadership development programs for organizations investing in their people.  Additionally, she offers leadership development forums specifically designed for women.

Individual Coaching Experience

  • Provided over 2600 documented hours of coaching experience for over 400 leaders and managers resulting in promotions, elections to partnership and acceptance into highly regarded institutions, along with unquantifiable yet valuable personal learning and insights
  • Created a specialized focus in coaching and developing women leaders through coaching over 100 women and providing forums specifically for women

Group Coaching Experience

  • Facilitated the design and delivery of over a dozen Leadership Development Programs (each 6-9 months in duration) within client organizations to support the growth of colleague cohorts as well as intact teams
  • Partnered with over 90 client organizations to provide coaching, workshops, retreats, mediation, and programs to support professional growth, organizational strength and overall vision-setting
  • Designed and led two proprietary group coaching programs (invitation-only): The Lemonade Program and ClayWorks offering tools and coaching to see their lives and careers with new eyes. Both programs have run multiple times.

Prior Professional Development Experience

  • For almost 13 years, Kelly provided career development leadership to hundreds of top performers globally at McKinsey & Co., one of the preeminent management consulting firms. In this role, she offered career coaching, led hiring strategies, and spearheaded organizational development initiatives aimed at building communities and changing cultures within the firm.  She also led the design of the professional development processes and recruitment strategies for several internal start-up groups spanning the globe.
  • Prior to this work, Kelly spent several years working in two national law firms, SNR Denton and Howrey & Simon, to develop their recruitment and talent management strategies. She has interviewed hundreds of candidates to assess for organizational cultural fit and interpersonal skills.   She has also been a manager of numerous Hiring Committees reviewing thousands of candidates.

Educational Background

Kelly is a PCC-certified Leadership Coach with the International Coach Federation.  Kelly holds a B.A. in English from James Madison University and a Master’s degree in Positive Organizational Development from Case Western Reserve University.

She is also a graduate of Georgetown University’s Leadership Coaching program where she studied in the fields of adult development, organization development, communications, somatics, behavioral science and linguistics.

She has participated in numerous training programs involving managing team dynamics, administering and synthesizing results from 360-degree interviews, using effective communication and working with assessment tools.  She continues to take continuing education courses each year to remain accredited as a leadership coach and to deepen her knowledge in targeted areas.

She is certified and experienced in working with many assessments and tools, including DiSC, Strengthsfinder, TruValues, Appreciative Inquiry, Emotional and Social Competency Inventory, and Kolb Learning Styles.

A Personal Note from Kelly…

I live with my husband and two daughters in the beautiful foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside of Charlottesville, VA.  I try to find a way to get outside almost every day.  By widening my visual perspective, I can better widen my mental perspective.

For as long as I can remember, I have always loved to listen to people’s stories.  I enjoy learning how they perceive the world.  I am most interested in hearing where people want to go next and what they want to achieve along the way.  I’m curious – – what future do you want to grow into next?