Leadership development grounded in behavioral science
I help leaders in human services, behavioral health, and disability services build the skills behavioral science can describe and teach: taking perspective, reasoning across the levels of their organization, and owning the systems their teams work inside.
Leadership as behavior
Leadership is easy to describe in adjectives and hard to develop that way. I treat it as behavior: what leaders ask, notice, model, and reinforce, and how they reason about people and problems. Behavior can be observed, measured, and taught.
Two bodies of work shape how I do that. Transformational and transactional leadership research describes what effective leaders do. Relational frame theory, a behavioral account of human language and cognition, describes how people relate ideas to one another, take someone else’s perspective, reason about time, and think in hierarchies, from a single shift up to an entire organization. The Relational Frame Theory of Leadership (RFTL), the framework I developed, connects the two.
My doctoral pilot study of the ABLA 2.0 found that behavior analysts in leadership roles who showed greater flexibility in perspective-taking and in thinking across organizational levels scored higher on overall leadership effectiveness. The sample was eight leaders and the result is preliminary, which is why I describe it as a direction worth testing rather than a proven method. Read about the research.
What the work includes
- Leadership development for supervisors, directors, and executive teams, using RFTL exercises in perspective-taking, systems thinking, and reasoning about time and consequences.
- Leadership coaching on accountability, decision-making, and communicating hard decisions with dignity.
- Organizational assessment of structure, roles, decision rights, and whether useful feedback ever reaches the people who lead.
- Building clinical departments: hiring, onboarding, supervision ladders, and quality review that scale as a program grows.
- Board governance training on roles and responsibilities, drawn from my own board and council service.
When the problem is less about individual leaders than about the systems around them, this work pairs with organizational behavior management.
Leading in disability services and behavioral health
Leadership in this sector has particular demands. Services are regulated and staff-dependent, crises are never far away, and the people with the least authority often carry the hardest moments. Leaders have to hold compliance and dignity together, keep clinicians and direct support staff working as one team, and make decisions whose effects land on people who cannot easily advocate for themselves.
I have worked at every level of that system, from direct support professional to director of behavioral services, and I now chair New Hampshire’s Statewide Independent Living Council. I bring that range to leadership work: an understanding of what a policy looks like from the overnight shift, and of what it takes to change it from the director’s office.
Background
- Director of Behavioral Services for a New Hampshire agency serving adults with developmental disabilities, 2022 to 2026.
- Co-founded and lead a behavioral consulting practice, since 2022.
- Chair of the New Hampshire Statewide Independent Living Council by gubernatorial appointment, now in a second term; member of the New Hampshire State Rehabilitation Council.
- Trustee and governance committee member for a public charter school, and board director for Behavior Analysts for AI.
- Doctor of Education in Leadership and Learning with a specialization in organizational psychology, Aspen University, 2026.
- Military police soldier, New Hampshire Army National Guard, 2008 to 2014.
Start a conversation
Whether you are developing a leadership team, preparing new supervisors, or looking for an executive who understands both the science and the floor, email is the best way to reach me.