Marsha Connolly
MANAGING PARTNER, THE NEW RIVER GROUP
Marsha Connolly is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of The New River Group, an executive development group retained by senior executives who seek positive change in their leaders and in their top teams. Her coaching practice specializes in helping clients improve business performance and manage their professional development. Her consulting practice focuses on the strategic development and enhanced effectiveness of senior executive leadership teams and their organizations.
Marsha is an expert in helping her clients achieve success through aligning their aspirational career goals with the selection, interpretation, and performance of work roles. Her expertise is founded on her extensive experience as a Fortune 50 corporate executive leading organizations focused on learning and performance and as a behavioral coach and consultant helping executives and teams attain success through the application of contemporary social science research on learning and role performance. Her clients include Board, C-level, VP, Director and Partner level corporate and professional services executives, as well as media and television personalities, elected government officials, scientists, physicians, healthcare administrative executives and internet and technology entrepreneurs.
In her coaching practice, Marsha works with clients to identify and implement behavioral changes that result in performance gains and that build enhanced capability to meet future performance challenges and development goals. Rather than treating behavior as simply a mechanism to achieve results, she looks at behavior through the lenses of Identity—how the executive sees him/her self now and who he/she is striving to become in the future– and Role– how an executive’s role helps to both create and fulfill his or her desired identity. Marsha’s coaching methodology recognizes that all behavior is, at its roots, an expression of self. People do what they do as a result of who they think they are and who they want to become. Thus, behavior is both the source of identity and the product of it. The requirements, interpretations, and performance of the executive’s role, as related to his or her identity, is the focus of her work.
Marsha is affiliated with CoachSource, the world’s largest executive coaching network. She is a Goldsmith Advanced Certified executive coach and an NCHL-GE Institute for Leadership Transformation Certified executive coach. She is a former member of KornFerry’s cadre of Senior Executive Coaches, a former member of Marshall Goldsmith Partners and former Leadership Development Practice Leader for the Alliance for Strategic Leadership, a global coaching and consulting organization also founded by Dr. Goldsmith. Her previous executive roles include head of executive development and firm-wide learning for KPMG LLP during an era of widespread change in the accounting and professional services industry, including the spinoff of the consulting practice to Bearing Point, the collapse of Arthur Anderson and the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. She was previously a Vice President of Citibank and head of human resources development for Tandem Computers (now Hewlett Packard). In addition to coaching, Marsha trains coaches and organizational leaders in coaching methods and skills and designs and facilitates executive education programs and strategic team meetings. She has instructed and acted as coaching faculty for executive education programs at Dartmouth Tuck School of Business, MIT, Babson College, and Harvard University.
Marsha Contact Info: Marsha.Connolly@thenewrivergroup.com (201) 391-0960
