Ashridge Consulting

In addition to several years’ experience as consultant to major international organisations, Ghislaine also worked as a manager in business development and as an internal consultant in Daimler in the automotive sector and Beiersdorf in the FMCG. Now living in Germany, Ghislaine has worked and lived in several European countries including the UK, Spain, Italy, Turkey and France.

Most of Ghislaine’s interventions are at the intersection between strategy, leadership and change because she believes that this is where she can make the biggest difference, particularly in helping executives make things happen throughout their organisations. She believes this involves ‘working with what is’ and not only with ‘what should be’ (even if this can be messy at times), acknowledging the complexity of organisational reality and the necessity for reflection and risk taking to create progress. Her challenging and stimulating style, combined with dedicated support, encourages experimenting with new ways of working. Ghislaine works in English, German, Spanish and French, and can make active contributions in Turkish and Italian.

Recent client assignments include:

• The design and facilitation of a virtual strategy process for the global engineering company Alfa Laval involving the top 45 leaders of the organisation
• The design and facilitation of a global blended (face-to-face and virtual) strategy process for a global UN agency involving over 350 senior leaders from several organisations around the world
• The development of a team of 14 virtual leaders working across the globe for Danfoss Helping a virtual team of a global bank to become a virtual high performing team
• Developing the leadership capabilities of international groups of 35 managers in the context of the Global Executive Programme of Volkswagen
• The launch and delivery of the Ashridge Consulting Virtual Action Learning Facilitation programme

• Developing leaders of virtual teams
• Designing and facilitating virtual strategy and/or change processes
• Designing and facilitating virtual large group interventions
• Action Learning in virtual environments
• Developing virtual facilitators of Action Learning
• Virtuality consulting: helping organisations to develop and implement their strategy for virtual working and learning
• Leadership development for managers at all levels
• Helping teams and organisations through major transitions
• Helping HR communities to develop internal consulting skills and capabilities (in face-to-face and/or virtually)

Ghislaine heads the Virtual Working Practice Group at Ashridge Consulting and has been researching in the field of virtual leadership since 2003. She specialises in helping teams to become high performing virtual teams and leaders to lead effectively remotely. Ghislaine has also developed innovative approaches to learning virtually, which have been implemented by some of her clients with very convincing results. One of the approaches mentioned above (the virtual strategy process with Alfa Laval) was rewarded by the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) in the context of their Excellence of Practice Award in 2009. She has also embarked on a Doctorate on virtual leadership.