George Gates is President of Core-R.O.I., LLC, organization development consultants with offices in four states and the District of Columbia.
George brings to his clients more than thirty years' experience in consulting, management, and education in both the public and private sectors. He joined Core-R.O.I. as a consulting Principal in 1984 after serving as Manager of Organization Development for an international affiliate of Exxon Enterprises. He also worked for General Motors in Manufacturing and Organization Development, and has been an education consultant and teacher.
He has provided services in both the public and private sectors to improve employee work life and organization results. His work focuses on supporting practical change strategies which involve people in planning and managing improvement in their own organizations. He has worked with both line and staff functions, at all levels, from executive suite to shop floor. He is particularly experienced helping labor and management change adversarial relationships to working partnerships for their mutual success. George's clients have included Fortune 500 firms, labor unions, family-owned businesses, and non-profit organizations.
George has helped clients plan and develop more collaborative, team-based organizations. He co-developed Core-R.O.I.'s Fast Impact Redesign™, a structured participation methodology for redesigning existing organizations.
George's column in a national trade magazine provides constructive approaches to labor and management issues featuring, among others, such titles as: Go Be Teamish!; Finding Common Ground; Participation Is Not an Option; Leadership Myth-takes; Who's Accountable?; Clinging to Change Clichés; How to Wreck Change; and a series on Workplace Bullying and Mobbing. Other publications include: Dancing with the Bear: The Struggle of Labor Cooperation; Why Teams Fail (And What's a Body to Do?); What To Do When Your Team Doesn't Act Like One; Redesigning for Fast Impact; and On Saving the World a Bit At a Time.
Throughout his career, George has provided customized training and presentations for workshop and conference groups of all sizes. Facilitation Skills and Change Agent Skills workshops have included over a thousand participants. Recent conferences include: 2006 Society of Manufacturing Engineers Annual Conference, the International Conference on Work Teams, the University of Kentucky Annual Conference on Lean Manufacturing, Association for Quality and Participation Conference, and the Linkage Best of Teams Conference.
He includes among his recent clients: Air Canada/IAMAW; Air Products and Chemicals; SEIU 1199/Hospital League Labor-Management Project; Jewish Home and Hospital/SEIU 1199; AmerUs Financial Group; Merck Pharmaceuticals/PACE; DIMON International, Inc.; Cinnabar Solutions, Inc.; The New West Symphony; Telesis Corp.; and Solvay Paperboard, Inc.
George is a graduate of Xavier University, is on the faculty of the SEIU's Institute for Change, a member of the Organizational Development Network, and the American Society for Training and Development, and a Director of the Socio-technical Systems (STS) Roundtable.
George and his wife Pat live in Greensboro, North Carolina.