John Behr, PhD

Across over 21 years in consulting, Dr. John Behr has refined his expertise in the assessment and development of talent. He has led many large scale leadership development initiatives and has conducted over a thousand assessments for the selection, promotion and development of people at all levels. He has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies and clients have ranged from major airlines and manufacturing corporations to family businesses and biotechnology startups.

Representative assessment assignments include:

• For a leading pharmaceutical company, evaluated the team of senior vice presidents for purposes of development and succession planning.
• In a global diversified manufacturer evaluated senior talent within newly acquired companies for purposes of determining talent gaps and opportunities.
• Within one of the world's largest providers of equipment for the construction industry evaluated the senior team within newly acquired companies for purposes of merging talent into the parent organizations.
• At the request of the Board of Directors of a large Internet retailer, conducted executive evaluations of the entire C-Suite and all Vice Presidents for purposes of succession planning.
• In the government domain, Dr. Behr has consulted with the US State Department and has conducted hundreds of psychological evaluations for the screening of American police leaders as candidates to serve as leaders in rebuilding the law enforcement infrastructure in post war-torn environments such as Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor and Qatar.
• When the Federal Government took on the challenge of restructuring the Chicago Housing Authority, Dr. Behr redesigned their leadership development initiative, building numerous programs for the progressive development of senior management.

A partial list of client organizations John has worked with includes Amazon/Alexa, Baxter Healthcare, Boise Cascade, Chicago Housing Authority, Chicago Public Schools, Compass Group, DynCorp Aerospace, Lucent Technologies, S.C. Johnson, Snap-On Tools, Swiss Air, United Airlines, US State Department, W.W. Grainger, and YMCA of the USA.

Dr. Behr obtained undergraduate degrees in psychology and philosophy from Marquette University and his master and doctoral degrees in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He is active with the American Psychological Association, the Illinois Psychological Association, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. He served for three years on the Board of Examiners for the Lincoln Award for Business Excellence (Malcolm Baldrige-Illinois). He teaches Industrial and Organizational Psychology courses at Loyola University of Chicago. He has two children and lives in Evanston, Illinois.

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