Public Sector Leaders Program (Winter 2024)

Facilitator

Craig Szelestowski is a Lean government and transformation specialist with close to two decades of experience implementing dramatic turnarounds in Canadian government. He started Lean Agility Inc. in 2010 to apply Lean exclusively to government organizations. With his coaching, his clients have reduced lead times by up to 80%, increased capacity by up to 200% and created outstanding levels of employee engagement. 

In his public service career, as Vice President of Human Resources, Lean and Quality, he lead the Royal Canadian Mint’s Lean transformation which helped move the organization through a challenging era of cutbacks and job losses into an extended period of financial and organizational health and stability. During his tenure, the Mint realized tens of millions of dollars of Lean improvements, dramatically reduced the time and effort to deliver its products and services, moving from a financial loss, to a profit of over $68 million. In terms of employee engagement, it improved from 100 grievances per year to 20 per year and was named by Maclean’s magazine as one of “Canada’s Top 100 Employers” from 2007 to 2010. 

Over a period of the past sixteen years, Craig has introduced and/or applied Lean in over 60 projects in more than 25 public sector organizations in Canada.

He is widely regarded as one of Canada’s foremost experts on the application of Lean to both knowledge/project based work as well as to more transactional work such as permits and applications. An excellent speaker and facilitator, Craig has been called upon to share his expertise at numerous conferences across Canada, including: the 2018 Canadian Lean Summit (Results, Not Resistance: Building Buy-in and Execution into your Lean Initiative), the 2016 Conference Board of Canada Public Sector Transformation Conference (Taking a Lean Approach to Deliverology), the 2016 Ontario Public Service Lean Community of Practice Symposium (Banish the Backlog in Non-Transactional Processes), the 2016 Canadian Government Executive Annual Conference (Deliverology: Risks and Opportunities from a Lean Perspective) and the 2015 Canadian Government Executive Annual Conference (An introduction to Lean Government).  

Craig has served multiple times as a part-time professor at the Telfer School of Business at the University of Ottawa. He is currently the co-designer and instructor of Telfer’s White and Yellow Belt Lean Service programs and teaches Lean to Telfer’s MBA students.

Craig offers his services in both of Canada’s official languages; he served as the Mint’s Official Languages Co-Champion from 2004 to 2010.

Executive in Residence

Ingrid Richter is an Executive in Residence at the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa and Partner, Threshold Associates.  Her teaching, action research and consulting work has three major areas of focus:  leadership development, facilitating complex, multi-stakeholder change processes and developing change agents so that they can more effectively engage in high impact, complex change.  Her recent client work focuses on leadership and international capacity development supporting sustainability of social innovation initiatives. She has in-depth experience in provincial and federal governments, including as a Senior Fellow at the Canada School of Public Service as well as senior roles in corrections, policing and public safety.  Ingrid was the co-founder of the Canadian Organization Development Institute and designs and delivers leadership programs for the UN Staff College and the UNHCR.  In her spare time she is an active volunteer at Synapcity, (an Ottawa non-profit focused on developing citizen engagement), loves travel, poetry, cooking and learning to play the ukulele.

Facilitator

Robert Orr is an Associate at the Telfer Centre for Executive Leadership.  Prior to this, he was a Senior Faculty Member and Distinguished Fellow at the Canada School of Public Service, and for a few months, acted as Deputy Minister/President of the School.  From 2012 to 2017, he was Assistant Deputy Minister for Operations at Immigration, Refugee and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). In this role, he was responsible for leading a large domestic and international network which delivered Canada's immigration, citizenship and passport programs.

Bob was a member of the Canadian Foreign Service, first with the Department of External Affairs and subsequently with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. He served in Abidjan, Colombo, Damascus, Nairobi, and twice in London. He also held a number of positions in Ottawa, including Director of Personnel and Director General of the International Region and Director General of Refugees. From 2009 to 2012, he was the High Commissioner of Canada to Tanzania, with concurrent accreditation to Zambia, the Seychelles, the Comoros and the East African Community.

He holds an M.A. in history from Queen’s University.

Facilitator

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Christina Tector draws on over 20 years of experience working in the federal public service as a leadership facilitator, personal development coach, change leadership mentor, organizational change advisor, and mindfulness teacher. She is passionate about facilitating, supporting and guiding leaders to discover their own personal development edges, fulfill their potential and elevate the teams of people they lead.   Christina cares deeply about creating a climate of trust, compassion and authenticity for healthy humans to thrive in healthy systems.

Christina is a lifelong learner.  She is an Integral Associate Coach, a Qualified Mindfulness-Based Symptom Management teacher.  She is a certified Emotional Intelligence (EQ-i) Feedback Facilitator and Action Learning Group Facilitator.  She holds a Masters of Education Degree in Counselling Psychology from McGill University and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours Psychology), from the University of New Brunswick.

Facilitator

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James Clemens is an accomplished leadership coach and project consultant specializing in organisational culture change. He has over a decade of professional experience in executive leadership development and organisational effectiveness. Prior to becoming a management consultant, James was a manager of executive leadership programs in the Public Service of Canada as well as a Senior Policy Advisor providing strategic advice to the most senior levels of government on enterprise-wide change initiatives. James has extensive international and multi-cultural experience developing, leading and coaching executives and project teams to produce unprecedented results.