Karen Coplan is a Senior Consultant with The Leader’s Edge. She is an Industrial and Organizational Psychologist with over 20 years of corporate and consulting experience working across a variety of industries. Karen has extensive expertise in executive coaching, leadership development, and assessment. Her coaching approach focuses on helping clients see patterns and trends in their behavior/experiences, challenging their assumptions, in order to help them push beyond their own boundaries. She is fluent in Spanish, completed an expatriate assignment in Spain, and has also led global talent management projects. These experiences enable Karen to be particularly effective in coaching leaders who are working in global or multi-cultural environments.
Karen is experienced in coaching leaders from the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean who range from the C-Suite to high potential managers. Examples of recent client engagements include: executive coaching for leaders transitioning to senior leadership roles, coaching as part of an ongoing leadership development program for emerging women leaders from Latin America and the Caribbean, and providing assessment, development planning, and coaching for an organization’s high potential leaders for the past 8 years. Her coaching specialties include: executive presence and communication, emotional intelligence, coaching skills for leaders, influence, conflict management, and resiliency/stress management.
Karen has a keen understanding of ‘best in class’ leadership, as she has had the opportunity to consult with clients across a wide variety of industries throughout North America and Latin America. She has conducted in-depth assessments of hundreds of executives for purposes of executive selection, internal development, succession planning, and mergers/acquisitions, providing subsequent feedback and coaching for clients. As part of this work, she provided feedback and coaching in Spanish to dozens of individuals who were located in Latin America. During her tenure at Motorola, Karen led large-scale projects, both domestic and international, within the areas of corporate succession planning, high-potential leadership development, expatriate selection and repatriation, and training.
Karen holds a BA in Psychology and Spanish from the University of Texas and a MA and PhD from the University of Houston in Industrial & Organizational Psychology. Karen is currently an executive coach with Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management Executive Education. She previously served as a lecturer in the Effective Leadership series at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business MBA program for 7 years. She is active in the Human Resources Management Association of Chicago and the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology.