Who We Are

Sterling & Selesnick is an established and experienced organization consulting firm that has helped more than 200 government agencies and commercial enterprises master an extensive variety of complex challenges.  We design and facilitate collaborative processes of self-directed change that enable clients to improve, expand or refine their performance capabilities and add significantly greater value for their stakeholders.

Initiated in 1981 as a woman-owned small business with offices in Salem, Massachusetts and clients throughout North America, our practice is conducted by two partners who combine more than 60 years of experience consulting to more than six dozen government agencies as well as to scores of private businesses and non profit organizations; facilitating hundreds of critical meetings, sensitive discussions and strategic conversations; and personally mentoring, coaching or training over a thousand executives, managers and employees at every organizational level.

• Organizational Leadership Experience
• Recognized Professional Expertise
• Completely Customized Services
• Proven Intervention Skills
• Thought-Provoking Authenticity
• Relaxed Self-Assurance
• Quality and Responsiveness

Organizational Leadership Experience The firm’s partners staff all of its assignments.  Both partners are seasoned professionals with first-class educations, decades of broad consulting experience, many years of leadership experience building a lucrative profit center in a global consulting firm, and hands-on management experience growing their own successful business.  Our clients’ needs therefore receive the continuing attention of two seasoned senior consultants and the actions we propose are based more on practical reality than classroom theory.

Recognized Professional Expertise. Both partners have received a Hammer Award from the National Performance Review Task Force headed by former Vice President Al Gore for their respective contributions to “building a government that works better and costs less.”  Our commitment as professionals is consistently to serve clients and colleagues well beyond expectation and in a spirit of generosity which has repeatedly earned us significant client recognition.  We bring to each client situation rich and varied educational backgrounds and broad and deep multidisciplinary expertise.  Herb Selesnick holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in physics and management and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Hinda Sterling earned a Bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Massachusetts, a Master’s degree in educational counseling from Salem State College, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in human and organizational systems from Fielding Graduate University.

Completely Customized Services. We offer no packaged systems, preconceived solutions, preferred theories or proprietary methods of any kind that would impair our open-mindedness, compromise our objectivity, or limit in any way our ability to tailor interventions or solutions to each client’s substantive needs and situational requirements.

Proven Intervention Skills. An intervention is any comment, question, suggestion or recommendation that an organization consultant makes to a group either to structure one or more activities that will help the group accomplish its task or to clarify the meaning or pattern of the group’s behavior.  Both partners have a wealth of experience and expertise in making the kinds of interventions that comprise group process facilitation.  Our virtuosity in this distinctive skill-set has been honed by facilitating hundreds of meetings in more than 200 client organizations over more than three decades.  Typically, we use our practitioner understanding of interpersonal and group dynamics to design and facilitate interactions that give participants not only desired outcomes but also important new insights into how they can work together more cohesively and productively.  Our comfort and fluency with group processes enable each of us to act unobtrusively but effectively as a supportive presence that empowers and engages meeting participants and enables them to achieve results far superior to what they would have achieved in our absence or working individually.

Thought-Provoking Authenticity. We practice organization consulting because it provides the richly satisfying opportunity by being open and genuine to help clients achieve broader and deeper perspectives so that they can apply their own knowledge and skills more effectively.  When our customized interventions help clients understand themselves and their environments in new and different ways, valuable new insights emerge that enable them to distinguish either professionally or organizationally who they are from who they need to become, and then to begin moving purposefully and confidently from where they are to where they ultimately want to be.

Relaxed Self-Assurance. Much of our practice is with presidential appointees and senior executives of cabinet-rank federal agencies and related stakeholder organizations, many of which are the largest and most respected entities worldwide in their field.  Another important segment of our practice is with non profit professional associations staffed by highly trained scientific and technical personnel.  A particularly sensitive portion of our practice involves special assignments and high-level private briefings for senior public officials and association governance executives.

Quality and Responsiveness. We have deliberately remained small in the belief that, in consulting work, size often detracts from consistent professional excellence.  The absence of branch offices and junior practitioners helps us to ensure our independence and objectivity because we remain answerable only to our clients and ourselves.  Involving the same two highly experienced professionals intensively and interchangeably in every phase of any assignment we undertake enables us to maintain uniformly high standards of quality and responsiveness in all aspects of our work.

Herb Selesnick

Education

Herb Selesnick holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in physics and management and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professional Experience

Dr. Selesnick is a co-founder and partner of Sterling & Selesnick, Inc., an organization consulting firm that helps clients perform better and add value through collaborative processes of self-directed change.  In this capacity, he provides research, consulting, facilitation, training and coaching in support of customized processes that enable clients to improve, expand or refine their performance capabilities and add significantly greater value for their stakeholders.

With his partner Hinda Sterling, Dr. Selesnick has co-authored numerous professional papers on the role of customized collaborative processes in supporting self-directed organizational and individual change and improved organizational and individual performance.  He speaks on this subject before government, business and professional groups throughout North America, and has delivered professional presentations at MIT in the political science department and the Sloan School of Management, at the University of Pennsylvania in the Wharton School of Business, and at Harvard University in the social statistics curriculum and the Kennedy School of Government, as well as in the executive agencies of more than six dozen government agencies.

Dr. Selesnick is a member of the International Coach Federation, International Association of Facilitators, National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation and Boston Facilitators’ Roundtable.  He has been a panelist for the American Arbitration Association (AAA); has served as an organizational consultant at all levels of the public sector workforce; and has been recognized by the AAA as well as by the FMCS for his contributions to the encouragement of voluntary dispute resolution.  He received a Hammer Award from the National Performance Review Task Force headed by former Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore for his “contribution to building a government that works better and costs less” in connection with his organizational consulting support of design teams that developed blueprints for modernizing administrative structures, business systems and labor-management relations in the Internal Revenue Service.

Hinda Sterling

Education

Hinda Sterling earned a Bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Massachusetts, a Master’s degree in educational counseling from Salem State College, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in human and organizational systems from Fielding Graduate University.

Professional Experience

Dr. Sterling is a co-founder and partner of Sterling & Selesnick, Inc., an organization consulting firm that helps clients perform better and add value through collaborative processes of self-directed change.  In this capacity, she provides research, consulting, facilitation, training and coaching in support of customized processes that enable clients to improve, expand or refine their performance capabilities and add significantly greater value for their stakeholders.

Dr. Sterling has served for more than three decades as an organizational consultant for agencies and individuals at all levels of government as well as for major corporations, institutions of advanced education and non profit associations and professional societies.  Her clients have included the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs Service, Internal Revenue Service, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Highway Administration, Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), Department of Health and Human Services, Library of Congress, National Institutes of Health, Department of Labor, Office of Science and Technology Policy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, New York State Governor’s Office of Employee Relations, Massachusetts College of Art and Missouri Department of Social Services, among many others.

With her partner, Herb Selesnick, Dr. Sterling has co-authored numerous professional papers on the role of customized collaborative processes in supporting self-directed organizational and individual change and improved organizational and individual performance.  She speaks on this subject before government, business and professional groups throughout North America, has delivered keynote remarks for the National Association of Female Executives and for the U.S Office of Personnel Management, and has designed and led graduate management education seminars for major universities.

Dr. Sterling is a member of the International Coach Federation, American Psychological Association, International Association of Facilitators and Boston Facilitators Roundtable.  She has been a panelist for the American Arbitration Association (AAA); has served as an organizational consultant at all levels of the public sector workforce; and has been recognized by the AAA as well as by the FMCS for her contributions to the encouragement of voluntary dispute resolution.  She received a Hammer Award from the National Performance Review Task Force headed by former Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore for her “contribution to building a government that works better and costs less” in connection with her organizational consulting support of a successful negotiated rulemaking between Customs Service executives and representatives of the U.S. import/export trade community.

back to top