About Tom Reynolds

Professional Overview

Tom Reynolds is a business psychologist, executive coach, and trusted advisor to senior leaders across a range of industries. He helps leaders and teams uncover the “strategy” they need to get unstuck make progress on goals that previously felt intractable. His work focuses on helping people to re-shape their mindset to solve problems they never expected, and often achieve more than they thought they could.

 

Tom is a co-author of The Efficient Frontier of Teaming™, where he contributes his expertise around psychological safety and agile goal-setting. Specifically, his chapters help teams to see how the right kind of conflict can build psychological safety and that you can hit a moving target if you plan as though your plan will break down. 

 

With a background in business and clinical psychology, Tom uses a practitioner scholar approach to designing leadership solutions that bridge the divide between research and practical application. He holds a doctorate of psychology (PsyD) and masters in business administration (MBA) from Widener University, the only program in the United States that provides integrated training across those two disciplines.

 

Tom works with senior executives across industries including biotech, manufacturing, financial services, and professional services. At an individual level, he helps leaders regain balance and stay within themselves to regain traction on seemingly intractable goals. Working with teams, Tom focuses on building team resilience by taking interpersonal obstacles head-on, but with skill and commitment to core values.

 

In addition to his coaching and consulting work, Tom is active in his local community, coaching youth sports and guiding hikes with an organization called Friends of the Blue Hills. He also serves as treasurer and board member for a non-profit called Leah’s Dream that provides scholarships for young women to attend secondary school in northern Ghana. All of these activities help him continually refine his broad perspective on the world and sharpen his problem-solving skills.
 

I got into this work because I like helping people thrive. I stay in this work because I have become fascinated by discovering “what actually works” to produce change. So often, team success seems to be the result of a paradox - a failure that creates learning that turns into a future win, a conflict that becomes the perfect moment to strengthen trust and commitment. My journey has been one of surprises, and I have learned that the skill of adapting to surprise is a critical differentiator of today’s most successful leaders, teams, and organizations. I get up every day with the goal of building this skill in others, and I inevitably find that I am refining this skill in myself.

 

I think the simplest definition of leadership is the most powerful one. To lead means to go first. That means any member of a team can lead, and at least once, every member of the team has to lead. In my experience, when I am able to help teams discover this approach to leadership, they achieve results that surprise them.

Why This Work Matters to Me​

 

I got into this work because I like helping people thrive. I stay in this work because I have become fascinated by discovering “what actually works” to produce change. So often, team success seems to be the result of a paradox - a failure that creates learning that turns into a future win, a conflict that becomes the perfect moment to strengthen trust and commitment. My journey has been one of surprises, and I have learned that the skill of adapting to surprise is a critical differentiator of today’s most successful leaders, teams, and organizations. I get up every day with the goal of building this skill in others, and I inevitably find that I am refining this skill in myself.

 

I think the simplest definition of leadership is the most powerful one. To lead means to go first. That means any member of a team can lead, and at least once, every member of the team has to lead. In my experience, when I am able to help teams discover this approach to leadership, they achieve results that surprise them.

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