About – Stephen C. Schoonover, M.D., Partner

Stephen C. Schoonover, M.D., Partner

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Dr. Stephen C. Schoonover is currently the President of Schoonover Associates, LLC, an organization that focuses on leadership development and competency-based talent management solutions. Dr. Schoonover has been providing consulting services in this area for over 40 years with organizations in virtually all business sectors, specializing in leadership, coaching, executive development, strategic human resource consulting, competency model building, assessment capabilities, and creating integrated talent management systems.

Dr. Schoonover is also an acknowledged expert in human performance criteria and metrics, and has developed competency models for all levels of leadership and virtually all functions. In addition to being an expert in building entire human capital management systems, Dr. Schoonover has extensive experience in executive coaching, behavioral interviewing and development of assessment tools and processes, succession planning, workforce assessment and training and development. Dr. Schoonover has implemented hundreds of competency model-building engagements over the past 40 years, including extensive experience with creating both level-specific leadership profiles and job-family frameworks for various functional areas. He has also developed validated competency profiles and instruments, such as an adaptive leadership framework and a values and preferences inventory that support an entire leadership development program. Dr. Schoonover also has in-depth experience teaching and certifying HR professionals and consultants how to build models for organizations. Many of his large engagements spanned multiple years and involved developing competencies and leadership and talent management programs for several leadership levels and functional areas.

General Client Experiences

Dr. Schoonover has implemented consulting engagements related to competency development, leadership program design and implementation, functional transformation and competency-based talent management applications for companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Accenture, William M. Mercer, Ernst and Young, GlaxoSmithKline, Tyson Foods, Merck & Company, Johnson & Johnson, Lockheed Martin, Oracle, Corporation, General Electric, Freddie Mac, Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, Lockheed Martin, Citicorp, ING, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Bunge, BB&T Bank, Ingenico, Doosan and others. He has provided specific leadership program development services for organizations such as: Oracle, Freddie Mac, Doosan, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Stanley Works, and The Center for Executive Women at Kellogg School of Management. Dr. Schoonover has developed learning systems approaches, materials, websites and provided specifications and guidance for selecting and configuring LMS software systems for many organizations including Merck and Company, Johnson&Johnson, and The Joint Warfare Analysis Center. Dr. Schoonover has completed comprehensive training needs assessments for organizations such as General Electric, and Singapore Airlines, and EMC; developed a methodology and web-based toolkit for EMC consultants to conduct training needs assessments related to IT technical skills for their own clients; and led a project to re-engineer all of Singapore Airlines training schools.

Medical Practice and Consulting Experiences

A graduate from Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Schoonover was board-certified in psychiatry and neurology, and served on the faculty at Harvard Medical School for over 20 years. He has served in many roles during his medical career, including managing inpatient units, providing individual and group psychotherapy, providing consulting services at a large teaching hospital at Harvard; starting and managing a psychiatric clinic; starting a continuing education group at Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Hospital; and participating in various committees such as the oversight committee for Blue and Blue Shield psychiatric practices for Massachusetts. Dr. Schoonover also has extensive experience providing talent management consulting for medical institutions, including assessment services, to a range of medical organizations such as Heartland Healthcare; Advocate Healthcare; Baystate Medical Center; University of Virginia Medical Center; Bermuda Hospital; Banner Health; The Iowa Clinic; and University of South Florida. He has provided similar consulting services to other medically-related organizations such as Blue Cross/Blue Shield Maryland; Blue Cross/Blue Shield Rochester Area; GE Healthcare; and Smith & Nephew. Dr. Schoonover has developed employment screening tests for Robert Half for various support roles, such as medical billers/coders, and other medical care support roles. Dr. Schoonover also has extensive experience as researcher, author and consultant in the field of pharmacology/psychopharmacology, including publishing a series of books on psychopharmacology and consulting with various pharmaceutical companies such as Praecis Pharmaceuticals; Johnson & Johnson; Solvay Pharmaceuticals; Guilford Pharmaceuticals; Merck; GlaxoSmithKline; Pfizer; and Serono. He has also published widely on topics related to psychiatry including suicide, crisis management, and deinstitutionalization, among others.

Academic Experience and Publishing

Dr. Schoonover has taught at Harvard Medical School, Harvard’s psychology department, and Harvard Business School, the Kellogg School of Management and The Sloane School of Management at MIT. Dr. Schoonover has published several articles, and guides/toolkits related to leadership and talent management, such as HR Competencies for the New Century as a follow up to Competency-Based HR Applications: Results of a Comprehensive Study in partnership with the Society for Human Resource Management. In addition, Dr. Schoonover has produced and written a large variety of media-based materials for business and medical training, as well as contributing articles to a number of psychiatric and scientific journals. He has also created development programs and training packages for many corporations and training products for several human resource training organizations, as well as a core curriculum for leadership based on a research-based leadership framework he developed. He collaborated with Nicholas Weiler in Your Soul At Work: Five Steps to a More Fulfilling Career and Life published in 2001 by the Paulist Press; and has completed two books related to human resource development: Changing Ways, published by the American Management Association Press, based on a series of competency studies about managing organizational change; and Managing to Relate, published by Addison-Wesley, based on a series of studies about interpersonal skills. Dr. Schoonover has published recent articles, including Determining What You Value Most in the Institute of Supply Management Magazine; What Do We Know about Competency Modeling in the International Journal of Selection and Assessment, August, 2013; A Competency-Based Approach to Internal Audit Skills Assessment, in Internal Auditing, May/June 2014; and Linking Competencies to Compensation: Practical Guidelines for Design and Implementation, Journal of Compensation and Benefits, July/August 2014.