Stefani Quam

Applied Organizational Psychologist | Transformational Leader

About Stefani

Driven, Passionate, Confident

For over 10 years, Stefani has been helping businesses in the Non-profit, Retail, Manufacturing, and IT industries navigate organizational change for competitive advantage in the evolving marketplace. Stefani specializes in operational scalability, working with teams of 12 to 300 to improve their analytical processes, automation, strategy development, and organizational knowledge sharing. She has worked for companies such as AARP, Kohl’s, Fleet Farm, Homesnap, and API Heat Transfer. Her achievements include leading large-scale projects, such as a 25% cost reduction to loyalty program operations, implementation of a marketing mix modeling pilot program, leading an executive design thinking workshop for a buy-online-pick-up-in-store program scalability, and designing and implementing several end-to-end marketing operations. Stefani’s primary career interests are organizational effectiveness and culture change, through people management and coaching techniques.

My Approach

Stefani combines project management and change management principles to create a people-first approach to designing organizational solutions. She uses her expertise in organizational psychology to address cultural norms and optimize organizational collaboration through shared values and objectives. 

My Process

Stefani facilitates design thinking techniques with stakeholders to discover, identify, and articulate the business need(s) and guiding vision of a project. Once conceptualized, she applies Agile principles to develop solutions. Her execution-focused leadership balances business and organizational transformations to create sustainable behavior and culture shifts.

Unique Framework

Stefani leverages a proven 5 phase framework to maximize innovation with and within the teams she leads. Her framework is built on team creativity and innovation research, focused on the use of leadership techniques proven to produce high performing teams. 

What is Transformational Leadership?

Transformational Leadership refers to an individual’s ability to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward organizational success and is demonstrated through behaviors associated with developing psychological safety, knowledge sharing, and empowerment with (and within) their teams.

Stefani’s practice of Transformational Leadership concentrates on driving innovation among strategic, technical, and creative teams. Innovation in this context, refers to the creation of beneficial novelty on behalf of an organization. She uses team exercises and facilitation techniques to stimulate innovative behaviors as identified by Kleysen, R.F. & Street, C.T. (2001).

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Opportunity Exploration

Looking for, identifying, and gathering information on opportunities
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Generativity

Generating ideas, solutions, representations, categories, associations and opportunities

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Formative Investigation

Formulating, experimenting, evaluating ideas and solutions

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Championing

Mobilizing resources, persuading and influencing, pushing and negotiating, challenging and risk-taking
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Application

Implementing, modifying, routinizing

What is Applied Organizational Psychology?

Applied Organizational Psychology is the scientific examination of how human cognition, attitudes, and behaviors are affected by the context of leaders, co-workers, and organizational policies, structure, culture, etc. Core topics include motivation, leadership, group and team performance, job attitudes, organizational climate and culture, and organization development.

Stefani uses her unique skill set to assess organizational and team dynamics through interviews, empirical studies, meeting observations, and strategic alignment activities to identify and address discrepancies between organizational culture and organizational climate. Organizational culture, in this context, is defined as the beliefs and values that govern the organizational entity, while organizational climate refers to the actualization of those beliefs through behaviors and interactions of the organization’s members McLean, L. D. (2005). Stefani focuses on how the organization’s leadership models impact the intrinsic motivation of employees. Leadership ability to harness employees’ intrinsic motivation has been found to be a key characteristic in successful, innovative teams Ostroff, C. (1993). Stefani works with both leaders and managers to help them address the individual needs of their team members as well as their teams as a whole to increase innovation and agility.

Case Studies

Driven, Passionate, Confident

Endorsements

As her direct manager at AARP, I noted Stef is gifted at having the tough conversations while protecting the dignity and integrity of those involved. My team benefitted from her ability to manage demanding client relationships and her strategic thinking skills which enable her to anticipate executive needs, build organizational alignment, and deliver on agile processes. Stef works well in collaboration and providing direction for a team. I am happy to recommend Stef.

Anne Walsh
Digital Platform and Product Director
AARP

Stefani has managed her objectives in satisfactory way. The whole audiovisual team at the Council of Europe are very happy with her work which included production co-ordination, editing work and assistant work on day to day basis.
If you hire Stefani you will have a creative and loyal colleague.

Head of Production
Council of Europe

Stefani came into a team with little production experience, so she was a very precious asset for us. She completed all her tasks with professionalism and expertise. Everyone involved in Viewpoint was very satisfied with her work, which brought an extra dose of quality to the program.

Francisco Empis
Partner
Remarkable Communication & Image Management

Stefani is great to work with. She is responsive, detail-oriented, and quick to learn. She does a great job of communicating and asking the right questions. She is always candid and fair, and willing to work diligently to get the deal done. A delight to work with.

Steven Phillips
General Manager
Warehouse-Lighting.com

Stefani’s responsiveness and quick grasp of evolving situations was instrumental in our collaborative relationship over the past year: she has a well-developed ability to synthesize project requirements and stay on top of many moving parts to keep them all on-track and on-schedule. Stefani is a deft professional, who kept an even keel when surprises arose and deadlines got near, which was confidence-inspiring. She’s got a lot to offer any company lucky enough to have her, and it was a pleasure to get to work with her.

Programmer
Okanjo

Stefani is incredibly talented with good business instincts and passionate focus on processes and organizational strategies. Besides incredible intelligence in the office she is a creative artist who has shown her works in gallery spaces. Stef works very hard, takes feedback very well and uses her curiosity to learn and apply to new ideas that can benefit the teams she partners with.

Adam Cera
Senior Designer
Amazon Go

Stefani and I worked together on a Pivot pro bono consulting project. Stefani is very thoughtful and diligent in her work. She strives to ensure consensus while never losing site of the needs of the client. Stefani managed a delicate component of the project and deliverable and asked the client to closely examine what was and wasn’t working within the organization. Although a potentially delicate topic, she handled it with grace and truly created a space for the client to look inwards at their organization. Stefani was essential in successfully meeting the needs of the client.

Associate Director Strategic Planning and Implementation
Archdiocese of Chicago

Rarely do you get to work with someone who is as passionate about change management and talent development as Stefani. I have had the pleasure of collaborating with Stefani on numerous projects and initiatives while at Fleet Farm. Observing her ability to garner buy-in from stakeholders from top to bottom throughout the organization is astounding. Stefani’s usage of very large post-it notes will truly be missed. She would be an excellent addition to any organization committed to continuous improvement and development.

Gary Scray
Manager of Loyalty and Credit
Fleet Farm

One of Stefani’s many strengths is her ability to foster collaboration across different areas of the enterprise. She is a strong motivator and can help the team define its goals and then deliver on follow-through. Stefani, while leading many team-level process improvements, developed better documentation and meeting structure and ultimately brought better visibility and urgency to larger matters of efficiencies. Stefani’s signature tone towards others is always calm and collected, sincere, approachable, relatable and grounded in transparency.

Digital Nomad; Creative Entrepeneur

Stefani posses the most important qualities of a good leader vision, influence, and positivity. She has inspired our team to do things we never thought we could. She was able to help our team identify pain points in our daily operations, that then led to improvement strategies in the identification of issues within our organization which fostered the development of structured problem-solving documents. These documents created value by bridging tactical and strategic requirements, consisting of the processes, strategies, and systems that sustain them. Glad to have been apart of the process!

Senior Marketing Analytics Consultant
Lityx, LLC

Frequently Asked Questions

I Get These Questions All The Time!

MAY WE CONTACT YOU FOR AN INTERVIEW?

Yes, I am always willing to discuss my work and my purpose.

MAY WE HIRE YOU AS A CONSULTANT OR FOR A SPECIFIC PROJECT?
Independent consulting is subject to availability. Please reach out with the specifics of your request and project to start a conversation.
ARE YOU WILLING TO TRAVEL TO RUN A WORKSHOP?
I am willing to travel within the United States.  
DO YOU DO SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS?
Yes! Please reach out and introduce yourself, along with providing the date, event, location, and topic details to arrange a preliminary call about the opportunity.