Cindy McCauley

Cindy McCauley, PhD

Honorary Senior Fellow

Current Role

Cindy McCauley is an Honorary Senior Fellow at CCL. She designs and manages R&D projects, coaches action learning teams, writes for multiple audiences, and is a frequent speaker at professional conferences.

Experience

With over 30 years of experience at CCL, Cindy has contributed to many aspects of CCL’s work: research, publication, product development, program evaluation, coaching, and management.

Cindy co-developed 2 of CCL’s assessment tools, Benchmarks® and the Job Challenge Profile, and co-edited 3 books for talent management professionals: The Center for Creative Leadership Handbook of Leadership Development (Jossey-Bass, 2010), Experience-Driven Leader Development (Wiley, 2013), and Using Experience to Develop Leadership Talent, (Jossey-Bass, 2014). Her most recent publications include Change Now! Five Steps to Better Leadership (CCL, 2014), which guides leaders through a process of crafting and enacting development plans, and Direction, Alignment, and Commitment: Achieving Better Results through Leadership (CCL, 2016), which helps leaders diagnose leadership issues in groups.

As a result of her research and applied work, Cindy is an advocate for using on-the-job experience as a central leader development strategy, for seeing leadership as a collective endeavor, and for integrating constructive-developmental theories of human growth into leader development practice. Cindy was awarded the 2017 Marion Gislason Award for Excellence in Leadership Development by Boston University.

Educational Background

Cindy has a PhD in Industrial–Organizational Psychology from the University of Georgia and a BA in Psychology from King College.

Insights From Cindy

Ever wonder the meaning of leadership? Based on our decades of research, we define leadership as a social process that enables individuals to achieve collective results.
You need direction, alignment, and commitment (DAC) to make leadership happen in your group or organization. Learn more about our DAC framework and how leadership is a social process to foster more of it in your group or organization.
This introduction to our leadership philosophy explains how direction, alignment, and commitment (the elements of our DAC framework) are key in how leadership works, connecting exponential potential with collective progress.