Our Services
Will Transform You & Your Organization
Using The People First Approach, Croteau & Company helps institutions of higher education, academic medical centers, government, healthcare institutions, NGOs, arts organizations, and social justice movements increase their impact on the world by focusing their leaders on their greatest assets: their people and their strategy.
Croteau & Company's approach toward strategic transformation is purposeful. We assess (A), we innovate (I) and we deliver (D). Our A.I.D. approach allows us to understand the current state of successes and challenges for leaders and organizations. Our advisors create solutions to amplify strengths and remove barriers to achievement. Then, we deliver by showing you how to do just that: deliver.
Strategic Planning & Organizational Strategy
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” – Gloria Steinem
Our advisors can help your organization dream and imagine the ideal mission, vision, and strategy. We then help you design a strategic planning process that is right for you and your organization, eliminating barriers, bottlenecks, indecision, and inaction.
It all starts with the right organizational mission, vision, and a long-term strategy to achieve ambitious goals.
Leadership Advising
"I think self-awareness is probably the most important thing to becoming a champion." – Billie Jean King
Leadership can be lonely at times. Our advisors provide leadership advising that gives you the private, confidential, and judgement-free space to explore your most critical leadership challenges.
Whether pondering the next move in your organization, how to better manage up, or how you can be the best manager to your team, leadership advising offers you sage, unbiased, wise counsel and advice to achieve your leadership goals.
Leadership & Career Counsel
“Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.” – e. e. cummings
Exploring what your next role or even what career might be best for you can be daunting. Our advisors can help you discover your strengths, and determine roles and careers that fit you the best.
You spend so much of your life working; finding a role in a place, in an industry, that also brings you joy is our ultimate goal.
Leadership Development
“Ideals are like stars. You will not succeed in touching them. But like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides and following them you will reach your destiny.” – Carl Schurz
Developing leaders is as much an art as it is a science. The art is how your advisor guides you to self-awareness and the science sets the chart of specific goals to get you where you want to be, or where your organization wants you to get.
Leadership development is how our advisors help you or your organization find the best inspirers, empathizers, imaginers, and igniters. Leadership development is not only about transforming you as a leader, but also about transforming your organization, because of the leaders you develop.
Organizational & Talent Effectivenss Assessment
"Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. After you become a leader, success is about growing others.” – Jack Welch
In order for an organization to be successful it has to understand the enhancers or the barriers to making its people successful.
A talent effectiveness assessment does just that: it helps the organization learn what key areas in your people strategy are holding you back and what small changes or investments could make you even more effective.
After our assessment phase, we give you the blueprint and the road map with a step-by-step approach on how your people, your organization, can be even more effective.
Culture & Change Management
“Determine what behaviors and beliefs you value as a company, and have everyone live true to them. These behaviors and beliefs should be so essential to your core, that you don’t even think of it as culture.” – Brittany Forsyth
Culture might seem intangible, but our advisors bring it into view. We can help you and your organization establish and execute the kind of workplace you want to be, and get you there.
Building, growing, or expanding culture takes effort and time. Change is hard but it does not have to be. Our advisors can help you and your organization realize your culture aspirations and help you change it at the same time through the development of key core values and inculcating them into your organizational systems.
Leadership Transition & Succession Planning
“The most successful leader of all is one who sees another picture not yet actualized. He sees the things which belong in his present picture but which are not yet there…” – Mary Parker Follett
Ensuring the successful future of organizations is all about leadership transition and succession planning. Every leader or board should be developing their next leader replacement; whether a chief executive officer or a vice president, transition does not always mean finding someone from the outside.
Our advisors can help you assess your leadership scenario, develop a future generation of leaders, and strategize for any transition, planned or unexpected.
Thought Leadership Published by our Advisors
Books
My Thinning Years: Starving the Gay Within
An Amazon best-selling memoir exploring identity, queerness, and self-acceptance, and what it means to live authentically as a leader and human being.
Making the Case for Leadership: Profiles of Chief Advancement Officers in Higher Education
A deep exploration of the role, impact, and leadership journeys of chief advancement officers in higher education, highlighting how they drive mission, philanthropy, and institutional progress.
The People First Approach: A Guide to Recruiting, Developing, and Retaining the Right People
Methodologies and practical tools for recruiting, developing, and retaining the right people, grounded in a People First philosophy that aligns talent strategy with mission, culture, and long-term institutional success.
Effective Measures: The Return on Investing in Talent Management
A research-informed look at how strategic talent management drives measurable returns for mission-driven institutions.
Eating Disorders: The Journey to Recovery Workbook
A practical, compassionate workbook supporting individuals and families on the path to healing from eating disorders.
Articles & Essays
Our Experts
Driving significant progress for leaders in higher education, private secondary schools, academic medical centers, hospitals, and complex nonprofits through specialized leadership and organizational strategy.
Dr. Jon Derek Croteau
Founder & Principal Advisor
Kerry Brady Seitz, M.A.
Managing Advisor
Justin Croteau, M.B.A.
Special Assistant to the Advisors
Dr. Jon Derek Croteau, Founder & Principal Advisor, is an internationally recognized author, executive coach, leadership advisor, and strategy and organizational consultant. With over twenty-five years of providing counsel to executive leaders, consulting on strategic planning, board governance, human resources and talent management, and executing leadership searches, his unique background as a chief administrative and chief strategy officer, leadership, talent, and strategy consultant, author, professor, and speaker makes him a thoughtful and thought-provoking advisor to an array of individuals and institutions across the globe.
Since 1998, Dr. Croteau has been counseling individuals, executives, managers, and organizations across the globe, working for, or consulting on effective strategic planning, talent management and human resources initiatives, diversity, equity, and inclusion, organizational structure and design, and executive search in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors.
Dr. Croteau’s work in organizational development, leadership, and talent management began at Watson Wyatt Worldwide (now WTW) where he learned how to harness the power of investing in human capital. At Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Croteau’s work in talent management was groundbreaking for the institution, helping it reach a new level of cross-university and intra-departmental effectiveness. His impact expanded to influence effective-people-practices across the not-for-profit and for-profit sectors. He was recruited to WittKieffer and quickly became a partner at the firm with a thriving, international practice for a decade in executive search, executive advising, and leadership solutions. He has served in transitional, transformative leadership roles at organizations like Emerson College, Northwestern University, Lindauer Global, The Skatepark Project (Tony Hawk's Foundation), and Washington State University. He has consulted and worked with leaders and boards at institutions like Australian National University, American University in Beirut, Artis—Naples, the Brearley School, Columbia University, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Deerfield Academy, Emory University, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Neighborhood Connections, Oregon Health and Science University, Russell Reynolds Associates, Weston Theater Company, University of California, Union of Concerned Scientists, Wellesley College, and Williams College.
He has authored many books: Effective Measures: The Return on Investing in Strategic Talent Management, The People First Approach: A Guide to Recruiting, Developing, and Retaining the Right People, Making the Case for Leadership: Profiles of Chief Advancement Officers in Higher Education, and the Amazon-Best-Selling memoir, My Thinning Years: Starving the Gay Within. He is a contributing writer in Goodman & Villipiano's Eating Disorders: The Journey to Recovery Workbook and has published poems, articles, and essays which can be read in the likes of Huffington Post, Insight into Diversity, Inside Higher Education, The Good Men Project, and the International Journal for Educational Advancement. He is currently working on a new book to be published by Bloomsbury in 2027 on queer leadership.
Dr. Croteau is a Fellow at the Institute for Inclusive Leadership at Simmons University, and has served as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon in the H. John Heinz III College and at the University of Rochester’s Warner Graduate School of Education. Dr. Croteau has lectured in classrooms and institutes, and has spoken at conferences from Boston to San Francisco to Hong Kong to Singapore to Sydney to Brisbane to Edinburgh to Madrid.
He was appointed to Carnegie Mellon University's Diversity Advisory Council, and was Vice Chair of Emerson College's Executive Board of Directors. He was on the Board of Ambassadors for The Home for Little Wanderers, served as a mentor for Point Foundation, and was on the Deans’ Advisory Board for Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development.
His degrees include a doctorate from Boston University, a master’s from Northwestern University, and a bachelor’s (summa cum laude) from Emerson College. He attended Georgetown University’s Institute for Leadership, studied and lived abroad in Spain and in the Netherlands, and is a proud graduate of Hurricane Island Outward Bound School.
Ms. Kerry Brady Seitz, Managing Advisor, is Vice President, Women's Leadership, and heads the development of Women’s Leadership programming at Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership. She brings a wealth of knowledge and expertise to produce innovative, research-based learning journeys that foster gender parity in organizational leadership worldwide. As a member of the Institute’s leadership team, Ms. Seitz is deeply committed to establishing the Institute as a global authority on the intersection of leadership, equity, and inclusion.
A Certified Career Coach, Ms. Seitz began her work in leadership advising, development, and strategy as Principal at Sunrise Coaching & Consulting where she worked predominantly with women relaunching and redefining their career journey.
Ms. Seitz was Vice President of Learning and Development at Landit, a career development tech startup aimed at democratizing career success. Prior to that role, she was the Director of Advancing Women and Inclusive Leadership solutions and Executive Director of the Women in Leadership Institute at Linkage, a global leadership consulting firm.
Ms. Seitz spent the first ten years of her career in the mental health field. She has served as a clinician at the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children; a researcher at the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College; a coalition and program manager for the Support to End Exploitation Now coalition at the Children’s Advocacy Center of Suffolk County; and an adjunct faculty member in the criminal justice department at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
She earned her Bachelor's degree in Human Development & Psychology and her Master's degree in Counseling Psychology, both from Boston College, and is certified as a coach by the Life Purpose Institute.
For over two decades, Mr. Justin Croteau has been helping C-Suite executives and their teams achieve ambitious missions and goals. Through his strong organizational skills, financial acumen, and tactical-centered approach, Mr. Croteau aims to ensure leaders are as effective as possible day and night. Currently, Mr. Croteau works for the Chief Revenue Officer at Yahoo!, whose team is comprised of over two thousand employees worldwide, and is based in New York City. Prior to Yahoo!, Mr. Croteau worked in similar key roles at Verizon Media, Viacom, IDEXX, and Carnegie Mellon University.
Mr. Croteau has served on many boards and councils, and is an active member of the community, volunteering for organizations like the Trevor Project, Point Foundation, and GLOBAL VOLUNTEERS. He served as Secretary of the Board of Directors for the Partridge Hill Homeowners Association, the Board of Directors for 113 Newbury Street, and Charlie West.
Mr. Croteau earned a BA and an MBA from Providence College. He is an avid Broadway, Off-Broadway, Lincoln Center, and museum patron and enjoys theatre, the arts, traveling, the outdoors, and home design/curation.
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New York City, NY / Naples, FL
PHONE
+1 (347) 556-6330
@croteauandco