Marea O’Sullivan
Principal Consultant

Expertise

Marea has over 15 years experience as an international Learning and Development professional and has been working for Linkage Western Europe as a consultant for the past 6 years. Marea is a specialist in the design and implementation of solutions to achieve individual, team or organisation wide behavioural change. She works in English, French and Spanish. Marea has experience using a broad range of tools and techniques in projects involving consulting, facilitating and coaching. With regards to her approach, Marea has a highly empowering style and uses measurable outcomes created in partnership with her clients. The result is durable solutions with a good fit to the individual and/or organisation.

Professional Background

Marea’s experience, which includes commercial line management, spans a number of industries: Media, IT, Financial Services, Public Sector, Aviation, Transport, Hospitality, Property, etc..
Marea’s consultancy work currently occupies 30 percent of her time. Current and previous consultancy projects include: A key role in a major Benchmarking project, as part of the UK Deputy Prime Minister’s White Paper on Competitiveness. This involved using a competency framework to assess skills and training in organisations across Europe and assessing the links between training, skills and business performance. As Organisational Development Director for a property company Marea was charged with aligning the organisational structure and activities to fit a challenging new business model, Marea instigated and managed change programmes, set up performance management systems, designed work systems to allow people to be responsive to change, designed numerous development programmes and lay the foundations for continuous improvement. Marea played a key role in updating the Competency framework for a key part of the NHS. Marea is currently involved in a Cultural change project instilling Core Values in a group of manufacturing companies in France.

Marea spends 40 percent of her time on strategically positioned group training and facilitation solutions in the areas of leadership, interpersonal skills and change management. She spends the remaining 30 percent of her time on coaching assignments. She is an experienced coach averaging 15 coaching clients of long duration in a year.

Not only does Marea speak four languages, she has worked in African countries and has lived and worked in the USA and in many European. As such, Marea has a great appreciation of various cultures and working practices.
Marea has a psychology based Master Degree specialising in human communication. She is CIPD qualified (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) and has a TAP Professional Development training qualification and is a trained practitioner of the DISC Psychometric instrument. Marea is also Master Certified in the Leading Organisational Transitions methodology which Linkage uses in its work around managing the human side of change.


Clients

Marea’s current and most recent projects include long-term assignments with clients such as Accenture, BskyB, Unilver, Airbus, RBS, Norwich Union, Abbey, Bank of England, The European Commission, Benteler Automobiltechnik, Alstom Holdings, Randstad Holdings, IMI plc, DSS Smith, NHS, The North West Development Agency, (a Government Agency), GlaxoSmithKline, Hilton Hotel Group, LogicaCMG and LloydsTSB.