Corporate Leadership
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Denise H. Calore - Founder, President and Senior Organization Development Consultant |
Denise H. Calore founded Opportunity Knocks, Inc. in Washington, DC in 1997 and continues to serve as its chief executive, leading all corporate operations, business development, and client services. She has over two decades of leadership, facilitation, human resources, and organization change/effectiveness consulting experience working both as a Federal employee and subsequently as a consultant in a variety of private industry, public, state, and federal organizations ranging from small businesses to those with over 100,000 employees. She is a high energy, results-oriented professional focused on enhancing system-wide performance and effectiveness by challenging the status quo and discovering new insights and perspectives.
Throughout her career, Ms. Calore has demonstrated success in improving organization performance by providing clients with thought leadership and strategy facilitation, as well as designing processes to achieve organizational effectiveness during times of change. Her core areas of expertise are in leadership and partnership development, program and project management, transition management, organization formation, strategic, operational and staffing planning, communications planning and implementation, process facilitation, stakeholder engagement, training design and instruction/facilitation, team and leadership development, and conference/meeting design and management.
As an organization development and change expert, Ms. Calore has been instrumental in leading consulting teams in the design and delivery of strategic, operational, training, performance management, and communications processes/plans to assist clients with achievement of their organization goals and objectives. For example, she developed a transition methodology that assisted hundreds of information technology projects within a 100,000 person organization in achieving agency-wide readiness to use, operate and maintain their IT systems. She also personally facilitated the establishment of a multi-state, public, federal government, and private industry partnership to eliminate duplicative state regulatory reviews of environmental technologies. Additionally, Ms. Calore has designed and facilitated numerous workforce and organizational climate assessments, as well as client engagements focused on leadership development, organization/change readiness, strategic planning, employee development training, and team building.
Ms. Calore is a graduate of the University of Maryland with a B.A. in Government & Politics and The American University with an M.S. in Organization Development. She has also worked as an adjunct professor at The American University, instructing graduate students in team building and organization change. She is certified to administer the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and the Grounded® Leader Assessment. She is also a member of the National Organization Development Network and is certified as a Red Cross Disaster Services volunteer.
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Carol M. Laub - VP of Administration |
Carol M. Laub has over 30 years of experience as a highly skilled business management professional. Ms. Laub utilizes her corporate and consulting expertise to oversee the daily operations of Opportunity Knocks to ensure business goals are achieved. As a critical member of the corporate leadership team, Ms. Laub leads corporate accounting, including ensuring compliance with DCAA accounting requirements for government contractors. In addition, she manages all contract administration & reporting, develops proposals, and supervises the human resources staff. She participates in business planning, general administration, and personnel tasks, including managing the employee benefit plans as well as the timekeeping and payroll systems.
Ms. Laub also assists the Opportunity Knocks team in fast-paced, high-pressure environments in the development of state-of-the-art briefing materials, creation of policies and procedures, and execution of professional document formatting. With a keen eye for creativity and meticulous attention to details, Ms. Laub adds the finishing touches that make documents clearly communicate the message, story, or vision of its creator.
Ms. Laub has completed course work towards a BS in Marketing as a part-time student at Muhlenberg College and Penn State University. She also has an Associate Business Degree in Executive Secretarial Services from the Allentown Business School in Allentown, PA.
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Gretchen L. Dellinger - Principal Consultant |
Gretchen L. Dellinger has sixteen years of experience in program management support for corporate, government, and non-profit clients. This includes program services for a large Federal Agency in information technology planning, change management, communications, program development, and event/meeting planning and facilitation; as well as facilitating several leadership transition meetings for various regions of an additional Federal Agency.
As a Principal Consultant, Ms. Dellinger engages clients to create solutions for project and enterprise-wide challenges by analyzing and planning business strategies. She also leads teams through project delivery and daily operations. Specific project tasks include strategic meeting planning and facilitation, change management, system development life cycle (SDLC) project management, and executive communication. She also supports clients who are organizing conferences by designing activities and discussions that attain meeting goals and objectives. As she facilitates these meetings, her focus is on coaching participants for maximum engagement, effectiveness, and outcomes. In addition, Ms. Dellinger leads change management discovery and analysis for IT project implementation, supporting executive sponsorship plans and overall organization readiness for new solutions. To further support these IT projects, Ms. Dellinger manages the SDLC efforts to ensure best practices for project management and governance.
Ms. Dellinger earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the University of Maryland.
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