Simon D’Arcy
Chief Culture Builder
Founder of Next Level Culture, Simon is a thought-leader on organizational culture with more than 18 years experience on six continents as an organizational development consultant and executive coach.
Simon offers his clients a competitive advantage by bringing culture-building to the center of their operational strategies. Integrating sound assessments, expert facilitation, and leadership coaching, clients rely on Simon to increase employee satisfaction and engagement while developing resilient, effective, and dynamic leaders and teams. Results include increased trust and motivation, more effective decision making processes, faster execution, and thriving workplaces.
Known for bringing even the most dysfunctional teams and organizations together, Simon embraces paradox, calls forth strong leadership, ignites engaged participation, and articulates the ineffable. These qualities–combined with a B.A. in macro-economics, extensive training with experts in group dynamics and human systems, and a dedication to growth in all areas of his life–reliably result in Simon being a catalyst for powerful and sustainable change in the organizations he works with.
Throughout his nearly two-decade career, Simon has consulted with hundreds of senior leaders, helping them create high-performing, dynamic, and fulfilling work environments. During his ten years as a senior consultant at Malandro Communications, he worked with leadership teams inside Fortune 1000 companies to change their corporate culture from a command and control environment to a high-performance culture based on partnership, trust and 100% accountability. Recent clients include ConocoPhillips, USG Corporation, Phillips 66, EKS&H and DCP Midstream. Some of Simon’s recent work includes:
- Guiding a two-thousand person IT.organization of a global energy company over three years to design and cultivate a high-performing culture through a series of leadership summits, leadership team interventions and supervisor-led training modules.
- Helping a new CIO successfully transition into a new role and build effective relationships with his senior and extended leadership teams, while increasing capacity in the face of mandated budget cuts.
- Facilitating the administration, faculty and board of a private school to heal a decade-old rift and begin a transition to new level of cohesion within the organization and community.
Guided by his core values of authenticity, accountability, community and life-long learning, Simon currently leads a research project on corporate culture building. His aim is to uncover, organize and communicate the essential aspects of integrated high-functioning corporate cultures, so that they become less the exception and more the rule. His purpose is to put culture on equal footing with the financial and physical dimension of how business is done in the corporate world.
Simon lives with his wife Tamra Rutherford in Santa Barbara, CA, where his passion for culture-building inspired him to co-found an intentional community 15 years ago that is still thriving, and is a model for similar communities across the country.
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