Cheryl Rykowski

Cheryl is a learning and development professional with over 15 years experience designing and facilitating learning across a wide range of international industries and cultures. Cheryl has taught classes from the “plant floor” to “executive suite” for many corporations including MasterCard International, Avon Cosmetics, Allied Waste Disposal, Grey Advertising and Boehringer-Ingelheim.

Cheryl’s passion is in helping managers increase effectiveness in managing their teams. To that end, she has designed, developed and delivered classroom and self-study programs in the areas of Leadership and Management, Interpersonal Skills, Coaching and Feedback, Communication Skills, Performance Management, Career Development, Goal Setting, Performance Review, Presentation Skills, Flexible Work, and Sexual Harassment.

She has led numerous initiatives to facilitate organizational and individual change. She uses focus groups, simulation exercises and coaching to help individuals and groups gain awareness, surface issues, create vision, define strategy and develop skills. Cheryl is particularly adept at root-cause problem analysis for poorly functioning teams and has helped teams to improve performance, communication, and creativity.

Not satisfied with existing products, Cheryl built and teaches her own train-the-trainer program called, Training from the Inside Out and her own creativity and brainstorming program called, No Wrong Answers.

Cheryl is certified in numerous professional training programs and assessment tools, including: DiSC Personal Profile System, Profiler’s 360 Degree Feedback, Ken Blanchard’s Situational Leadership, Thomas-Kilman Conflict Mode Instrument, Firo-B, Business as UnUsual, Employee Workshop for Organization Change, The Change Cycle®, ExecComm Presentation Skills, and TMC’s Cultural Orientations at Work.

She is a certified Teacher of English as a Foreign Language and has served as adjunct faculty teaching English as a Second Language at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut and Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut. She has also designed and delivered Welfare to Work training for the State of Connecticut in support of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act.

Cheryl is a graduate of Boston University’s School of Management with a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration, earned a Masters in Education from Fairfield University’s School of Education and completed post-graduate certification in Organization Development Practices from Columbia University.