650 483 8682
Our Services
Ghelfi - De Smedt and Associates (GDSA) is a partnership of professionals with expertise and many years of experience in organization and leadership development, executive coaching, cultivating corporate cultures, and data and analytics strategies to increase organizational alignment and effectiveness. GDSA focuses on small to mid sized organizations.
The principals of GDSA, Jennifer Ghelfi - De Smedt (Founder and CEO) and Philippe De Smedt (CTO), offer a compelling set of complementary skills to understand your organization’s unique circumstances, and successfully craft a strategy and plan to optimize your organization and the talent within it.
In these changing and unsettled times, organizations find themselves needing to be resilient to change and reinvent how things are done: e.g. defining and designing new ways of collaborating, of interacting where informal communication has become disrupted, and of providing and soliciting feedback.
Corporate directions may need to be reset to weather current and future changes. They need to adjust to the new normal of their employees' blending major life categories of work, school and family and navigating a path forward, find new ways to recruit and onboard new talent, keep existing talent engaged, and have a plan for 'how we come back', when we come back.
Most importantly, successful organizations will assess and respond to impacts on corporate culture, and create or reinforce a culture of inclusion and equity.
GDSA is your perfect choice to tackle these challenges and position your organization for continued success. GDSA uses proven approaches and leverages the latest analytics technology to understand and analyze the data behind your organization.
Our services are project, monthly fee or retainer based.
Organizational Health Consulting
The Key to Culture
We provide organizational and leadership development to help small to mid sized organizations achieve transformational change.
No change will produce optimal results without taking the well-being of employees into account. Achieving this balance is an essential component for development programs to flourish. We incorporate conversational and emotional intelligence methodologies into our solutions to ensure wellness is woven into culture and organizational designs.
Today our professional mission is to create opportunities for leaders to transition from incremental to transformative ways of thinking and performing. We define leaders as those professionals who have influence and accountability, a strategic role in the organization and are open to learning.
Executive Coaching
Cultivating the Path to Success
More than ever, leaders need support and skill development in navigating uncharted business issues. The expectations on executives to perform in ways that are a stretch or a large departure from their current skill set are prevalent, reactive practices. Executive coaching is professional training at the individual level, and provides a dedicated space for learning, growth and exploration of novel ways to propel forward.
Building awareness into daily practices, pulling out of 'reactive' modes to make room for reflection and strategic thinking, boundary setting, flexing communication styles to engage optimal team participation and experience, and building bridges from conceptual visions to tactical reality are some of the many ways we've worked with our coaching clients.
Our clients are leaders responsible for teams, functional areas and organizations who are invested in their professional development, who are open and ready to examine their communications, style, results and create a compelling future. Collaboratively, we create new patterns of thinking and behaving in order to shed roadblocks to success. Together we explore intention as the starting place for lasting, positive change.
We also work directly with HR professionals, the heart of organizations, to help them position as strategists and influencers rather than transactional service providers.
We serve as both an internal and external coach to inspire executives to engage their best talent in the workplace.
Organization Analytics
Unleashing the Power of your Organization's Data
Organizational health relies on a strong analytics foundation, to understand where the organization is doing well or needs improvement. Indicators include successful recruiting and retention, and an engaged workforce. These can be measured through a variety of internal and external data sources and applications. This service defines a data integration strategy that enables advanced analytics against your key organizational data, applying the latest technologies, including machine learning and AI, predictive analytics, natural language processing, bias detection, sentiment analysis, etc. It frames this capability as an essential component of your organization health strategy.
About Us
Jennifer Ghelfi - De Smedt holds a Master's Degree in Human Resources and Organization Development. She is a certified executive coach and is master-certified in team and communications programs including core values index (CVI), Core Coach for Conversational Intelligence (Ci-Q) and a certified practitioner in Integrative NLP.
An active member of Coaching, OD and HR communities, Jennifer frequently delivers presentations at professional development associations and dedicates her time to a variety of for-profit and non-profit organizations including Society for Human Resources Management, Women in Consulting, Northern California Human Resources Association, and school foundation boards.
Philippe De Smedt holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, a Master of Science degree in Engineering: Business and Technology from Stanford University, and professional certificates in Data Science and Neuroscience from Harvard University.
His expertise spans the entire range of data architecture, business intelligence and reporting, data mining, machine learning and artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, master- and metadata, data modeling, data governance and stewardship, and bias detection in data and algorithms.
Philippe has extensive experience both on the business and IT side, and has worked in research, product development, and in the medical devices and financial services industries.
He is a prolific author and speaker, has been issued four patents, and has a passion for the application of 'data for good', specifically global financial inclusion.
Meeting the Moment
The 'New Normal' as an Opportunity for Organizational Refresh
Skillfully navigating the seminal changes occurring in the way we work, live, and communicate is a challenge the magnitude of which we are only starting to grasp. No single solution fits all scenarios, but Ghelfi - De Smedt and Associates can help your organization and its members embrace this challenge as an opportunity for growth in a fundamental way.
A Renewed Commitment to Openness
The way organizations operate needs a 'reset' to face these new business and societal challenges. This creates an opportunity to 'doing things right', rethinking organizational and personal purpose and approach, and employing a fresh mental orientation unencumbered by conflict, tension, disagreement, and lack of communication, but rather based on openness and on actively seeking out and embracing multiple, diverse views, and incorporating them into best solutions.
An Organizational Model Biased towards Continuous Learning and Growth, and Elevated Conversations
Ghelfi - De Smedt and Associates helps you define an operational model tailored to your organization, with its specific characteristics, strenghts, and challenges. We listen to what has worked and what hasn't, and map this to the new reality that we are all facing. Specific emphasis will be on creating an organizational bias towards learning and growth, as well as on elevating the conversation in your organization. If the current challenges teach us something, it is that there is an unmet need to keep learning and seek out areas for growth, and a need to deepen and raise the level of our conversations.
Ghelfi - De Smedt and Associates Uses an Evidence-Based Approach
Ghelfi - De Smedt and Associates' model is evidence-based, employing the latest available research, augmented with a strong data- and fact-based analytics capability to ensure the most effective solutions are put in place and their effectiveness monitored. We offer this unique blend of organizational and quantitative insight through many years of experience with clients in multiple industries.
Contact Us
11040 Bollinger Canyon Road
Suite 871
San Ramon, CA 94582
650 483 8682
