The Profile · No. 014
Kelly
Kelly
Garramone
She started in clinic accounting. She ended up running the firm that taught Wall Street to put a number on character.
She started in clinic accounting. She ended up running the firm that taught Wall Street to put a number on character.
Kelly Kiel Garramone runs a consulting firm that argues, with data, that character is not soft. She is the CEO of KRW International and the executive director of its research institute, both headquartered in Washington, DC. The job, on most days, looks like a strange hybrid of board advisor, behavioral scientist, and certification authority.
KRW is the firm behind Return on Character, a multi-year field study that surveyed thousands of employees about the integrity, responsibility, forgiveness, and compassion of their CEOs, then compared the answers to financial performance. Garramone was one of the principal field researchers. She now spends her week converting those findings into something a Fortune 500 head of HR can actually use on a Monday morning.
That means coaching the C-suite. It means certifying other coaches in the ROC methodology. It means sitting with boards that have, somewhere on a slide, decided that the next leadership transition should be evaluated for things that previous transitions never measured.
"Character is the most undervalued line item on a leadership scorecard."
The thesis Garramone's career sits onBefore the coaching certifications and the field research, there were spreadsheets. Garramone began her career on the finance side, serving as CFO of a large mental health clinic system and, later, as president of a vocational rehabilitation services firm. Those are not the usual feeder roles for a global executive coach. They are exactly the roles, however, that teach a person to ask whether a program actually pays for itself.
That question — does this leadership investment actually return anything — is the one she would spend the next thirty years answering. She joined KRW in 1991 as its chief operating officer. The firm was already in the business of advising senior leaders. What it did not yet have was a body of research large enough to argue that the work moved the financial needle.
It got one. Return on Character became a study that drew interviews from thousands of employees and tied character ratings of chief executives to measurable improvements in return on assets. Garramone walked the field for it. She watched the methodology become a deck, then a book, then a curriculum, then a certification.
By the time she took the CEO seat at KRW, the firm's value proposition had shifted from "we coach leaders" to "we coach leaders against a peer-reviewed model of what good leadership measurably looks like." That is a different kind of consulting practice. It is also a harder one to fake.
Garramone's husband is a US diplomat. That meant a career run, in parts, from London, Bucharest, Amman, Brussels, Paris, and Geneva. Most consulting partners avoid that kind of disruption. She built around it. Along the way, she designed corporate team development programs that became curricula for emerging leaders in Romania and Moldova, and conducted a national leadership gap analysis for the Romanian-American Center for Business Excellence.
An executive coach is only as credible as the instruments behind their judgments. Garramone has stacked the bench. The credentials read like a survey of the entire discipline of behavioral assessment.
Executive Certificate in Leadership Coaching. The credential that turned a long-time consulting operator into a formally credentialed coach.
Executive Certificate in Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Studies. A signal that the practice intends to keep updating its instruments.
Principal field researcher on the seminal Return on Character study, the one that drove the firm's intellectual property.
CFO, large mental health clinic system. Then president, vocational rehabilitation services firm. Operational P&L training.
Joins KRW International as Chief Operating Officer.
Serves as one of the principal field researchers for the Return on Character project. The study moves from working papers into a recognized methodology.
Designs leadership development curricula for emerging leaders in Romania and Moldova. Leads a national leadership gap analysis for the Romanian-American Center for Business Excellence.
CEO, KRW International. Executive Director, KRW Research Institute. Coaches boards and C-suites. Certifies the next wave of ROC practitioners.
Most coaches arrive from psychology. Garramone arrived from accounting. It shows in the questions she asks — and in the firm's appetite for measuring its own claims.
In a consulting industry that prizes departure, she has been at KRW since 1991. The continuity is itself an unusual data point about how she works.
UK, Romania, Jordan, Belgium, France, Switzerland. The practice was built to be picked up and put down again. Few consulting careers survive that. Hers became more global because of it.