FACILITATOR PROFILE
Facilitator ID: OWH-F1024
Kenneth R. Steensma
Solve today’s challenge. Build tomorrow’s capability.
Performance Improvement Coach · Leadership & Organizational Development
Decision-Making
Leadership Development
Performance Improvement
Organizational Change
Manhattan, Kansas · Central Time · English
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~35 years
Facilitation, coaching & consulting
6
Practical decision-making tools
3
Core coaching & development services
Online · In person · Hybrid · Individual and team engagements
About Kenneth
Kenneth R. Steensma is a facilitator, performance improvement coach, and organizational and leadership development consultant with approximately 35 years of professional experience. He helps individuals and teams address current challenges while building decision-making skills, confidence, and the ability to guide their own improvement.
His strongest areas are decision-making under time pressure, performance improvement, organizational development, and leadership development. He works especially well with owners and leaders of small and family-owned businesses, and with larger organizations developing a particular team, business unit, or project. His approach combines structured inquiry, relationship building, and practical learning through real work.
Education & Preparation
Master of Social Work, Michigan State University; Bachelor of Arts, Calvin University, with a major in Sociology and minor in Psychology; and postgraduate study in change management, paradigm-change-based decision-making processes, and ecosystem theory. His preparation is grounded in extensive applied practice, including systemic transformation in high-conflict settings.
Professional Experience
His background spans university adjunct teaching in organizational development, social entrepreneurship, management, leadership, psychology, sociology, and human services; continuing education leadership at Aquinas College; school and community support roles; financial services coaching; and graduate student success coaching at Kansas State University.
Learning Through Current Work
Kenneth often works alongside owners and teams in their decision-making processes, helping them solve operational challenges while developing transferable skills. The intended progression is toward greater participant independence, internal peer coaching, and an on-call support relationship as needed.
Coaching & Consulting Services
Three customizable offerings combine current organizational work with practical development. Starting point, pace, session structure, and degree of coaching involvement are designed around the client’s challenge, resources, and timeline.
Real-Time Performance Improvement Coaching
Address challenges that exceed the team’s current readiness while building transferable decision-making skills. Individual sessions typically run 30–60 minutes; operations teams meet for one hour; project teams for 90 minutes, with support between sessions.
Groups: four to six preferred, maximum eight, with micro-teams for larger stakeholder groups. Intended outputs include timely decisions, stronger capability, and progressively greater independence.
Leadership Development Through Current Work
Help formal and informal leaders develop others through day-to-day decisions. Participants practice the tools on current challenges, support independent team use, and build an internal peer-coaching cohort.
Typical structure: three 90-minute sessions in Phase 1, two in Phase 2, four to six in Phase 3, then as-needed follow-up for further development, new leader onboarding, or complex challenges.
Organizational Transformation Coaching
Help organizations respond to rapid change, complexity, and uncertainty by developing parallel interim processes, continuous improvement habits, and self-directed decision-making. The process can address organizational pressures associated with emerging technologies without serving as technical instruction.
Uses the decision-making tools, parallel change management, and a ten-indicator organizational-thriving feedback tool. Larger groups can use representative sub-teams. Duration and follow-up are shaped around the organization’s needs.
Facilitation Philosophy
Shared trust. Active participation. Practical progress.
An effective workshop facilitator quickly builds shared trust and openness so participants can exchange ideas and opinions even when they disagree. Before the workshop, the facilitator engages stakeholders and participants to align the mission, desired outcomes, individual development benefits, and timeline. During the engagement, interaction is structured from beginning to close to maximize participation, collaboration, and the achievement of individual goals through shared team outcomes.
An effective workshop hub is a consultative connector and strategic partner. It meets clients where they are in their development journey, helps define what support is needed and why, explores the organization’s criteria for an effective facilitator, recommends suitable matches, and supports a clear agreement. The partnership continues through feedback, help resolving challenges, and follow-through support when needed.
An effective organizational client is committed to empowerment and active participation in anticipating operational gaps, identifying root causes, and responding collaboratively. An organization can still be a strong client while developing that culture, provided it is willing to grow through the process, establish clear goals, turn internal agreements into productive collaboration, and use present challenges to build a stronger organization.
Build shared trust
Create openness to ideas, questions, and differences before moving toward decisions.
Develop through action
Use current challenges to practice skills while doing the work that needs to be done.
Grow independence
Support participants in guiding their own decisions and coaching one another.
Methods, Experience & Engagement Details
Kenneth uses a structured six-tool approach covering engagement communication; an event log for identifying frontline symptoms; performance-gap analysis, root causes, and game planning; force field analysis to accelerate progress; drawing shared benefit from differences; and a nine-tool collaboration set across three decision-making stages. These tools include mind mapping, gap analysis, collaborative problem-solving, risk analysis, multi-voting, and criteria-based decisions. His methods also draw on systems thinking, ecosystem theory, and parallel change-management processes associated with Kurt Lewin. They are designed for practical use across organizational levels, from frontline and production staff to senior executives.
Engagement definition begins with force field analysis and gap analysis so clients can identify their current and desired states, obstacles, resources, development needs, strategies, and timelines. He can connect clients with a colleague’s culture and empowerment-potential survey system, use a team feedback tool to examine readiness for transformation, or jointly identify appropriate formal assessments. Decision support, customized recommendations, implementation support, and examination of assumptions are integrated through directed, open-ended questions.
Kenneth’s reported engagements include interim operations leadership for a changing service organization while supporting succession; transformation of a construction business that had outgrown its project-management system; rapid market repositioning and customer-acquisition strategy work; and a project-design team’s review following a failed launch. In one construction engagement, a four-hour definition meeting clarified outcomes, critical paths, management-structure problems, and development needs. The work combined redesigned management teams, operational meetings that doubled as skills development, and coaching between meetings. He reports that the general contractor subsequently offered the team related work in its market on a no-bid basis.
His work spans service businesses, manufacturing, construction, education, nonprofits, and community development. Earlier experience includes school social work at Kenowa Hills Public Schools, clinical settings at Pine Rest Christian Hospital, and neighborhood transformation through Seeds of Promise. These experiences inform his organizational coaching; clinical services are not part of the offerings described here. He has also coached six international Ph.D. students at Kansas State University from Chile, Nigeria, and Ghana, supporting academic organization, priorities, and adaptation across cultures.
Based in Manhattan, Kansas, he offers online, in-person, and hybrid delivery. Most earlier work was in person in the United States, with more recent engagements online. He is comfortable with international time zones and has no geographic restriction for virtual work; in-person travel is coordinated in advance. He facilitates, coaches, consults, advises, and conducts discussions in English only, and can prepare written materials with graphic support. Online platform arrangements are confirmed during engagement planning.
Kenneth is flexibly available Monday–Friday, with limited evenings, particularly for international work, and Saturdays or other weekend sessions by exception. Initial concern-definition sessions can be arranged when an opening is available; extended engagements are jointly scheduled around existing obligations. His preferred capacity is approximately 20 engagement hours per week, with flexibility during intensive periods. Short-notice support is considered as scheduling permits, and recurring relationships commonly shift toward on-call support as teams gain independence.
Build Capability Through Your Next Challenge
Book a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your organization’s needs and a potential match with Kenneth.
Mention OWH-F1024 during your consultation.