Michael F. Seelman
Michael Seelman is the principal consultant & coach for Churchill Consultants. He serves the global community as a leadership coach, consultant, and inspirational speaker. He is a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s (World’s #1 Executive Coach) elite team of certified executive coaches. collaborating with leaders in North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia to bring out their best performance and a more fulfilled life.
His clients have included founders of innovative firms in healthcare and marketing and executives in larger corporations leading operations, marketing, administration, software design, and other functions. He listens deeply to clients and tailors his methodology to their needs. He employs mindfulness techniques, visualization, powerful questions, music, action plan development, leadership theories, happiness research, kinesthetic and writing exercises, improv comedy training, & more to serve them and their goal(s) fulfillment.
Michael is an inspirational speaker on topics of leadership, leading remote teams during the pandemic, happiness, innovation, and collaboration. He brings deep expertise and improv comedy playfulness to the presentations he delivers. He has trained corporate executive teams on leadership, FBI supervisors on communications and leadership principles, delivered two university commencement addresses, spoken about the future of collaboration on an international leadership panel with a Member of the UK Parliament, and expertly facilitated discussion with audiences as diverse as police chiefs, high school student leaders, Italian coaches, Harvard University alumni, and international intelligence agency executives.
Recently he trained the executive leadership team of an Australian company How to Lead Like a Coach, Optimist International chapter presidents on Self-Leadership and Happiness, and co-presented a webinar on women’s leadership with a rising female technology leader. He is currently conducting original research into leading human-machine (artificial intelligence) teams. His team was selected by the International Leadership Association (ILA) to present their initial findings at the ILA’s Global Conference 2018.
Previously Michael served for 19 years in the Federal government including leadership positions at the White House, U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) – with roles in innovation, communications, employee engagement, intergovernmental liaison, knowledge management, human resources/leadership development, information technology, administration, and high-profile multi-agency initiatives.
For more than a decade at the FBI he served as the first global chief of internal communications, as the deputy chief knowledge officer (intersection of people, processes, IT systems, and innovation), and the co-director of a multi-agency law enforcement team leading violence reduction efforts in the country’s most violent cities.
Michael did his undergraduate thesis and collaborated on a book with leadership scholar and Pulitzer Prize-winning author James MacGregor Burns and Georgia Sorenson the University of Maryland. He received his master's degree in public administration from Harvard University where he did his master's thesis project with leadership scholar Ronald A. Heifetz.
He served as the Vice President of the Board of Trustees for a youth leadership development nonprofit and in many training, mentoring, and facilitation roles for nearly three decades as a volunteer. In 2012, he graduated from the military’s Advanced Management Program and received his Chief Information Officer (CIO) certification from the U.S. military’s National Defense University.