Norm Smallwood is a partner and co-founder of The RBL Group. His research and consulting focuses on helping organizations increase business value by building organization, leadership, and people capabilities that measurably impact market value. He has written extensively about leadership and organization effectiveness in eight books and over a hundred articles.
Norm Smallwood is a recognized authority in developing businesses and their leaders to deliver results. His current work relates to increasing value by building human capability- organization, talent, leadership, and HR.
Norm co-founded The RBL Group in late 1999 with Dave Ulrich. Before this, he was a founding partner of the Novations Group where he led business strategy, organization design, and other change management projects for a wide variety of clients spanning multiple industries.
Norm has received various awards and recognitions over the years. Including:
- Change Driver of the Decade - HR Digest, 2024
- Lifetime HR Achievement Award - Utah Business magazine, 2019
- Distinguished Alumni, BYU Department of Organization Behavior
The Harvard Business Review recognized Norm for doing “innovative and groundbreaking work on effective leadership.”
Norm’s approach is to partner with clients to align leaders and their organizations to foster a high-performance culture that resonates with customers and employees. Intended outputs include distinctive organization capabilities and recognizable leadership brand. Success is defined as increased confidence in the future by investors, customers, and employees leading to higher market value.
Norm has co-authored eight books: Real Time Strategy, Results Based Leadership, Why the Bottom Line Isn’t/How Leaders Build Value, Change Champions Field Guide, Leadership Brand, Leadership Code, Agile Talent, and Leadership Sustainability.
He has also published more than a hundred articles in leading journals and newspapers including Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. His Harvard Business Online blog on Personal Leader Brand was highlighted as one of the ten most read for the year.
Norm was a faculty member in executive education at the University of Michigan in the Ross School of Management between 2001 and 2003. He has also served on the HRCI board during 2019-2020.
Norm and his wife Tricia enjoy their children and grandchildren as well as their pets including a school of koi fish, Frank the Great Dane, and Stein the Bengal cat.