Dr. Christianna E. Kellman is an Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, executive leadership coach, organizational consultant, and former senior operations executive with more than three decades of experience leading people, transforming operations, developing leaders, and guiding organizations through complex change. Her career has been defined by an ability to recognize organizational gaps, translate challenges into practical solutions, and build the people, processes, and capabilities needed to sustain results.

Before co-founding Elevare Leadership Partners, Christianna built an extensive career at Xerox Corporation, progressing from frontline technical operations through increasingly senior leadership roles and ultimately serving as Vice President of Technical Service Operations. In that role, she led a multi-state organization of more than 600 employees, managed a $50 million operating budget, and oversaw a complex service environment supporting hundreds of thousands of customer devices across multiple states.

Christianna has led organizations through restructuring, technology implementation, workforce change, performance challenges, and periods of significant operational disruption. When organizational performance required improvement, she restructured teams, strengthened coaching and accountability, clarified expectations, and achieved 90% of critical KPIs within ten months. In another large-scale transformation, she redesigned service processes and training for 600 employees, helping reduce customer response times by more than 50% within three months.

Her approach to change extends beyond designing a new process or organizational structure. Christianna focuses on what employees and leaders need to understand, learn, and do differently for change to succeed. During a major technology implementation, she developed instructional content and trained 1,560 employees, completing the rollout in 4.5 months and improving operational efficiency. Across her progressively senior leadership roles, she held responsibility for training deployment and leadership development supporting more than 2,600 employees.

She is equally comfortable responding when traditional solutions are not working. Faced with difficult-to-fill technical positions in the Maryland/Virginia market, Christianna helped move recruiting beyond conventional methods. She partnered directly with managers, took recruiting into technical schools, conducted on-the-spot interviews, expanded the candidate pipeline, and helped fill five engineering positions that had remained vacant for months. Her leadership style is action-oriented: identify the gap, understand what is preventing progress, mobilize the right people, and create a solution that strengthens the organization.

Christianna’s transformation experience also includes high-stakes operational and financial challenges. She led changes to technology systems, software, processes, and stakeholder training that reduced service-delivery costs by $20 million; redesigned support strategies that helped secure a $15 million contract supporting nuclear power plant outages; and revised service support for a healthcare client to help prevent a potential $3 million-per-month revenue loss. She also negotiated a new support solution for a federal customer that generated significant cost savings.

Her experience spans technology and IT, federal government environments, healthcare and hospital administration, K–12 and higher education, and organizations navigating mergers, restructuring, integration, and operational transformation. Across these environments, Christianna has worked with leaders and employees not only to implement change, but also to understand what comes next—developing communication, training, leadership capability, performance expectations, and systems that help people move from uncertainty to execution.

Christianna’s leadership philosophy is grounded in a simple belief: behind every number is a person. She believes organizations do not have to choose between strong performance and human-centered leadership. Her experience has shown that accountability, psychological safety, communication, employee development, and operational discipline can work together to produce stronger and more sustainable results.

Christianna earned her PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Walden University, graduating with a 4.0 GPA. Her doctoral research examined the lived experiences of mid-level managers in the technology industry leading employees through crisis, with particular attention to communication, adaptability, psychological safety, emotional intelligence, employee well-being, and leadership effectiveness. She also holds an MBA, a Master of Philosophy in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, and is a Board Certified Coach trained in evidence-based coaching.

At Elevare Leadership Partners, Christianna combines executive leadership experience, organizational psychology, behavioral science, and evidence-based coaching to help leaders and organizations navigate change, strengthen leadership capability, improve performance, and build resilient teams. Her work is particularly suited to organizations that need more than advice—they need a partner who understands how to move from diagnosis to action, bring people through change, and build the capability required for the organization to thrive after the transformation is complete.

Professional Affiliations & Honors:

• Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP)

• American Psychological Association (APA)

• Board Certified Coach (BCC)

• Psi Chi, International Honor Society in Psychology

• Golden Key International Honour Society

• Omega Nu Lambda

• Society for Collegiate Leadership & Achievement (SCLA)