Dr. Gerald Bell, founder of the Bell Leadership Institute, remembers his first “Aha!” moment with regards to studying leadership: he was 29 years old, a visiting professor at Harvard Business School, involved in a consulting project with the Coca-Cola Company to recommend a new CEO. He remembers knowing intuitively which candidate was best, but was concerned that there was no factual, research-based proof for his selection. The candidate he helped choose ended up being approved, and succeeding in his role … but Dr. Bell never forgot how stressful it was not having data to back up his choice. The challenge of determining “What makes an effective person and leader?” led to a lifelong personal mission and in 1972 he founded the Bell Leadership institute to answer that question.

Dr. Bell’s research into leadership and his interest in people’s behavior actually started long before his Coca-Cola epiphany. Throughout his childhood he observed how people behaved in workplace situations, from selling and delivering newspapers as a boy of 8, to picking cherries and rogueing peas in the Midwest as a 10-year-old, to working in his father’s hardware store as a young teen. Dr. Bell recalls wondering why some people were happier, more successful, more enthusiastic about their work than others; he credits those experiences as the birth of his curiosity for his life’s work.

Over the past 15 years our team has expanded to include more than a dozen more professionals to lead and facilitate our programs, conduct data-driven research, and provide client support.

The global Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 created a unique and necessary opportunity to develop and modify our virtual program offerings. We were able to convert some of our most popular programs such as Achievers, Advanced Communication, and Selection, as well as the Leaders’ Roundtable and executive coaching, into more than 100 virtual seminars that took place regularly over the 12 to 15 months of “lockdown.”

Because the pandemic played such a massive role in the very fabric of our society, and created such entirely new and extremely difficult challenges for leaders, we saw it as an opportunity to gain and share knowledge. In 2020 we launched an online interview series, “Extraordinary Achievers, Extraordinary Times” where Dr. Bell set out to answer the question “How do Achievers lead during a crisis?” through a series of executive interviews.