Instructor

Mr. Kowalski had 33 years of HR professional experience in the US Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Administration.  He was a line manager for 21 of those years in large VAMCs.  For 6 years, he served as a national internal consultant in the VHA Human Resources Management Group that provided HR support and consulting services to VHA’s senior leadership in HQ and in the VISNs. He served on VA’s national labor management partnership council and on the national All Employee Survey committee. 

In January 2020, he facilitated a three-day planning session for the Forest Service, Real Property Division that was about to merge its regional offices into one national organization.  In October 2019, he designed and facilitated a change management workshop in Oak Ridge TN for supervisors in the two Department of Energy, Office of Science, Integrated Service Centers that were about to merge.  In 2014 and again in 2019, Mr. Kowalski provided support to the Federal Railroad Administration in developing a five-year strategic human capital plan. Mr. Kowalski also supported the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in an effort to reorganize. 

In 2017 - 2019, he provided annual supervisory training for the Defense Logistics Agency throughout the US and in Germany. He has also taught strategic human capital management at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and the Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) in Keyport WA.  In 2019, he designed and taught a course on internal consulting skills for HR professionals in NAVSEA HQ HR. He also co-designed a course on internal consulting skills for contract specialists. Both courses were designed using adult action learning principles and included presentations, small group discussions, learning tools, and an imbedded case study for discussion, solution design and reflection.

He has developed and presented classes for federal HR practitioners and managers on recruiting using social media, workforce planning, strategic alignment of human capital, internal HR consulting, job analysis and assessment, HR analytics, and supervisory training.  He has provided training courses in VA, the Office of Personnel Management, Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, Army, Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, National Park Service, National Institutes of Health, Indian Health Service, and National Credit Union Administration. 

He has discussed strategic human capital management with the Japanese Ministry of Finance, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, American Chamber of Commerce in Tokyo, and Japan Association of Corporate Executives and provided advice to the Indonesian government on implementing the Factor Evaluation classification system as part of its Civil Service Reform Initiative.

Mr. Kowalski has presented at national meetings of the Academy of Management, at the Society for Organizational Learning, at an International Meeting of the Eastern Academy of Management, and at a meeting of the British Academy of Management. He is a member of the Center for Evidence Based Management and is active in the Academy of Management’s Organization Development and Change, and Management Consulting Divisions, where he reviews articles for the Academy’s Annual Meetings

Mr. Kowalski is the co-author of five articles, the two most recent, “A Contextual Mapping Intervention For Organization Dialogue And Change” (OD Practitioner, Winter 2018, an online publication of the Organization Development Network, 2018) and “Lessons Learned From a Five-Year Project within the Department of Veterans Affairs: Applying Theories of Interpersonal Aggression and Organizational Justice to the Development and Maintenance of Collaborative Social Space” (Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 2007).

He holds a B.A. degree from Canisius College and a M.A. degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.