Susanna Mlot, Partner

Susanna is a Partner at Axiom Consulting Partners and brings to the Firm over three decades of business transformation experience. At Axiom, she has led large-scale change initiatives in some of the leading health systems in the US, as well as the banking, insurance, financial services, and professional services sectors. Susanna also has deep expertise in mission-driven organizations, non-profits, and higher education.

At Axiom, Susanna is a leader of Axiom’s talent risk and inclusion diagnostic program and founded and sponsored the Women of Axiom employee resource group and the Firm’s DE&I Committee.

It’s most exciting to me to see how our work impacts the trajectory of a client’s business performance and how leadership develops as we collaborate in the problem solving. Seeing this kind of change has always been a passion and why I became a management consultant over thirty years ago.

Experience

Prior to co-founding Axiom Consulting Partners in 2005, Susanna was with Restructuring Associates Inc, a change management consultancy. Susanna began her consulting career at Sibson & Co. where she advanced to senior consultant and partner. She also served as a Human Resources Generalist with General Mills Inc. in the R&D and Manufacturing divisions and began her business career in Operations, Management Training, Consumer and Small Business Banking, and Personnel at First Wisconsin National Bank.

Some of Susanna’s experience highlights include:

• Operating Model, Talent Strategy, People Analytics, Team Effectiveness – served as interim Chief Human Resources Officer of a major academic medical center. In addition to oversight of core functions to support over 13,000 team members, she led the implementation of a transformational service delivery model; established new people analytics to support the Compensation Committee of the Board; advised the CEO on diversity and inclusion metrics; addressed escalating clinical vacancy rates to support labor optimization; and oversaw two major compliance initiatives that achieved record-level completion rates.
• Operating Model – assisted numerous Fortune 100 organizations in their quest for high performance.  Among them was the pilot plant design of a premier high technology firm that led the market in new silicon chip technology. The plant design ultimately became its global manufacturing model. She also was a project leader in the high-performance work system redesign of the U.S. plants for a global consumer products company, improving throughput, first-run quality, and on-time delivery in both unionized and non-union facilities.
• Team Effectiveness, Talent Strategy – partnered with numerous clients on strategic HR transformation initiatives, including all aspects of talent ecosystem integration, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion efforts, and HR operations and service delivery innovation.
• Business Strategy – led the work establishing the profitable growth and acquisition strategy for a prominent regional banking organization, including a three-year program that yielded a 40% increase in assets, progressively higher levels of employee engagement, and deeper leadership capabilities, and bench strength. Strategy assessments and leadership development for family businesses are a specialized practice area for Susanna.
• Business Strategy – consulted for eight years to what has been described as a historic and perhaps the most ambitious performance, culture, and employee change initiative in the United States, involving 100,000 employees, managers, and physicians in the largest not-for-profit health care system in the nation. Susanna was recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Labor for her contribution to that work and was acknowledged in the research of Dr. Thomas Kochan of MIT.

Susanna earned her M.B.A. from the J L Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.  She received her B.A. from Princeton University and was then awarded a Princeton-in-Asia teaching fellowship.  She spent her fellowship as an instructor at International Christian and Meiji Universities, and as a language consultant and actor with NHK-TV in Tokyo, Japan.  She is also certified by Hogan Assessments in its suite of leadership assessment tools.