Faculty Profile

Susan Franzen is Vice President of Strategy and Leadership for AXIOM Learning Solutions where she works with client organizations to define and clarify organizational strategy, align learning initiatives to strategy, design learning programs that improve performance, and evaluate program effectiveness. Before joining AXIOM, she served as Managing Partner for PatternShifts, LLC and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Organizational Effectiveness at The University of Texas System where she led the broadest and deepest organizational assessment in the history of the System. Susan was promoted to AVC from Director, Shared Services Innovations, a change management and training role for multi-institutional projects like enterprise resource planning implementation and redesigning medical curriculum for the Transformations in Medical Education (TIME) initiative. Prior to that, she served as Director, Leadership Institute where her programs achieved an average 91 percent effectiveness rating. Before joining UT, Susan was the founder and president of LifeU, Inc., a national leadership and organizational development consulting firm with offices in Chicago, Boston and Austin, where she spent over 20 years consulting with clients on performance improvement. Susan holds a Masters in the Neuroscience of Leadership from Middlesex University and a Bachelor degree in Business Administration from Elmhurst College. She is a graduate of Coach University, and is certified in DiSC® Behavioral Theory, Training and Development (Boston University), Evaluation (Kirkpatrick), The Leadership Challenge program and LPI Online 360-assessment, Prosci Change Management, and as a Professional Teleclass Leader. She is a member of the Association of Change Management Professionals. Susan serves on the Friends of Kishwauketoe Nature Conservancy board. In her spare time she reads books on neuroscience “for fun”.