About Telos Executive Consultants

Our Mission is to provide the support, guidance, and resources needed for executives to become effective leaders, and to offer organizations the help and training needed for them to be successful – with their mission, their team members, their board of directors or owners, their families, and the communities they serve.

Our individual coaching clients have varied widely, from individual creative artists to executives and entrepreneurs responsible for many people in complex organizations. Our institutional clients have been predominantly in the business sector and tend to be start-ups with annual revenues in the one-to-twenty million dollar range. Our work in the non-profit and government sectors has focused on providing professional growth experiences and intervention projects.

Telos Executive Consultants is the latest iteration of Tom Walken’s professional career as an executive coach, placement consultant, and facilitator of organizational health. It is a practice that coordinates its services with independent practitioners in the behavioral sciences, business, legal, and healthcare fields. Working with a variety of businesses in the Triangle area for more than 40 years, we know that organizations require the help of many kinds of professionals to be competitive, financially responsible, and prepared for growth. We use that experience to fine-tune what we do for clients and how we refer them, when necessary, to other professionals we know and trust.

What’s important about the Telos approach to serving others is our commitment to focus on the end goals desired by each client. We have time-tested models of leadership development and organizational effectiveness and a menu of services we are qualified to provide. But a key value for us is to make sure that we respond to each client’s specific needs — their end goals, not ours. Listening carefully and encouraging candid conversations is the starting place for all our consulting projects.

Tom Walken began working with executives in businesses and non-profit organizations in his hometown of Baltimore while finishing his Master’s Degree in clinical psychology at Loyola University. At Loyola, he studied psychometrics and personality assessment with Gilbert Clapperton, Ph.D. and Gregory Helweg, Ph.D. His Master’s thesis was on self-esteem and productivity. He relocated to Raleigh to work on his doctoral degree in Clinical Community Psychology at N.C.State. After taking an organizational development course with Gerald Bell, Ph.D., a professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC Chapel Hill, Tom worked with him on consulting and coaching projects for several years before starting his full-year clinical internship at the Durham VA Hospital.

After completing his coursework at NC State and the Durham VA clinical internship, he became a healthcare provider and managing partner of a large mental health practice in Raleigh. While continuing to work on organizational projects, he was a sought-after individual and family therapist and conducted more than 1,200 individual assessments in clinical and business settings. Reporting on these assessments for various attorneys, he has been qualified as an expert witness in District and Federal courts more than two dozen times.

Tom keeps up with the popular literature on leadership and organizational life by reviewing non-fiction audiobooks for AudioFile Magazine. During his 28 years as Contributing Editor with AudioFile, he published more than 2,200 reviews of audiobooks on leadership, economics, marketing, sales, personal growth, health, and contemporary culture.  In addition to articles he has written for business magazines, he writes a column for AudioFile called “Learning by Ear” and has interviewed and written profiles on authors like Stephen Covey, Deepak Chopra, Zig Ziglar, Robert Kiyosaki, Brian Tracy, Marianne Williamson, and Daniel Goleman.

Telos is the Greek word for Aristotle’s FOURTH CAUSE which literally means “with the end in mind.” We strive to work with our clients in that spirit by helping them clarify goals important to them and align everything they do with those objectives. Our work with executives and organizations always begins with a clear statement of values and goals that we encourage our clients to continually refine and commit to achieving.