TeamTech co-founders Joel Wright (left), Kathleen Harnish McKune, and Priscilla Wilson at Joel’s retirement celebration in December 2015.
Kathleen Harnish McKune
Kathleen is a co-founder of TeamTech, LLC specializing in facilitative leadership, strategic planning, and organizational coaching. She holds a Master of Business Administration degree and has worked as a successful entrepreneur for more than 30 years.
Kathleen’s background includes an internship with Dr. W. Edwards Deming, which taught the core philosophy that the way organizations become high performing is through their people.
In 1987, Kathleen attended a strategic planning retreat working as an intern for a Kansas City area investment management company while finishing her MBA. It was at this retreat that Kathleen was inspired by the facilitators, Joel Wright and Pricilla Wilson, who demonstrated the power of reflective capacity to help people think and take action together.
In 1991, after leaving the investment management world to pursue entrepreneurship, Kathleen reached out to Joel and Priscilla for mentorship. By 1996, the three had merged their firms to create TeamTech, Inc., a strategic facilitation and training firm. In 1998, they created their well-known curriculum, Everyone A Leader®, to teach facilitative leadership skills to people at all levels of organizations so they can lead where they are. Kathleen continues to teach these leadership skills, updating and adapting the content as needed yet keeping the fundamental Life Methods and Facilitative Tools originally taught.
Kathleen coauthored the 1993 top-selling video, Implementing Total Quality Management, which was produced and marketed by CareerTrack®. She is coauthor of several publications: the 2003 book, The Facilitative Way: Leadership That Makes the Difference; the 2006 booklet, Making Dollars & Sense: The Kansas Collaborative; and the 2019 book Remarkably Resilient: Community Matters. Kathleen also recently rewrote TeamTech’s Everyone A Leader®: Lead Where You Are curriculum – teaching facilitative leadership skills to leaders at all levels of organizations.
William Joel Wright
Working for the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA) for 14 years, Joel lived and worked all over the world, dedicated and committed to economic and community development in areas of need. It was clear from the beginning that Joel had a special gift for being able to “read the room” and facilitate groups of people to think and take action together. This experience helped Joel and his business partner, Priscilla Wilson, to develop the foundation of what would become TeamTech. In 1996, Joel and Priscilla became business partners with Kathleen Harnish McKune.
Joel passed away in July of 2021, leaving behind invaluable lessons, bits of wisdom, and a special place in the hearts of so many people. Read Kathleen’s tribute to Joel here.
Priscilla H. Wilson
For more than 30 years, Priscilla worked as a program designer, curriculum creator and trainer for leaders and facilitators across North American, Northeast Asia and Europe, working with governmental, community and non-profit organizations as well as corporate businesses. Like Joel, Priscilla worked with the Institute of Cultural Affairs in the 1960s and 1970s, a non-profit organization that facilitated community development projects all over the world.
Priscilla earned a BA in Education from the University of Oklahoma with advanced studies at Northeastern University in Chicago. She is a member of the International Association of Facilitators, and is the author of: The Facilitative Way, Leadership That Makes the Difference. Priscilla retired in 2005.
In its first 20 years, TeamTech worked with two Kansas Governors, almost every state agency and county in Kansas, and numerous non-profit organizations and foundations within the state. It was a trailblazer for trauma-informed practices decades before it became a common term, and for training based on the idea that everyone can be a leader, no matter their position or title.
TeamTech won the 2006 Innovations Award from the Council of State Governments for work in the Kansas Collaborative. Governor Kathleen Sebelius’s Chief of Staff once told Joel and Kathleen privately that “Kansans will not know the positive impact you have had on their lives by your work, but we three will know.”
Kathleen continues to share the wisdom of the founders. Her legacy vision is to pass these insights along to others through Everyone A Leader (EAL) workshops and train-the-trainer certifications in both EAL and TeamTech’s simple, yet profound strategic planning process.