Hunt Scanlon Media’sManaging Hidden Risks: The Role of Leader Personality in Mergers and Acquisitions
November 12, 2025 - 2pm EST
Behind every merger or acquisition lies a complex web of leadership dynamics that can determine success—or derail integration. While financials and strategy often take center stage, the personality of the leaders involved may be the hidden factor that makes or breaks the deal.
In this interactive panel, experts will share how personality assessments can uncover strengths and potential risks within leadership teams during the high-stakes M&A process.
The discussion will explore:
- How personality assessments guide integration planning and cultural alignment
- Why leading consulting firms leverage Hogan for data-driven talent insights during M&A
- The critical red flags and strengths consultants look for when evaluating leadership teams
Speakers:
Ted Bililies, PhD
Global Leader of Transformative Leadership, Partner & Managing Director
AlixPartners
Ted is an internationally recognized expert on leadership and organization development. He advises investors, CEOs, and boards globally to help them select the right leaders for key roles and to position and develop those leaders and their teams for maximum value creation. Ted is often sought out for challenging succession issues and when boards of directors need to make strategic leadership change.
Serving three decades as a business psychologist, performance coach, human resources executive, and management consultant, Ted is an expert on talent and value creation in the private equity and alternatives investment space.
Ted is also on the Executive Education faculty of the Harvard Business School. He has helped leaders around the world achieve enduring change in their organizations, their teams, and themselves by expanding their psychological, behavioral, and organizational insights into leadership.
Mary Rachide
Managing Director and Operating Partner
ICV Partners
Mary Rachide is Managing Director and Operating Partner at ICV Partners, a lower middle market Private Equity firm focused on founder and family-owned business. She plays a key role in recruiting and assessing executive talent for both ICV and the portfolio company teams. Prior to joining ICV, Ms. Rachide founded Think Forward Consulting where she provided business strategy, human resources, and brand development consulting services to private equity and venture backed companies.
Previously, Ms. Rachide held senior executive roles in strategy, sales, product development and implementation, and operations at a number of large public and smaller private companies, including: Surterra Holdings , FleetCor Technologies, PulteGroup, Family Dollar, and Clement Pappas. Her largest operating P&L was $2 billion. Ms. Rachide was also a consultant for McKinsey & Company, where she was a leader in the growth strategy practice and served clients in the retail, consumer goods, and private equity practices.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Rachide was a divisional controller at Liz Claiborne. Ms. Rachide is a North Carolina native, where she grew up working in her family’s independent pharmacy. Ms. Rachide holds BS and BA degrees from the University of Richmond and a Masters in Business Administration from Duke University. Mary is a certified yoga instructor and loves traveling the world to scuba dive and sail with her husband and teenaged children.
Kevin Impelman
Principal Consultant
Summit Leadership Partners
Kevin is a highly experienced and growth-oriented consulting leader who has served as a trusted advisor to help a wide variety of organizations across different industries meet their goals through maximizing their human capital. He is a client-focused, data driven consultant who is comfortable advising the C-suite as well as stakeholders across the organization on to implement talent initiatives.
Kevin is a continuous learner with a strong research background and interest in emerging technology who regularly presents applied research. He specializes in organization and executive assessment, leadership team effectiveness human capital strategy, organization health, leadership development, and people analysis.
Prior to joining Summit Leadership Partners, Kevin served as the VP of Consulting and R&D at Hollweg Assessment Partners, where he was responsible for developing new consulting offerings, conducting senior leader assessments, and leading talent audits and succession planning initiatives for leadership teams. Kevin also served as Executive Consultant Leader for IBM where he led consulting engagements including large-scale assessment and selection systems, talent acquisition and recruitment processes, organizations and engagement projects, leadership development programs, and people analytics applications. While at IBM, Kevin led a team of consultants and served as a Watson Trainer, providing behavioral science expertise to optimize IBM’s talent management offerings leveraging Artificial Intelligence.
Kevin holds a PhD in Industrial/Organizational psychology from the University of North Texas, and a BA from Southern Methodist University. He is a licensed psychologist in the State of Texas and is an active committee member for the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP). Kevin also serves as an adjunct professor at SMU’s Cox School of Business. On a personal note, Kevin and his wife enjoy spending time traveling, watching, and often coaching youth sporting events for their three active sons.
Moderators:
Kelsey Klausing
Director, Solutions Partners
Hogan Assessments
Kelsey is the director for Hogan’s solutions partners team. She is responsible for assisting in the growth, delivery, and support of Hogan’s partners in their journeys to leverage personality assessments in their talent management strategies. Kelsey plays a key role in delivering projects and driving continuous value in partner relationships and identifying new opportunities to implement assessments to enhance partners’ talent management services. She joined Hogan as a senior consultant, responsible for overseeing effective vendor partnerships with a number of Hogan’s partners.
Prior to joining the Hogan family, Kelsey was the senior manager, assessment and measurement at Macy’s Inc., where she led the research, design, and implementation of pre-hire assessment tools to identify the best external talent. She built and secured assessments, interview guides, and case studies. She also conducted ongoing scientific analysis of tools to ensure effectiveness and minimize risk.
As an external consultant with Talogy, Kelsey helped hundreds of clients integrate science into the art of hiring and development. She led client-facing projects involving job analyses, competency modeling, structured interview guides, assessment recommendations, and validation studies. Partnering with dozens of assessment vendors in the industry, she maintained the catalog of offerings and ensured the accuracy of assessment overviews, reports, and versions.
Emilie Seyfang
Consultant, Solution Partners
Hogan Assessments
Emilie is a solutions partners consultant at Hogan Assessments. She is passionate about helping her clients leverage personality insights in talent selection and development to empower individuals and organizations to reach their maximum potential.
Before joining Hogan, Emilie served in a variety of roles across different industries, focusing primarily on human capital issues within organizations. In her work, she has partnered with senior executives on business transformation initiatives, coaching them on their role in ensuring employee adoption and leading their teams through transformation.
Emilie has partnered with clients to evaluate their culture and provide actionable recommendations to create culture change in rapidly growing organizations. She has also worked with organizations to improve talent selection and promotional processes.
9 Reasons to Attend
Come virtually network with hundreds of talent leaders and executive recruiters
- NETWORK with talent professionals
- ENGAGE in high-level debate
- MEET the experts and influencers in executive talent and recruiting
- DISCOVER the latest trends in executive recruiting
- GAIN valuable market intelligence
- LEARN what your competitors are doing
- DEVELOP your knowledge in executive recruiting
- CONNECT with peers in the recruiting ecosystem
- UNCOVER potential new customers