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Organizational Training & ConsultancyDr B's Products & Services |
Social - Emotional - Behavioral Intelligence
Other areas: Customer Service, Creativity in Thinking & Communicating |
Mental Wellness & Resilience-Building
Other areas: Talent Development, Resilience & Staying Happy, Employee Engagement, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion), Positive Psychology, Positive Youth Development, Teaching & Learning Innovation
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- Client-facing - including scoping, customizing, delivering and assessing impact.
- Intervention tools used include Prevention Science’s Risk and Resilience Mapping, Needs Assessment, Logic Modelling in Intervention Development, Cognitive-Behavioral Techniques, and a Positive People Development framework,
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Profile as a Consulting Psychologist
Psychologist with 25+ years of cross-industry experience in applied psychology, organizational behavior, and mental wellness across Malaysia and United States. Pioneering new initiatives within full-time leadership roles in Oil & Gas, Airlines, Universities, and Private Practice. Designing and leading 20+ impactful interventions focused on talent development, culture change, leadership, employee engagement, and mental health; impacting 900+ leaders and managers across 10 high-profile industries. Nurturing talent-readiness of 500+ university students. Engaged in 30+ speaking engagements and media appearances to promote positive human development. With my teams, a guesstimate of impacting 10,000+ lives across 25 years of professional service. |
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Designing Critical Change Solution
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In my work in Oil & Gas company, through large-scale data collected, we identified key needs for senior leaders.
In response, I developed a 4-phase behavioral coaching program based on positive psychology called Critical Conversations with Senior Leaders (CCSL). This facilitative process culminates in a team alignment session. As a result, senior leaders found the coaching journey valuable in identifying their strengths, identifying areas requiring attention, developing action steps on the ground, and planning for the future. |
Coach Dr Brendan helped assist me in transforming my Operations team in regards to Culture of Accountability and Ownership. It has been valuable discussing with Dr Brendan in the past few months on how to effectively manage non-compliance, and create the right environment – ensuring people feel safe to give and receive feedback. What I also love about CCSL is providing a platform for self-reflection – where the coach provides opportunities for me to reflect on what I am doing. Getting feedback from coaches on our strengths and weaknesses is very valuable, as well as self-care to prevent burnout.
~ Fakhrul A., Head of Operations |
Solving Problems & Innovating
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As a visual thinker, I often see patterns to problems, and am keen to innovate matching solutions. In one organization I observed that people found it challenging to express their thoughts. So, I developed a workshop that took employees through a gentle process of helping them feel safe in expressing their needs, risks they observed, ideas and areas for improvements. This led to a series of Psychological Safety workshops across the organization. Evaluations from 10 sites across Malaysia showed that employees found the sessions highly valuable. As a result of these sessions, feedback on needs and risks obtained and were funneled back to team leaders for their action.
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Dr. Brendan has proactively supported our team in framing its initiative to promote psychological safety & mental health as part of the GHSSE org culture. He, along with Dr. J, has provided the team with the relevant resources for upskilling and supporting the staff.
~ Sandeep K.C., Head, Geophysics Solutions |
Team Management & Leadership Development
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I am often appointed to leadership positions, and have found it exciting managing team dynamics – both positive collaborative players as well as those who were initially challenging.
At Air Asia, I was brought in as Consulting Psychologist and Acting Head of Training for the region. I had 5 training divisions reporting to me – safety, engineering, regulatory, customer service and leadership. My primary tasks were in managing learning and development for the region (incl. sourcing for the best instructors), enhancing working relations between divisions and across the organization, change management, and resilience-building. To enhance communicating needs and ideas effectively, I introduced toolbox meets where teams come together to build mini-props to showcase what they want to see improved and how we can get this done together. As a result of using visualization techniques, these teams experienced higher buy-in to their ideas from the rest, less confusion and unnecessary debates, and we were able to support them better in prioritizing allocations and manpower. Much of what I do at People Transformers (my own practice) is in the development of leaders. This includes crafting and developing training specific for leaders and managers, public and media sessions in resilience building, and in coaching those keen in self-development and improvement. For example, I developed and delivered a 1-day interactive workshop for CEOs of energy organizations in the nation. As a result, leaders had greater appreciation for using human performance improvement to address behavioral risk factors across the industry. |
Visionary, inspirational and focused, strategic and tactical, effective communication, collaborative and teamwork centered, persuasive and passion for job, caring and likeable, decisive, ethical and integrity, and openness to feedback ~ Summary of 360-degree evaluation as Acting Head of AirAsia Academy
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Developing & Delivering High-Quality Learning Content
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My philosophy in learning and development is in placing the talent at the centre of learning and including her/his global experiences that adds to the group learning. I believe everyone has something that is of value that we can learn from. Thus, my focus in L&D has been in collaborative opportunities and in providing immediate feedback – both F2F and virtually – including via learning management systems. Over the years, I have worked with various universities – providing content development and delivery to both university students as well as to adult learners. I have great fulfilment in facilitating sessions I develop in the space of organizational behaviour and psychosocial safety and wellbeing. Much of my work is in creating internal insight that motivates individuals and teams in taking small steps in creating changes they want to see in their workplace.
From being the Director of Executive Education and providing training to SMEs, to teaching working adults in postgraduate programs (e.g. MA Managerial Psychology, MA Counseling) to conducting corporate training in my private practice, I have enjoyed providing learning and development opportunities to a wide range of clients from various industries and countries – both face-to-face and using online technology. Positions such as Assistant Professor in Applied Psychology (Work Psychology) at the University of Nottingham has helped me nurture and develop future practitioners. As a result, many of my students from various parts of the world – from the United Kingdom to Sweden to China and India – now work successfully in I/O Psychology, Human Resources and Learning & Development. At PETRONAS, it was critical we aligned efforts in people development with our business objectives. For example, in achieving the organization’s vision for zero fatality, I conducted a briefing for developers/trainers where I mind-mapping our GC training to Self-Regulation requirements to help the company move closer to the necessary government accreditation. I am very familiar with various softwares that aid in learning including MS Office, research software such as SPSS and SAS, video conferencing and video editing; learning platforms such as Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard, and use various learning tools in facilitating my trainings including Slido, Quizzizz, and Kahoot for online interaction and engagement. |
Thanks Dr Brendan, we owe it all to you, H and the team who reviewed the content. Again, thank you so much; really appreciate your support on the module’s development. You have helped in the development of the HBC e-learning module, which involves clarification on the Categories (with both HSE, RCA & HSE ABR subject matter experts).
~ Mazliana A., Manager HSE Mgmt Systems & Knowledge Mgmt |
Evaluating Organizational Needs & Data-Driven Effort
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All of my design work begins with understanding needs through critical conversations with multiple stakeholders and collecting/using large-scale data – quantitative and qualitative. In my position in Oil & Gas, I was the Lead for the review of the Culture Maturation Survey – a tool we use in driving our safety and wellbeing strategies and in determining progress every two years. This tool includes both quantitative and qualitative items that I was involved in mining to aid in guiding our efforts and in intervention development.
Whenever I move into a new organization, there are always gaps in knowledge. I am comfortable seeking first-hand information from various parties through discussions and informal meets, even as I read-up on documents produced to find the needed information. In The United States: For 5 years at Penn State’s Prevention Research Center, I was the doctoral coordinator for Communities That Care that worked with a team managing close to 100 communities across the state of Pennsylvania in understanding and addressing risk factors using both quantitative and qualitative data analyses. As a result of our data-driven efforts, we were able to effectively evaluate the implementation of evidence-based interventions, provide reports and recommendations back to stakeholders across the state, and produce work in international publications. My work is well-cited in international journals. |
Feedback I have received from across divisions in PETRONAS include:
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Dr B's Innovative Approaches & Thinking Out-of-the-Box
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In a company I was working with, significant conflicts arose where leaders were blaming each other for delays in operations.
In deep-diving, I realized that their crutch was delays in email responses and confusion with back and forth responses. I got their permission to try out an “experiment”: to physically situate leaders next to each other for 2 months and do more face-to-face meets. I also helped facilitate some of these meetings. As a result, projects and critical decisions started to move again. These took less time as there were less obstacles in communications. Further, the silos that they had built to protect their turfs slowly came down while Trust increased. |
U.S. Fulbright academician Dr Brendan Gomez is a renowned psychologist and learning specialist. He is elegant and sharp in professional settings. He is gregarious and respects all people regardless of race, creed, and colour. Youth and adults find Brendan empathetic, personable and his high degree of positivity infectious. Some professionals have described Brendan as "sparkling juice" in social settings. Others say Brendan is a gentleman who exudes peace, love, and joy to individuals and groups of individuals, quietly dispelling discord, if any. Brendan's professional talents are highly relevant in today's social environment filled with much negativity, "noise" and fake news affecting the human spirit. Suffice to say, Brendan's talents are a pivot to success for organizations that place their people's development as a primary goal ~ Mr Gerard George, Retired Director of Lincoln Center, United States Embassy, Kuala Lumpur
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Dr B's Multi-Tasking & Successful Stakeholder Engagement
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In various organizations, I am tasked with multiple projects.
At HELP University, I wore multiple hats and was on multiple projects, all of which were successfully completed – university teaching, corporate training, mentoring, non-profit work, engagement with the United Nations, government ministries, and other key stakeholders. Much of my work at PETRONAS is in consulting as an SME to various project teams from different parts of this large global organization. I am proud of my accomplishment in introducing my team to SHELL’s SMEs, and helping organize efforts in exchanging of knowledge. |
Dear Dr. Brendan, I would like to extend my gratitude to you and Petronas for the opportunity to share our Safety Culture journey. Our safety culture can only be sustained not just within Shell Upstream Malaysia but also collectively across the Oil & Gas Industry. We have a lot in common; from the business nature, to contractors servicing us to the same safety aspiration. Echoing Lawrence, I also look forward to more learning opportunity with you and Petronas. Thanks again.
~ Eddy K., SHELL Malaysia Behavioral & Operational Safety Lead |
