Professional Biography
Tom is a founding director of Ranmore. He has worked with over 150 higher education institutions, research institutes, and policy bodies on strategy, change, leadership, and management development activities in the UK and globally. His work ranges from:
- The design and delivery of tailored leadership and management development programs
- The diagnosis, design, and facilitation of work to create high-performing senior management teams
- Supporting university- and portfolio-level strategy development
- One-to-one executive career and transition coaching for leaders and senior teams in higher education
The final area of focus, which has evolved over the past 11 years, is informed by research that led to a jointly authored book, Leadership Transitions in Universities: Arriving, Surviving and Thriving at the Top (Tom Kennie and Robin Middlehurst; Routledge, 2021).
Tom’s work in the higher education sector was, and continues to be, influenced by his experience as the co-founding program director (with Professor Robin Middlehurst) of the UK Advance HE/Leadership Foundation for HE “Top Management Programme” (TMP). Over a period of 13 years, in excess of 650 senior leaders participated in the TMP. He also worked internationally as Director of the International Association of Universities’ Leading Globally Engaged Universities program, and he continues, after 14 years, to co-lead the Global Child Dental Fund (GCDF) King’s College London–Harvard School of Dental Medicine Senior Dental Leaders program.
Immediately prior to establishing Ranmore over 20 years ago, he spent six years as Director of Human Resources for an international firm of property advisors and prior to this was Group Head of Learning and Development for Balfour Beatty, an international engineering company. He has also been a full-time academic, spending eight years as Head of Surveying in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Surrey and four years at the University of Technology in Kingston, Jamaica.
His academic background has included studying geography and topographic sciences (BSc, MAppSci, University of Glasgow), remote sensing and GIS (PhD, Imperial College, London) and business management (MBA, Roffey Park Management Institute, University of Sussex). Professionally he is also qualified as a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (FRICS), a Chartered member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CMIPD), and he is as a member of the Institute of Management Consulting (Certified Management Consultant).
He was appointed in 2016 as an Honorary Senior Fellow of the LH Martin Institute (LHMI) at the University of Melbourne. The LHMI is part of the Melbourne Centre for the Study of Higher Education. In 2022 he was awarded an Honorary Ed.D. by the University of Bolton.
