Claudia Müller – Founder and Managing Director of CIM Consulting
Claudia Müller is a consultant for organizational, team and leadership development focussing on the subject of collaboration. She is also an intercultural expert on China.
Claudia has extensive experience in international collaboration and leadership as well as building and developing organizational units or subsidiaries. After graduating from ESCP Europe (Master in International Management) she spent 15 years holding various international management and leadership positions in the Unilever Group of Companies and with Braun / Gillette. During this time she was responsible for collaborating with or leading teams and partners from more than 50 nationalities in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. Of German origin, she lived and worked in France, the UK, Switzerland, China, Singapore and India. She has continued to expand her experience and knowledge of the Asian context ever since into a true expertise, in particular for China.
In 1999 Claudia decided to transition into a consulting role. She trained as an organizational development consultant (Systemic and Gestalt orientation, IGG Berlin) and as an intercultural facilitator and trainer (ICI, Portland). The combination of these skills with her own international management experience, Asia expertise and research about collaboration with a focus on China are at the centre of her own freelance consulting and training activities since the year 2000. In 2012 she founded CIM Consulting to integrate the organizational and the people side of international, companywide collaboration.
Claudia works both at the level of the organization as well as directly with leaders and teams. Customers value in particular her personal experience and knowledge of international business and of, in particular, Asian cultures; her capability to find underlying causes and interdependencies, and her commitment to develop practical and concrete solutions. Her goal is not just to produce insights and potential for development, but to support her clients in implementation.
” I really feel strongly about the connection between the organization and the people side of collaboration. When people are prepared to collaborate, but the organization holds them back through the way work is structured, goals are set, through a very competitive, individualistic culture, bureaucratic procedures and other elements of organizational design, collaboration will not really happen. On the other hand, when a company changes aspects of organizational design or culture, but its leaders and collaborators do not live what it means to achieve together, with and through each other but work against each other, then collaboration will also not happen. Both have to be synchronized. When this happens, the sky is the limit for what people of different talents and backgrounds can achieve!”
Claudia works in German, English, French and Italian, with good notions of Spanish and some notions of Mandarin Chinese. She lives in Berlin.