John Pickering is the founder and President of the Commonwealth Center for High-Performance
Organizations, Inc. (CCHPO), a management consulting firm located in Charlottesville, Virginia which provides services to federal, state, and local governments, non-profit organizations, and the private sector. Dr. Pickering has over thirty years of experience as a management consultant, executive in both the public and private sectors, professor of public administration and management, and director of academic programs. Areas of consulting emphasis for the CCHPO are large-scale organizational change, development of high-performance executive leadership teams, organizational diagnosis and work culture surveys, integration of the continuous learning and improvement philosophy into organizational work cultures, design and implementation of product quality and service quality programs, design and development of customized project/program management programs, and design and delivery of executive development programs. Dr. Pickering is the primary author of the Building High-Performance Organizations in the Twenty-First Century seminar and of its HPO Organizational Diagnostic/Change Model. Dr. Pickering is also an adjunct faculty member at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s Federal Executive Institute for senior federal executives and at the Senior Executive Institute/LEAD Programs for local government executives at the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service.

Before founding CCHPO in 1989, Dr. Pickering was Deputy Director and a Senior Faculty Member at the Federal Executive Institute (FEI) in Charlottesville, Virginia from 1982 to 1989. The Institute is the federal government's primary center for executive development. It runs intensive month-long programs for the federal government's highest-level career executives. Dr. Pickering came to the federal government in 1976 when he was awarded a fellowship by the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA) to spend a year with a federal agency; he joined the Department of Housing and Urban Development as an in-house management consultant and program evaluator in that agency's Office of Policy Development and Research. In 1978, he decided to stay with the government and was selected by the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Multifamily Housing Programs to serve as the Program Support Officer (similar to a chief operating officer) for that organization within HUD.

Before coming to the federal government, Dr. Pickering taught at Memphis State University, Florida State University, Lamar University (Texas), and the University of Southern Mississippi, and he was Associate Director of the Institute of Governmental Studies and Research at Memphis State University. He has consulted extensively with federal, state, and local governments, non-profit organizations, and private sector companies. He is certified to administer and interpret the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and has used this instrument with thousands of senior level executives to assess leadership style, improve teamwork, and enhance group problem-solving skills in the more than twenty years he has been administering it. He is also certified to teach and apply the PROSCI Change Management material, which is intended to manage the “people side” of large-scale organization change. He was responsible, along with Bruce Brown at BYU, for developing the Leadership Philosophy Questionnaire, a 360 degree feedback instrument for assessing a manager’s leadership philosophy available through CCHPO.

Dr. Pickering received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of Washington (1967), a Master of Arts degree in Political Science from the University of Southern Mississippi (1969), and a Ph.D. in Political Science with concentrations in Public Administration, Policy Analysis, and Research Design from the Florida State University (1973).