Dr. Kwame R. Charles

DR. KWAME R. CHARLES

Dr. Charles is the former Director of Quality Consultants Limited, a Caribbean-based business research and management consulting firm which he co-founded and operated for over 25 years, with his wife and business partner. During this time, the company pioneered conducting employee satisfaction and engagement surveys throughout the English-speaking Caribbean, as well as parts of the Dutch and Spanish-speaking Americas. Beginning in 2000, and over the next decade and a half, the company conducted their proprietary Employee Benchmark Survey, surveying over 100,000 employees from more than 100 public and private sector organizations in the Caribbean, and creating the largest database of employee sentiment data in the region.

Dr. Charles obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 1976; and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Social & Organizational Psychology from Howard University in the United States in 1978 and 1980, respectively.

Prior to starting his own consulting business in 1996, he had both a practical and academic career in management in general and Human Resource Management in particular. In 1982, he joined a local energy company as one of the first persons in the country to be given the title of “Human Resource Manager,” rather than “Personnel Manager,” the prevailing title at the time.

His academic career has included both fulltime and parttime appointments at the St. Augustine and Mona Campuses of the University of the West Indies, the latter being a four-year stint at the University’s Centre for Hotel and Tourism Management in the Bahamas. He has also taught at the Arthur Lok Jack and Cave Hill Schools of Business in Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, among other regional and international tertiary institutions.

Dr. Charles has conducted numerous consultancies throughout the Caribbean and the Americas for several regional governments and international agencies, including the European Union, International Labour Organization, Organization of American States, and Caribbean Development Bank. He has published extensively in books, academic journals, magazines and local and regional media, and has been listed in the Marquis Who’s Who in the World and the Dictionary of International Biography.

In retirement, Dr. Charles’ interests include Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience and quantum mechanics, which he doesn’t really understand, but which he believes will shape and determine humanity’s future; as well as ornamental plants, in particular, crotons, which keep him grounded… literally