Mary Catherine/RAND Fallout : VP of Staff Development and management to step down

After serving as Vice President of Staff Development and Management
for nearly 12 years and chair of the Research Staff Management
Department for 15 years, Adele Palmer has informed me of her desire to
step down from these roles at the end of the calendar year in order to
focus on research.
Adele’s contributions to RAND have spanned her service as a
researcher, department head, and corporate officer. As an analyst,
she led or co-led influential studies that addressed a broad array of
policy issues, ranging from defense resource management to
environmental regulation. As its first chair, Adele was the leading
architect in designing the modern-day Research Staff Management
Department (RSMD) and in developing RAND’s practices for recruiting,
managing, promoting, and evaluating research staff. During her
tenure, Adele and her team of RSMD group managers hired hundreds of
RAND’s current research staff members. As chair of RSMD, Adele has
led efforts to improve recruiting and performance review processes for
research staff, led an initiative to increase the diversity of our
staff, refined researcher job families, and developed promotion
criteria. Since becoming Vice President of Staff Management and
Development in October of 1999, Adele has also had responsibility for
Human Resources, and she has led RAND’s HR function through
significant improvements and modernization efforts over this period.
Adele introduced RAND’s HR generalist model, which greatly improved HR
service and the level of support provided to RAND units, departments,
and staff. She has also provided oversight of our employee benefits
and compensation programs and has supported numerous efforts to
improve them; led the effort to modernize RAND’s employment
classification system; championed the implementation of important
system updates, such as the introduction of online recruiting and
applicant tracking capabilities; and led our new staff orientation
program.
Adele’s move back to the research staff will leave a void, and we will
be addressing the question of succession as the transition date draws
closer.
Adele has been a trusted adviser to Michael and me. We are extremely
grateful for her many contributions to RAND and pleased that she will
continue to lend her research talents to our institution.
Jim