co-create a thriving culture.
Most companies wait to work on their culture until there’s a problem with culture.
But there’s a cost to inaction.
High turnover. Disengaged staff. Reduced performance. Damaged company reputation.
I’m often called in to serve companies who are experiencing these problems. For some, it’s their first sign that their culture needs work. But these “symptoms” of a damaged culture can continue to hurt culture even as we work to change it. Culture transformation can be done, but it’s tougher and takes longer if we wait to fix it until there’s a crisis.
Wouldn’t it be better to start today to lock in a strong, resilient, people-centered culture that stands the test of time? What if you could have happy staff, sustainable business growth, AND reliable performance? You can engineer it now, and save yourself stressful, expensive problems down the road.
Now, more than ever, the world needs organizations willing to lead their industries by redefining what great culture looks like.
TL;DR: Culture is not just an empty buzzword. Let’s do something about it.
culture = the actions and decisions that are accepted and rewarded in your organization.
What do you really want your business to become?
The most innovative? Impactful? Growth-oriented? People-centered? Collaborative? High-performing? Transformational?
And are you doing what it takes to build an intentional culture that will actually produce the results you want?
Or are you allowing your culture to be created by default, leaving it vulnerable to internal and external chaos?
Let’s be real here: You wouldn’t take an accidental approach to your organization’s success.
So don’t take a hands-off approach to your culture and leave yourself scrambling to fix the fractures every time you grow.
Engineer it intentionally from day one, and watch it become the main factor of success and growth for your business.
what’s top of mind for you right now?
I work collaboratively with you AND your team
to co-create experiences and cultures
that feel good AND produce results.
(You do not have to choose between the two.)
go beyond fluff. have fun solving problems and achieving goals.
Too many organizations are still running old-school trainings, workshops, offsites, and retreats that are theoretical, passive and lecture-based, or fluffy and not applicable to real life. The trouble is, these experiences don’t really achieve anything but a momentary feeling.
Your team knows when you are trying to put on a show to take their mind off the tougher parts of today’s work world. Occasionally, “just fun” is needed! But it only works with specific scenarios.
What most people really want and need are enjoyable team experiences with real depth, where they can work together on the solutions and goals that help them move through blocks, operate at their best, and solve problems.
I specialize in:
Creating active learning and collaboration experiences that achieve results, custom-designed in collaboration with you
Applying design thinking and agile approaches to solving business problems
Co-creation of collective goals, decisions, approaches, and quick wins DURING (not after) workshop time
Designing solutions with implementation in mind
Integrating fun and bonding in with the workshop experience — even when tough conversations are needed.
workshop facilitation
that actually solves challenges
methodology
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I work together upfront with the team leaders to define why the participants need the workshop. Some examples might include:
Solving a specific problem: what’s not working, in the team or in the team’s work?
Making something better: a process, a workflow, a collaboration, a project…
Creating something new: a specific change, a new project or approach, an old challenge that needs new ideas
Improving how we interact and collaborate, including silo-busting, info sharing, cross-functional collaboration
I will coach you through an initial design process where we get very specific about what this challenge is and why solving it together will be better.
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Nothing is more important than involving participants early and often, even before we decide an agenda. We always recommend a pre-survey, both to test our thinking and to ensure we don’t miss anything that’s particularly important to participants.
This can also be done via interviews or focus groups, depending on the challenge. For more complex problems or culture issues, it may be advantageous to speak with participants “live” in the early design stages so people feel heard and engaged before the session.
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Based on what we learn from the previous stages of the process, design begins. You and I will have weekly or biweekly checkpoints during the design process to ensure we remain on the same page.
Depending on your goals, some impactful workshop elements may include:
Team and individual wins
Setting working agreements and goals for the day in-session
Trust-building with honest and open discussions
Root-cause analysis for problems
Future visioning: what will a better world look like?
Ideation and design thinking
Team decision making strategies
Establishing working groups
Strategy and implementation plans
And more. The choice of modality entirely depends on the outcomes we define together with the team..
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Most people think of information relay when they think of team meetings. However, this is the most inefficient way to improve info flow.
If there is new information people need ahead of the workshop, we’ll figure out a different technique and forum to use before and/or after the workshop.
This way, workshop time will be dedicated entirely to problem-solving and making real progress on goals. People will have the information they need to do their jobs upfront. -
It’s time to deliver the workshop!
During the workshop, people get to the implementation phase as quickly as possible. Analysis of the problem or goal is intended to be quick but in-depth. Teams work together and the facilitator coaches them through sticking points and tough conversations.
The people are experts in their subject matter. The facilitator’s role is to be the expert in the process of progress.
The leader also has an important role during the workshop. They will speak last in most discussions, serving only as a tiebreaker or to provide specialty strategic guidance when there is a need for prioritization. People from multiple levels should take various lead co-facilitator roles throughout the day as well — not only the leader.
Teams should leave a workshop with a clear picture of the way forward, and the leader should be ready to offer support and resources however possible.
keep & GROW THE best people
With CAREER development coaching programs
Coaching at scale, for a purpose.
My scalable coaching programs help you create big transformations in your organization.
I specialize in:
Giving people a real voice and showing companies how to incorporate those voices into decisions
Empowering people at all levels to create company-wide change together
Making the most of the engagement, creativity, and motivation of your people
Helping people get ready for their first leadership role — BEFORE they first get leadership responsibilities. (If you wait to train them until after they get their new roles, it’s too late to get ahead of bad habits).
I frequently partner with other trusted coaches with impressive and diverse backgrounds — enough to find a match for any person and scale up to any size engagement.
Individual Coaching
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Getting people ready for their first leadership role — or moving from middle to senior management — is a critical time to provide support and development. A one-size-fits-all training won’t do it — this is the time for people to confront their internal biases and blocks, set a strong personal vision, and do what it takes to be the best versions of themselves so they are fully ready for the challenges inherent in managing others.
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Career development is a top priority for people wondering whether to stay or leave a company. But most organizations silo their coaching resources to only their executives or leaders. But the rest of the organization needs support, too! That’s why it’s so important to individualize your career development resources and make them available to as many people as you can. We can offer scalable options to help you individualize your career development programs and get people the support they need.
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Traditional “hi-po” (high potential) development programs are usually nomination-based. Ours is open-enrollment and opt-in, in order to make your organization more inclusive and make room for more diversity at every level. Built on an initial strategy session with you and your leaders, we create a strategic roadmap to company goals, and we support your people 1:1 to develop their own ways of contributing to the success of the organization.
Group + Team Coaching
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An incredible way to build strong networks while getting big goals accomplished, these “mastermind” style group coaching engagements bring people together to figure out innovative solutions to the company’s most interesting challenges. We facilitate these cross-functional, multi-level groups through a series of dynamic exercises and coaching techniques to help them come up with fresh ideas AND implementation plans, while learning to see barriers as guideposts, not stopping points. In the process, people build new connections and relationships within the company that make them want to stay. We’re all in this together.
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Is your team struggling through repetitive issues or hitting the same roadblocks over and over? It might be time to get them out of their habits and into a coaching environment. In our Team Culture group coaching program, teams are able to speak safely about what’s not working in the team and implement strategies to make it better. We utilize tools such as the Energy Leadership Index tool to put real data behind a team’s challenges and design a better way forward.
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I’ve spent years figuring out how to make L&D initiatives more sustainable and less event-based — coaching is one great way to make that happen. Add Group Coaching on to a training program to maximize community, action and behavior change. We can work with absolutely any material (we can also build your own custom courses) and we’ll facilitate group or team coaching around action objectives of your choice. (For example: adopting new leadership or agile working behaviors). Because expecting anything to change after one training event just isn’t realistic — people need to work through real-world challenges in a supportive environment. That’s the value of group coaching.
reimagine culture
culture transformation consulting
great cultures are built on purpose.
here are some examples of my past work.
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An international development office wanted to evolve from a culture where issues were never directly discussed, people kept information to themselves, and there were no consequences for destructive behavior, to a culture of collaboration and trust.
Values and behaviors existed for this organization, but they felt far-reaching and unclear. Our goal was to integrate defined values into how people worked together on a daily basis.
During this six-month project, in partnership with Fitch Consulting, I served as Director of the People & Culture workstream, building and facilitating workshops, leading difficult discussions to resolution, training leaders, and holding individual coaching sessions. Simultaneously, my consultant partner led functional teams through major process redesigns and new ways of working. The final output was a pragmatic culture transformation workplan, which the staff co-created during a retreat with us.
Because we created safe spaces to get out from under the weight of historical fears and have purposeful, constructive conversations they’d been avoiding, this team was able to move forward. The clients have extended this contract in order to make more progress with implementing the workplan with our support. -
A 1600-person global retail company defined a culture change strategy, but behavior change in an organization where tenure was long meant most people had no other example of what was possible. They needed resources, information, and new ways of working to help them realize the full benefits of this commitment from the organization.
Working from inside the company, I established a new strategy for learning that would make the most of existing resources to reach more people with more diverse learning resources. This included the organization’s first opt-in gatekeeper-free coaching program for all levels that is still in use today, learning digitalization, a cross-functional networking group, and built a new learning space that enabled more active, experiential learning. Additionally, in partnership with a small team of committed colleagues, I co-founded a grassroots employee-led culture change group.
By empowering people from all levels, teaching them new ways of working, and giving them a direct line to top leadership, this intentional global collaboration launched innovative projects that were important to employees, with full support from top leadership. -
I served as Project Director on the reorganization and realignment of a 12-person specialty gender advocacy team trying to create behavioral and policy change across a 10,000-person organization.
Through a highly collaborative consultative process including every person on the team, a partner consultant and I led a series of collaborative workshops, individual consultations, a survey, and analyzed asynchronous contributions from staff.
We used these insights to co-create Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) with this team to ensure optimal team-level performance, and we designed an agile matrixed structure which included both cross-functional and direct reporting responsibility areas, as well as thematic focal points.Because the staff was involved in every discussion from the beginning, the structure was implemented with normal “ways for working” growing pains but almost no resistance.
Full CV available upon request.
Ready to build something transformational?