About Me
I have spent much of my career helping people accomplish difficult things together.
That work has taken me into community organizations, public systems, nonprofits, leadership teams, civic partnerships, philanthropy, and institutions carrying significant responsibility for the people they serve.
Across those settings, I have learned that strategy alone is rarely the whole challenge.
Organizations can have talented people, strong plans, and important goals—and still struggle to move because trust is low, teams are fragmented, difficult conversations are being avoided, or people are working from very different understandings of the problem.
That is where much of my work lives.
I help leaders strengthen the human and relational capacity required to execute their goals.
My background was built in high-stakes environments. In Oakland, I worked on community violence reduction alongside residents, city leaders, service providers, law enforcement, and people most directly impacted by violence. That work required people with very different experiences and levels of trust to coordinate around a shared outcome. During those years, Oakland saw significant reductions in homicides and shootings.
Those experiences shaped how I think about leadership.
Complex problems rarely belong to one department or one leader. They cross boundaries. They expose gaps between strategy and culture. And they often require people who do not naturally trust one another to figure out how to work together anyway.
Today, through Empower Initiative, I partner with leaders and mission-driven organizations to strengthen culture, increase alignment, deepen participation, and connect human dynamics to organizational results. My work draws on storytelling, systems thinking, and practical leadership tools.
I believe leadership capacity is business capacity.
When trust breaks down, decisions take longer. When teams retreat into silos, information stops moving. When disagreement becomes personal, energy that should be directed toward the mission gets consumed internally.
Belonging and bridging, for me, are not abstract ideals. They are leadership disciplines that help people contribute, challenge one another, share information, take ownership, and stay connected to the work when pressure rises.
I am especially interested in the work senior leaders carry.
My role is often to become a thought partner to the person responsible for moving an important goal through an organization. I try to understand what they are trying to accomplish, what may be getting in the way, and what conversations, experiences, or leadership practices can help move the work forward.
Sometimes that means facilitating an executive team. Sometimes it means helping leaders navigate conflict or change. Sometimes it means designing a broader leadership experience around a strategic priority.
The objective is the same:
increase the organization’s ability to do what its leaders already know matters.
The question I keep returning to is not only:
What do we need to do?
It is also:
Who do we need to become to accomplish what we are trying to do?
That question sits at the center of my book, Troubling the Water, and increasingly at the center of my leadership work.
I do not believe the consultant should become the hero of an organization’s story.
The leaders already there know the history, carry the relationships, and will live with the consequences of what comes next.