Client Engagements
Long-term partnerships and strategic interventions. Leveraging pivotal moments to evolve how you lead.
CLIENT STORIESSVP, Global Energy
Greater alignment across a changing team, faster integration of new leaders, and stronger relationships through five years of organizational change.
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The work began with an Enneagram workshop for one team. It resonated strongly enough that the engagement expanded to the broader organization of more than 100 people across 2 continents, creating a shared language for understanding how people communicate, make decisions, and respond under pressure. From there, the work became more fluid: coaching individual leaders, supporting relationships that had become strained, working with teams, and designing offsites around alignment and vision.
That continuity has mattered through years of leadership changes, reorganizations, and turnover. Because I know many of the people, the history, and the patterns that tend to emerge under pressure, we rarely have to start with only the issue sitting on the table that day. Sometimes a current leadership problem echoes one I watched unfold elsewhere in the organization years earlier. Naming that pattern can shift the conversation from “What is wrong with this person?” to “What has gone unaddressed, and what does this moment require from me?”
The same context helps new leaders find their footing faster. We can talk not only about responsibilities and priorities, but about the relationships around them: whose style may initially be easy to misread, where trust needs to be built, and how to enter an established team without either over-accommodating or overcorrecting. In one case, that meant helping a leader think as deliberately about setting a new team member up relationally as operationally. Within months, she was stepping confidently into high-stakes conversations with senior leadership.
Over time, the changes are often visible in small but consequential moments. A leader who once experienced shifting expectations from his manager as personal and destabilizing can now recognize the pattern, stay grounded, and focus on what is his to manage. Two colleagues whose relationship had deteriorated worked through it well enough that the improvement was later noticed by senior leadership. And a team that once needed collaboration deliberately mapped out now does much more of it organically, including newer members contributing freely.
Nearly five years in, the value of the partnership is not any single workshop, coaching session, or offsite. It is the accumulated context between them. I can work with an individual leader while understanding the relationships around them, support a team without losing sight of the people inside it, and help leaders get beneath the immediate friction to what is actually happening. The work changes as the organization changes, while the trust and context keep building.
Senior Partner & Practice Leader, Global Law Firm
A clearer vision for the practice, and stronger judgment about when to push, when to listen, and how to bring others along.
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As D.’s firm prepared to merge into a much larger global platform, business plans needed aligning, roles and titles were still being negotiated, and many of the people he needed to bring with him were peers, not direct reports.
Early in our work, much of D.’s attention went to reading the politics around him—who was aligned with whom, where the threats were, and what decisions others might make. The work gradually shifted toward a different question: What did he want this practice to become, and how could he build support for that direction?
His vision broadened with it. What initially sounded like an expansion of his own practice became a picture of the whole group: where the firm needed stronger market presence, how the practice should evolve across offices, and where growth needed to feel additive rather than threatening to existing partners. He became more selective about what needed saying, more deliberate about when to push, and more willing to let an idea develop before pressing for agreement.
One moment captured the change. After a respected colleague left amid friction with another part of the firm, D.’s first instinct was to take his frustration to leadership. In our conversation, the question became: “What does this situation reveal about what the practice needs next?” He took that framing into a longer conversation with firm leadership—not simply naming what had gone wrong, but articulating a direction and the obstacles standing in its way.
As the combined group began working together, D. increasingly approached influence as a process rather than a single persuasive moment. Instead of announcing a finished plan, he tested ideas, took partners’ temperature, and built support over time. The work is still unfolding, but he is spending less energy reacting to the merger around him and more of it helping shape what the practice becomes.
Newly Promoted Executive, Global Energy
Greater confidence and authority in a bigger role, hard people decisions made early, and a leadership approach distinctly her own.
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E. stepped into a significant promotion after years of working alongside a highly regarded predecessor whose way of leading had become the default map for the role. He was based near senior leadership, stayed close to the details, and had strong relationships across the organization. She would lead from a regional office, had different instincts about how much autonomy to give her team, and was inheriting unresolved performance issues and a hiring plan she was not sure she agreed with.
Early in the transition, E. was still looking outward for cues about how to lead the role: What did her boss expect? How much say did she have in shaping the team? Our work focused on turning those questions into positions—what she believed, what she planned to do, and why.
That shift showed up quickly in her decisions. She challenged an inherited hiring plan and built the case for the skills the team actually needed rather than defaulting to seniority. She also began addressing performance issues that had gone unresolved, instead of treating them as part of the role she simply had to inherit.
Her natural instinct was to give people space and assume good faith. The work was not to become more controlling, but to pair that autonomy with clearer expectations. When one direct report repeatedly missed deadlines and challenged requests, she stopped absorbing the explanations and addressed the pattern directly.
She began managing up differently, too. Rather than waiting for the right moment, relying on proximity, or trying to anticipate what her boss wanted, she called, set the agenda, and brought her own point of view. Increasingly, she was leading the role from her own judgment rather than her predecessor’s map.
Principal, Public School
Stronger accountability and team clarity, a calmer and more collaborative school environment, and greater capacity for strategic leadership.
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After years of leading through crisis—from COVID and deep community divisions to acute challenges facing immigrant families in her school—J. was also contending with a destabilizing staff dynamic that was consuming enormous energy. She was absorbing problems that were not hers to carry, struggling to hold people consistently accountable, and questioning her own leadership while working within district, union, staffing, and budget constraints she could not simply change.
Our work focused on separating what was hers to own from what wasn’t—and becoming clearer and more consistent where she did have authority. That meant setting stronger expectations, addressing problems more directly, and being more explicit about roles and responsibilities across the leadership team.
It also meant learning not to let other people’s frustration, resistance, or disappointment determine what she did next. She became more able to hold difficult emotions without immediately fixing, absorbing, or backing away from the leadership decision in front of her.
The following school year opened with a noticeably different tone. Teachers were collaborating more, staff were responding to clearer accountability, and members of the team remarked on how unusually calm the school felt.
J. had more capacity, too—not because the constraints of public education had disappeared, but because she was clearer about where she had agency and where she did not. That created more room for strategic leadership, for her own life, and for the parts of the work that mattered most.
Small Business Owner
Clearer expectations across the leadership team, less rescue from the CEO, and a shift toward leading as an owner rather than the business’s safety net.
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After years of steering her company through crisis to steady profitability, S. was still the place where problems ended up. Directors brought issues back to her, she caught mistakes before they did, and work she had delegated often came back needing her to finish it.
The harder realization was that every time S. stepped in to make the work better, faster, or safer, she was also teaching the team that she would eventually catch what they did not. What had once helped the business survive was now keeping too much responsibility concentrated with her.
Our work focused on interrupting that pattern. She became clearer about what good work looked like, held people to deadlines without taking the work back, and resisted the familiar impulse to fix something simply because she could. When an urgent request stalled and she caught herself thinking, “I could just do it right now,” she gave the person responsible a deadline instead.
Over time, people began carrying more. A director she had once corrected almost daily became someone she no longer needed to monitor closely. Her COO held leaders to their own commitments. During one eleven-day trip, S. was almost entirely offline and nothing needed her.
She also saw that moving every problem to her second-in-command would only create a new single point of failure. The work became less about getting things off her plate and more about building real ownership across the team. She began spending more of her time making the decisions and pursuing the opportunities that were actually hers to own.
CDO, Global Development
Steadier through crisis, stronger delegation and boundaries, greater candor with executive team and board, and the clarity to pursue a new opportunity.
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Amid severe funding losses, layoffs, and rapid downsizing, M. was taking 5 a.m. calls across time zones, distracted and responsive to work during family time, and still building slide decks herself from the C-suite. She knew it was unsustainable, but didn’t know where to begin letting go without disappointing the people who depended on her—or herself.
The deeper issue was not workload alone. M. had built a career on being the person who could handle more, step in when things were hard, and make sure the work got done. Letting go could feel less like delegation and more like lowering the standard.
Our work focused on distinguishing when stepping in was actually leadership and when it was simply absorbing something that could belong to someone else. She handed off visible work that had previously stayed with her, protected more time away from work, and began noticing the standard her own overwork was setting for the team. She also became more direct with the executive team and board, raising concerns she had previously been more inclined to absorb or work around.
The restructuring did not stop, but she became steadier inside it. Letting go was still a practice, not a solved problem. The more important shift was in how she understood responsibility: just because she could carry more did not mean she needed to.
That same judgment eventually shaped the larger question of whether to stay. She had known for some time that the role, as she was living it, was not sustainable. Our work helped her separate the immediate urge to escape from the more important question of what she wanted next. She ultimately chose to leave and take a new position, making the move with greater clarity about what she was and was not willing to carry.
CEO, Global Social Enterprise
Greater trust in her own judgment, more decisive leadership, and the willingness to take the organization—and herself—into a new chapter.
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After nearly a decade leading the organization, A. was increasingly hungry for a new challenge. A difficult relationship with a senior leader had consumed enormous energy and left her second-guessing her own judgment. We worked through the personnel issue, put a timeline around her departure, and began exploring what might come next.
Then the parent organization announced plans to shut down what she had spent years building. The possibility of leaving had felt complicated; the possibility of losing the work altogether did not. When its impact in communities around the world was suddenly at risk, she became much clearer about what she wanted to protect and what she was willing to do to protect it.
She made the personnel decision she had struggled with, led the organization through a spinout from its parent, and moved from longtime Executive Director to CEO of an independent social enterprise.
The new chapter has required a different kind of leadership. She has had to make decisions with less certainty, take risks she once might have avoided, push a longtime team beyond familiar ways of working, and build sources of funding the organization had never needed before. The work has become less about whether it is time for her to leave and more about who she needs to become to lead what comes next.
CEO, Social Impact & Philanthropy
Clarity about the leadership strengths she could carry across industries, a successful move into a new field, and ultimately a transition into a CEO role.
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After decades in anti-trafficking work, including years of direct service globally and in the United States, A. was questioning whether her work still created the kind of impact that had drawn her to the field in the first place. Leaving, however, meant stepping away from an identity, network, and body of expertise she had spent decades building—and considering opportunities in fields where she was far less established.
Our work focused on separating what was specific to the field from what was hers to bring anywhere: the ability to build trust, advocate fiercely, mobilize people around a mission, and make difficult decisions when something mattered.
That clarity made it possible to see a move into a new field not as starting over, but as carrying forward the strongest parts of her leadership. She made a major leap into child digital-safety philanthropy, bringing decades of experience into a very different context.
Several years later, we worked together again as she considered her next step. This time, the question was no longer whether she could translate her leadership across industries. She pursued—and secured—the CEO role.
Principal, Public School
Stronger accountability and team clarity, a calmer and more collaborative school environment, and greater capacity for strategic leadership.
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After years of leading through crisis—from COVID and deep community divisions to acute challenges facing immigrant families in her school—J. was also contending with a destabilizing staff dynamic that was consuming enormous energy. She was absorbing problems that were not hers to carry, struggling to hold people consistently accountable, and questioning her own leadership while working within district, union, staffing, and budget constraints she could not simply change.
Our work focused on separating what was hers to own from what wasn’t—and becoming clearer and more consistent where she did have authority. That meant setting stronger expectations, addressing problems more directly, and being more explicit about roles and responsibilities across the leadership team.
It also meant learning not to let other people’s frustration, resistance, or disappointment determine what she did next. She became more able to hold difficult emotions without immediately fixing, absorbing, or backing away from the leadership decision in front of her.
The following school year opened with a noticeably different tone. Teachers were collaborating more, staff were responding to clearer accountability, and members of the team remarked on how unusually calm the school felt.
J. had more capacity, too—not because the constraints of public education had disappeared, but because she was clearer about where she had agency and where she did not. That created more room for strategic leadership, for her own life, and for the parts of the work that mattered most.
“Lisa is the one person who is fully on my side. She helps me show up the way I want to. I know I’ve found my footing as a new partner because of our work.”
WHAT CLIENTS SAY“Lisa listens to the whole tangled story with such warmth, then names what I’ve been avoiding. Suddenly a problem I’ve been circling for weeks has a clear way forward.”
“Lisa has coached me through some of my hardest seasons as leader. She helped me get perspective and make hard calls I knew I needed to make. My team respects me more, and I have more confidence. ”