What It's Like to Work With Me
How I Show Up
I work as a thinking partner and a structured guide. I ask hard questions without making people feel interrogated. I hold space for honest conversation without letting it spiral into venting.
I’m also a former project manager, and that shapes everything. When we start something together, I track it. I manage scope, sequencing, and follow-through so the work doesn’t lose momentum halfway through. Culture work can feel ambiguous. My job is to make sure it isn’t.
I work virtually and in person. For organizations outside the Mid-Atlantic region, most engagements are remote with strategic in-person sessions at key points.
How It Works
Every engagement starts with the Culture Threads Assessment. Before any design or implementation work begins, I need to understand what’s actually happening in your organization, not just what leadership thinks is happening.
The Assessment is structured and sequenced deliberately, and customized based on your organization’s size and complexity. We don’t jump to solutions before we understand how people are experiencing the current culture.
This is the Culture Design Canvas, the framework that supports everything we do together. When I share it with my clients, the most common reaction is: “That’s exactly what we need to work through.”
The Canvas covers three dimensions:
Alignment | Clarity about purpose, values, priorities, and the behaviors that bring culture to life or hold it back.
Belonging | Whether people feel safe speaking up, whether feedback is honest and constructive, and whether your rituals reinforce connection or quietly undermine it.
Collaboration | How decisions get made, whether meetings are meaningful, and the spoken and unspoken norms that shape how work actually gets done.
Together, these give us a complete picture of your culture as it actually operates, not as it’s written on a wall.
What I Ask of You
Culture work requires leadership commitment. Not just sponsorship, and not just budget approval.
Senior leaders need to show up for the process, hear uncomfortable things, and follow through on commitments made to the team. That’s what separates culture work that shifts something real from culture work that produces a report nobody acts on.
In practice, that means:
- Dedicated time from senior leaders for interviews, sessions, and review
- Honest engagement with findings, even inconvenient ones
- Clear decision-making authority so the work doesn’t stall
- A genuine intention to act on what you learn
This is also not a two-session engagement. The real work unfolds over months. I’m more involved at the start, when we’re assessing and designing together. As you move into implementation, many clients take more of that on themselves, which is exactly how it should work. I stay available to support and adjust along the way.
Is This the Right Fit?
This work has the most impact when leadership is ready to look honestly at what’s not working and invest in changing it over time. Size matters less than readiness. Budget and bandwidth matter more than headcount.
If your organization is in crisis mode, a full culture engagement may not be the right fit right now. But there may still be something useful we can do together. I’ve facilitated single-day retreats that helped leadership teams find a path forward under significant pressure. If you’re not sure what you need, reach out. We’ll figure it out together.
If this sounds like the kind of partnership you’re looking for, the next step is the Culture Threads Assessment. It’s where every engagement begins.