I’ve had a twisty path getting here.
In my early 20's I was hired by a new Artistic Director of a regional theater to start a school theater program. Three months later, the director left before he could be fired, and I ran the theater for two months with the remaining company. Not surprisingly, I burnt out from trying to do everything.
I earned a Master's in Counseling Psychology, which honed my listening skills. However, I found I agreed with Krishnamurti- “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” I wanted to help people in a more concrete way.
People and process skills came together when I became Dean of Faculty for a media arts college. My faculty members were all small business owners- artists, musicians, audio production engineers, social media business people. They taught me entrepreneurship as I sharpened their teaching skills.
Two large themes came out of my college work.
The first theme was managerial effectiveness. Accreditation is the way that colleges are evaluated. Without accreditation, colleges lose the ability to accept financial aid. Basically, no accreditation, no money, no college. I worked with my team "herding cats" to prepare for an accreditation visit where we received the highest possible evaluation. I learned how to tackle big team projects with this experience.
The second theme was outcome assessment. Colleges came under new pressure to prove that they were preparing students for their chosen profession. I learned to ask outcome focused questions - how do we know what success is? And create assessments to match - how can we see if we are being successful? These skills directly play into my ability to help business owners define their outcomes and measurements.
Assessment became my full time job as an internal consultant for several colleges and universities.
In parallel, I practiced entrepreneurship myself as I grew and self-managed a rental property portfolio.
About the time of the pandemic, I transitioned to Salesforce consulting. I found that many clients had not thought through their processes before in any systematic way. Processes were patchworks, where even people who liked each other would be frustrated with "why can't they just do it?" They didn't see the forces that caused silos and competition between groups that from the outside looked like they shared a common goal. I found that more than pushing pixels, my value came in helping teams start with the outcome in mind and build processes that supported that success.
When I learned about the Clockwork Certified Partners process, I jumped in immediately. I’ve been a follower of Mike Michalowicz’s work for years. I merge Clockwork with the Structural Consulting processes of Robert Fritz, author of The Path of Least Resistance and The Managerial Moment of Truth.
