How we can work together.

The Load Map

When you know something is wrong and cannot name it.

Or the opposite: you can name six things and have no idea which one is the problem, so you’ve been working on all six and none of them is moving.

You complete the EGER Leadership Diagnostic on your own, in about forty minutes. It looks at all four parts of the EGER Framework, Expectations, Governance, Environment, and Results, in the system around you and inside you. I score it and read the pattern underneath. Then we spend ninety minutes together, confidentially. Two days later you have a written map, Where the load sits, naming the one thing carrying weight it was never built to carry. About three weeks from start to finish.

The map locates. It doesn’t move anything, and it ends by saying plainly what it didn’t examine. It’s also written so you can hand it to a board chair without exposing yourself.

Keystone Coaching

Individual coaching for the leadership work in front of you.

For senior leaders, executives included. Ten confidential conversations over six months, or longer if what you’re carrying takes longer, focused on your authority, your decisions, and the results you need to deliver. When something can’t wait for the next session, you reach me.

Senior leaders are rarely short of people with opinions. What’s rare is someone who has carried the same weight, at the same level, with nothing to gain from what you decide. That’s what this is.

Cut: “Not advice, most senior leaders are surrounded by advice,” “I am not going to hand you answers. You have them…,” and the “free help always costs a favor” passage.

Keystone Executive Partnership

Coaching and organizational alignment, together.

For CEOs and senior executives, usually sponsored by the organization. Twelve months. It starts with a three-way agreement with your sponsor, so no one is surprised later about what travels. Then the EGER Leadership Diagnostic, and a round of listening to the people around you. Twelve sessions, with access between them. A midpoint review with your sponsor on themes only, never on content, agreed with you first. At the end of the year, we look back together, and you can renew if you want to keep working together.

A six-month engagement is available when the objectives and scope support a focused timeline.

The Role Rebuild

When the job itself is the problem.

It might be your role, or another key role in the organization: an associate, a chief operating officer, an executive director. Roles change over time, some by design and many by accident. The organization grows and the role doesn’t keep up. Someone left and their duties were absorbed. A crisis added something that was never removed. Years later, the job description has little to do with what the person in it actually does. They’re measured against a document that doesn’t describe them, and so is the next person you hire.

One quarter. Working sessions with the people responsible for the role, usually the senior leader and the board president, plus one session with the full board. You end with three documents: the role as it actually needs to exist, the case for it in language the board can use with each other, and a hiring strategy that widens the field rather than narrowing it to whoever is already known.

In time: about two hours a month from each of them, and one ninety-minute session with the board.

For smaller organizations, a shorter version covers the read of the role and the written specification.

This is often the first time a leader and board sit down with an outsider on something that matters. Doing that on a problem that’s clearly structural, not in a crisis about a person, is worth a great deal on its own.

Governance Realignment

When decisions get made twice, and the board and staff keep doing each other’s jobs.

Decision rights. Board behavior. Bylaws that describe an organization you stopped being years ago. And underneath almost all of it, the difference between governing and managing, which most boards were never taught, through no fault of their own. Most are relieved to finally have it explained.

Multi-quarter work, phased. The first phase is scoped and priced on its own, and either of us can stop at the end of it.

Succession Advisory

When you know roughly when you are going, and almost nobody else does.

Or when you’re still deciding whether, and when, to go. That’s often where this work starts.

Timing. Contract terms. Whether there’s any overlap with your successor. In a company there often is. In a congregation it’s usually the reverse: an emeritus steps back to make room for an interim, and then for the new rabbi’s first year. The order in which people hear, because that sequence, more than the decision itself, shapes how the last year goes. And the lame-duck window, which opens the day it becomes public and which almost nobody plans for.

This often runs two years. It’s the work I’m most careful about, because a succession handled badly can undo a career’s worth of building in eleven months.

It’s also the only part of this work I hold a formal certification in. I am certified in interim ministry by the Interim Ministry Network, which is transitional leadership as a trained discipline. And I’ve done it: I served as interim executive director of a national nonprofit.

Successions rarely come apart over contract terms or timelines. Those are solvable, and most people roughly know how. They come apart over grief, which arrives late, disguised as a procedural objection, from someone nobody expected it from. A search firm hands you a hire. This is the part that comes after, and it’s the part that decides how it goes.