Our Founder : Leslie Plettner
Companies and organizations typically flourish or fall a part because of relationships and culture. Yes, an unclear vision or strategy, mission drift, lack of capitalization, role confusion, poor market timing, or lack of investing in branding and marketing negatively impact organizational success, but those failures are often a result of poor relationship development, subpar communication, and a lack of care across the cultural fabric.
I have 30 years of organizational and executive development experience across both public and private sectors, including working with start-ups or turning seasoned underperforming organizations around. As an executive, I understand both the opportunities and pressures.
What makes my career distinct is my nimble ability to work with a variety of clients and constituents across both public and private contexts. As an educational coach, I honed my ability to influence organizational results without leveraging positional authority to hire or fire. Instead, I harnessed relational and expert authority to inspire people and teams to take decisive strategic action based on agile and coherent system wide collaboration. As a private sector executive, entrepreneur, and coach, I honed my negotiation skills, fundraising versatility, and business development acumen.
In the end, I can say this with certainty: It’s harder to accomplish organizational change in the public sector. Given the nature of bureaucracy and the difficulty to hire A talent and release (aka fire) non-contributors, creating organizational change depends entirely on an ability to direct others—through their own inspiration—to be part of a winning team that seeks to do good work and accomplish noble goals. Raising millions of dollars or getting an incompetent and disorganized city to entitle a commercial development project was much easier than getting an Oakland high school to be the most improved urban high school in California for three years in a row.
I seek individuals who see my ability to work across diverse contexts in both the public and private sector as an asset. I know how to get things done in public schools, board rooms, networking events, and bureaucratic low performing municipal agencies. I’ve combined my executive experience with a masterful coaching system to help executives do the same—get things done and achieve organizational greatness while creating more inner joy and harmony.