Working Together
For Leaders
I work with leaders who are smart enough to know they have blind spots, and honest enough to want to find them. My approach is rigorous and reflective; it’s equal parts strategic clarity and honest examination. I ask better questions than most people. I notice what's not being said. And I stay with the work long enough to matter.
The First 100 Days: A structured engagement
The First 100 Days is my signature program for leaders crossing a professional threshold: a new role, expanded scope, or meaningful reinvention. Built around a proprietary five-stage framework — Investigate, Imagine, Identify, Incubate, Implement — the program combines intensive 1:1 coaching with a guided workbook that structures the thinking between sessions. Most engagements run three to six months and are sponsored coaching agreements (company/organization-paid, for the organizational leader’s participation).
Ad hoc Continued Partnership
For clients who've completed an initial engagement and want to keep going, or who come with a specific challenge already in view, I offer ongoing one-on-one work.
Introductory Call
Thirty minutes. No agenda except figuring out whether this is right.
→ Book a 30-minute introductory call
For Organizations
So things aren’t working, and no one knows why?
I've spent my career walking into exactly that situation.
My particular skill isn't standalone diagnosis; it's a combination of seeing clearly and moving carefully. I know what I'm looking at, usually early on. The assignment is to help you see it, too.
An organization can only move as fast as its leadership can see, and the most important thing I can do in the first months of an engagement is build enough trust that the real conversation becomes possible. That approach has made all the difference.
As Executive Director of the Semmes Murphey Foundation, I’m guiding a 15 year old organization onto a path of focused functioning. Before that, I led the strategic repositioning of what is now Kindred Place, steering both the rebranding and the eventual acquisition by SchoolSeed Foundation. And before that, I worked through the transformation of the organization now known as Vitalent, navigating institutional change during a period of significant regional and national disruption. There’s more, but it’s all the same story.
I take on a small number of these engagements — fractional executive roles, strategic consulting, board-level advisory work — selectively and only through existing relationships. If you're wondering whether your situation might be one of them, the right first step is a direct conversation.
What people say
"Jennifer asked me a simple but profound question that no one had ever asked me before, and that I'd never considered asking of myself. That question was like a magic unlock. It led me to a profound understanding of my own power."
— Organizational leader, mid-career
"It was like putting a mirror in front of the part of me I just didn't want to see. And it felt gentle and safe, like it was finally OK to be myself."
— Organizational leader in a high-stakes, high-conflict situation
"Yoda."
— Founder & nonprofit leader