Thriving organizations are the backbone of our society. They provide jobs, services, and products to communities around the world. It’s essential that you know how to get yours thriving when it shows signs of weakness since navigating what your organization needs to truly thrive is a complex challenge.
We can help you do just that! Unison is a company with a mission: to make your organization thrive by uniting you under new systems and mindsets.
Purpose
Our purpose is to guide organizations to thrive.
Vision
We envision a world of thriving organizations who place their people at the center of their success.
Mission
We will guide you on your journey towards thriving and show what it takes for culture, operations, and leadership to work in unison.
We help purpose-driven organizations build world-class culture, demonstrate operational excellence, and grow leadership capacity.
We help people and organizations succeed by taking a people-centered approach. We assist them by improving their workplace culture and achieving better results through our strategies.
We weren’t always guides. We’ve been teachers, salespeople, consultants, founders, personal assistants, and executives. And, we’ve have also experienced first hand the pain of dysfunctional teams, toxic workplace cultures, and burnout. Knowing that pain has brought us to this work and to each other. Together, we’ve tried to build the kind of team and culture we support others in building. It’s always a work in progress and we are learning right alongside our clients. Check out the journeys we’ve been on that have brought us to this work below!
I have spent my career committed to “solving problems that matter”. From helping hospitals work out inefficiencies to teaching creativity frameworks to hundreds of social enterprises, I work with organizations to build high-functioning teams. My experience spans across a broad array of industries, including healthcare, fast-casual food, recruiting, social enterprise, and start-ups.
From the moment I started here, the team has truly believed in me, asking for my opinions and views in guiding the formation and trajectory of the company and inviting me to become a partner. The belief and support I got from the Unison team helped me to step into an interim Chief People Officer role at Fearless, one of our clients, where I helped build culture and the PeopleOps team from the ground up. Together with the COO, we built a culture of care and a high-trust team. I’ve witnessed first hand how when companies are willing to build the right culture, they truly become high performing.
With the Unison Team behind me, I’m regularly grounded in the importance of people-first cultural practices, strong internal systems, and good process, which I help our clients to build as well
The experience was an eye-opener for me and also left me wondering if others face burnout or frustration because they were locked in a mindset like mine. Today, I proudly embrace my role as someone who helps others shine in their contributions. As part of the Unison team, I build systems like our playbook, which gives our guides ready-to-deploy resources for clients, and a process through which my teammates can deliver five modules of content with the same amount of effort it used to take us to produce one. As a guide, I work to help others do the same!
Years ago, I stumbled into a role with Teach For America’s southwestern branch as Director of Growth Strategy. I was given a simple mandate: grow. We started as a small team and organization but quickly quadrupled in size. But our growth resulted in much pain and suffering for our team. Throughout my nearly 10-years with the organization that would grow from a team of 200 to over 2,000, I had the opportunity to sit in many roles and on many teams. Time and time again across each team I encountered the same pattern: the startup team was a small group of people with easy communication, and enjoyable work, and straightforward decision-making. But as the team would grow, each one became weighed down with bureaucracy, conflict, culture and values drift, and increasing stress for individuals and the team as a whole.
It was then that I suspected that countless organizations suffer from the same pattern, and wanted to interrupt the cycle somehow. As I moved on to manage a for-profit engineering firm, I began to experiment with trying to get to the root of the issues in an effort to prevent the same pattern from re-occurring yet again as we grew. I started consulting with growing organizations navigating the same challenges I had experienced and started to develop solutions to these challenges. Since then, I’ve had the chance to connect with the other members of the Unison team and our clients (many of whom are one and the same), and we have begun to uncover why so much workplace suffering happens during growth despite meaningful missions, extraordinary colleagues, and abundant financial resources. Together, we’ve learned a lot about how to prevent much pain and prove that it is possible to grow and thrive if we can build workplaces who work tirelessly to keep their culture, operations, and leadership working in unison.
I’ve always believed in the power of good leadership. For almost a decade, I worked as a social entrepreneur with education start-up, African Leadership Academy in South Africa, helping to prepare Africa’s next generation of transformative leaders. Though I so deeply believed in the mission and loved my colleagues, I longed for leadership opportunities that captured the full range of my ambition, but that didn’t cost me generational wealth. I wanted to grow as a leader, so I sought new opportunities.
After years as a solopreneur, building a cross-border consulting practice, I landed an exciting position as a senior administrator at a private school in Baltimore. But when the pandemic hit, cuts were made, and I knew then I owed it to myself and my family to find something that would esteem our wellbeing.
Thankfully, I had started some part-time work with Unison Solutions. I thoroughly enjoyed the coaching and leadership development I got to do, I couldn’t help but think “I could do this all day long.” I had the full support and confidence of the rest of the team and the flexibility of working within a schedule that allowed me to support my family as an owner. This was especially meaningful to me after the summer of 2020, I had been talking with many close friends and family members about the need for Black ownership and Black leadership, and here was a chance for me and my family to step into exactly that.
My team has my back here at Unison and I have theirs. Every day, I get to do work that nourishes me and helps others grow to meet their leadership potential. I haven’t looked back.
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