About Us

Are you looking for a company to help your organization thrive? Unison is here for you. Our goal is simple: get all parts of your organization working together!

We Help You Thrive: The Art of Unison

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

Our mission is to get organizational culture, operations, and leadership to work in unison.

Unison Does It Differently

We Deliver Proper Guidance

We will guide you on your journey towards thriving and show what it takes for culture, operations, and leadership to work in unison.

We Build Meaningful Organizations

We help purpose-driven organizations build world-class culture, demonstrate operational excellence, and grow leadership capacity.

We Take A People-Centered Approach

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.

Our Team

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!

Ashley Elmblad

Partner

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

Sara Rodriguez

Delivery Systems Lead and Guide

When I got promoted to COO at my previous company, a nonprofit startup accelerator, something felt off. I loved my colleagues and believed in our mission, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was putting so much work in only to see little by way of results. Though teammates gave me positive feedback, I felt like I had professionally plateaued. I was honest with my CEO about my challenges, who connected me to Will Seamans (Unison’s founder, who served on our board at the time). He began coaching me. He helped me realize that I had been measuring my performance as a manager the same way I measured my performance as an individual contributor. I couldn’t expect results quickly or to see a direct correlation between my efforts and the outputs of those efforts as a manager. I had to take a longer term view and see my success as the success of my team. I was more coach than player now and I hadn’t made the paradigm shift I needed to to feel good about my work.

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!

Will Seamans

Partner

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.

Segun Olagunju

Partner

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.

Joscelyn Anguiano

Operations Manager

It was 2020 and I had just finished 6 years of door-to-door book sales for Southwestern. I was ready to move away from sales and found a role at a company that immediately laid me off due to the pandemic, leaving me unemployed on and off for 9 months. Initially, I found a retention role at a cable company. After a short stint there, I felt a strong values mismatch and told my team that I was ready to leave. They tried to talk me out of leaving by telling me, “there’s some kind of satisfaction in convincing someone to do something that they don’t want to do.” That assured me that I absolutely did not want to work there. Shortly after, I found a part-time job with a company training teachers in justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion to create supportive environments in schools for all kids. My boss, who trained teachers for a living, told me 2 weeks in that she didn’t have time to train me and was letting me go.
Then, I learned of openings at Unison in my job search. I came in with skepticism, given how badly my past two work experiences had gone, but I found a team that was interested in listening to what I loved and wanted to do and was able to concisely articulate it back in our first conversation. Not only did they actually listen to me from the first conversation, but every member of the team believed in me and supported me to do things I didn’t know I could do myself. They let me, and even caringly pushed me, to make decisions and develop programs. They saw I have the skill to build systems and entrusted many internal systems and operations to me from day 1. They believed in my intrinsic value and were willing to work to increase my hours as I sought out a full-time role, as they valued my contributions so deeply. While I don’t work directly with our clients and mostly focus on Unison’s internal processes, my journey at this company is a story of how Unison really practices what it preaches, has a true people-centered approach, and that what we offer our clients is just like what we do within our own organization. I’m so proud to be a part of this team!

Let’s Build a Thriving Organization.

Download our Introduction Deck today to learn more and start your journey.

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