I have spent most of my life inside teams.
Long before I worked with executive leadership teams, I belonged to athletic ones.
ABOUT
I spent twelve years playing competitive volleyball. Later, I coached the game. Today, I find myself learning many of the same lessons again as an amateur golfer. People often describe sport as a place to build character. While that is trie, I also learned to carry responsibility. As a setter and team captain, I learned to communicate without speaking, how to recognize when trust had quietly left the locker room. I noticed how much a coach could change the feeling of an entire team with a single conversation.
I thought my career had moved away from sport.
It hadn't. For nearly two decades, I found myself sitting in different kinds of locker rooms.
Conference rooms. Boardrooms. Leadership retreats. Organizations navigating conflict. Teams trying to find one another again after connection and processes had been strained. Leaders carrying decisions that no one else could fully understand.
The uniforms changed but the conversations were eerily similar. People were still trying to perform and lead.
I realized I wasn't studying conflict within business and interpersonal systems and what happens after.
These question kept following me.
What allows people to connect with each other again?
Why do some teams become stronger after difficulty while others drift apart?
How do environments influence the conversations we're willing to have?
What makes recovery possible for individuals, teams, and organizations?
They eventually became the center of my work.
Today, my work lives in three places.
My Essays helps me understand what I'm observing before, and sometimes after, I put it into practice.
Through The Studio, I partner with women's sports organizations, athlete-founded businesses, and sports brands navigating leadership, conflict, and organizational change. Together, we work to understand what is happening, facilitate the conversations that matter, design healthier ways of working together, and integrate those changes into everyday practice.
Through PARLO, I return to sport through women’s golf. I study performance and explore how design, hospitality, landscape, and culture shape the way Black women and LGBTQ+ women golfers recover, gather, and return to themselves.
To me, these are different ways of answering the same questions.
high performance is never the whole story.
Yes, meaningful work happens during the match, on the eighteenth green, and weight training during two-a-days.
It also happens after when the staff decides whether they'll tell the truth so the team can connect again. The value add is choose to build a different framework than what existed before.
That's the work we get to do together.