Center for Women & Enterprise

Value and efficiency come from clarity; this is why the engagement always begins weeks before anyone enters a room with questions, not answers.

Rather than arriving with a prescription, we opened with a structured set of probing questions drawn from our root-cause problem-solving framework: When did this start? Where does it show up? What does good look like? What have you already tried? While Simple and surface level, these questions did something powerful: they enabled the organization to diagnose itself.

Rather than answer our questions herself, Gaby brought the questions to her full leadership team, and the discussion they sparked shifted the organization's own understanding of its problem. What began as a request for help with onboarding evolved into a deeper recognition that CWE's challenges weren't based on individual understanding, but a need for an evolution of organizational structure. The team had invested time training on behaviors to navigate periods of major change; what was missing were complementary systems allowing their investment to flourish.

To go deeper than group discussion allows, we then surveyed each of the five leaders individually. The candid, confidential responses surfaced what a room full of colleagues rarely says out loud: invisible work going unrecognized, an organization relying on people “behaving well” rather than working with clear standards, and hesitancy around accountability.

The preparation wasn't just information gathering but also mapping out the session itself. With only 90 minutes, we recognized we could only offer solution depth in one problem area.

To properly align the engagement, we analyzed the survey responses to find where the team already agreed and where they diverged, sourcing the root cause of the tension. The analysis revealed a telling pattern: when asked directly, most leaders pointed to onboarding as the priority. But under the surface, every single respondent flagged the same deeper issue: role definition and ownership.

In the session, we reflected the team's own words back to them, and the group did something teams rarely do in 90 minutes: they changed their minds together. The leadership team pivoted from general onboarding to the true root cause: unclear ownership on cross-functional projects.

With the real problem named, the solution could now begin. Leaders openly worked through a live example where the project owner and key stakeholders held genuinely different understandings of their roles. Questions that had gone unasked since contraction — Who makes the final call? When am I supposed to weigh in? How do we escalate when two leaders disagree? — were finally on the table, now discussable because everyone understood the tension was structural, not personal.

The team walked out aligned on one focus: project-based role clarity and ownership. Not because we told them so, but because their own answers, organized and reflected, made the conclusion unavoidable.

Alignment became architecture. From the session's discussion, a set of concrete practices emerged:

• A RACI discussion as the mandatory first step for every new cross-functional project — distinguishing who is Responsible for the work, Accountable for the project, who's Consulted, and who's Informed before work begins, rather than mid-conflict.
• A single “center pole” owner named for every major initiative, with defined rules of engagement for when leadership weighs in.
• Simple visibility mechanisms — a shared project board and 90-day review cadence — so the status of key work is never a mystery, even when the update is “no change.”

We translated the session into two deliverables the team could run with: a full session summary capturing what was heard and decided, and the CWE Project Clarity Toolkit — a practical package containing a project initiation checklist, a RACI decision tree tied to CWE's own real projects, and a week-by-week 90-day implementation roadmap with a designated pilot project.

The toolkit wasn't designed to make CWE dependent on a consultant — it was designed to make one unnecessary. Every tool gives repeatable structure to practices the team had already begun on its own, including a collaboration framework two of the leaders had built together. The roadmap asks the team to implement one thing consistently, see what happens, and adjust.

CWE entered 2026 with a shared diagnosis, a common vocabulary, and a plan they built themselves — reviewing the toolkit together as a leadership team in the new year.