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 opportunity. What began as a request for help with onboarding evolved into a deeper recognition that CWE's operational systems needed to evolve. The team had invested significant effort in trust-building, communication, training, and collaboration. The opportunity was to complement that work with structures that could reinforce those behaviors consistently — particularly as the organization prepared to grow again.

To go deeper than group discussion allows, we then surveyed each of the five leaders individually. The candid, confidential responses surfaced themes around visibility, role clarity, accountability, decision-making and cross-functional work — giving us a clearer picture of where stronger systems could have the greatest impact.

The preparation wasn't just information gathering but also mapping out the session itself. With only 90 minutes, we recognized we could only offer 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 a more foundational opportunity: clearer ownership on cross-functional projects.

With the real problem named, the solution could now begin. Leaders worked through real examples of cross-functional projects where collaboration was strong, but roles could become less clear as multiple departments became involved. Important questions became more explicit: Who makes the final call? When am I supposed to weigh in? How do we escalate when two leaders disagree? — now discussable because everyone understood the tension was structural, not personal.

The team left aligned around a practical starting point: strengthening project-based role clarity and ownership so that cross-functional collaboration could remain an organizational strength as CWE grew.

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.