I help leaders hold people accountable without blowing up the relationship.
When a leader on your team can’t give direct feedback or effective coaching, there are ripples throughout the team. Deadlines get missed, the workload becomes unbalanced, and the demands on you grow.
I’ve spent my entire career in organizations where communication breaks down under pressure. It usually does. And those breakdowns have become my life’s work: understanding them, addressing them, and unlocking the potential for radically more powerful connections.
You might be seeing…
Culture Problems
When something feels off across the team, addressing the culture makes sense. How do you equip your leaders to have the conversations they’ve been avoiding? How do you inspire the behaviors you actually need?
Communication Problems
So many challenges boil down to communication that has been avoided, softened, or delayed too long. Avoiding the conversation feels kind, but it isn’t. How do you both upskill and inspire these changes?
Burnout Problems
Too many leaders take the heat for their teams rather than distributing tasks. They wind up operating beyond their capacity for too long, and the stress they’ve been absorbing leaks out through their own weaknesses. How do you help them restore balance?
Sound familiar? Let’s talk.
About Amy Kay Watson
My career path doesn’t make sense to everyone, which I understand, but it’s clear to me.
I started in ministry with a year of hospital chaplaincy in Peoria, Illinois, and an M.Div. degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. I soon decided that the church wasn’t the right container for me, but the calling was undeniable.
I learned management on the floor at Borders Books, Music, & Cafe. It was a school of hard knocks that also gave space to my passion for adult learning and my fascination with performance management. From there I moved into the Office of President Gordon Gee at The Ohio State University. When Gee brought Senn Delaney in to work with the University’s leaders, I was recruited immediately as one of the facilitators. We would cascade this new skillset through offices and departments trying to make their bureaucracy become nimble.
In 2011 I transferred that experience to Hertz, traveling across North America for four years to lead culture-change retreats with C-suite leaders, middle managers, and frontline service employees discovering the hard truths and liberating insights that made working and thriving together possible.
Since 2015 I have worked as a coach. I hold the MCC credential, the highest certification the International Coaching Federation offers. Fewer than 4% of credentialed coaches reach it.
Through all of this experience I have come to believe in the cornerstone of my work, that empathy without accountability is collusion, and accountability without empathy is coercion. I’ve spent my career in the space between those extremes, finding a way of bringing empathy and accountability together that is transformational.
Work With Amy
Let’s talk about what you’re noticing.
You already know where the gap is.
This is the conversation that starts closing it.
No pitch. A direct conversation about what you’re navigating.