About Betsy Block
The team has what it needs. A catalyst helps it emerge.
That sentence is the whole of my practice. Others arrive with answers for your team, I arrive trusting the answer is already sitting in the room, distributed across people who are just waiting for the conditions to say it out loud.
Our work together creates those the conditions.
How I got here
"This team needs an exorcism more than it needs a plan."
I spent the first stretch of my career as a program evaluator. Nonprofits handed me a year of work and asked me to judge it.
The plans were good. The evaluations were sound. And over and over I watched a solid strategic plan land in a team that struggle to deliver on it — and struggle more with burnout. The team had all the needed skills and commitment to the mission — and something in how those people worked together sat in the way. The team waited for permission to name it.
So exorcism. I started saying the word out loud to colleagues. While the term got a chuckle, it also deeply resonated.
So I moved to where the leverage actually is. Work the dynamics first, and everything downstream lands with more force — the plan, the evaluation, the restructure, the campaign, the merger. The dynamics are the secret sauce teams keep missing, and they're where I want to be, because that's where everything else gets its impact.
B3 Consults became B3 Coach along the way. That's a tidy way to describe fifteen years of following one question.
Credentials
Accredited on evidence and impact.
These accomplishments required years of documented practice, peer assessment, and portfolio review. Holding the team and individual accreditations at Senior Practitioner level from EMCC is rare, held by a small number of coaches worldwide.
EMCC - EIA and ITCA Senior Practitioner
ICF PCC and ACTC
EMCC - ESIA
ICF MCS
Training and certification
The programs behind the practice.
ORSCC — CRR Global
CPCC — CTI
CTPC — Team Coaching International
Novalda Diploma in Team Coaching Supervision
Decolonizing Coaching Supervision
Dare to Lead Trained
Lego Serious Play / Liminal Spaces
Positive Intelligence Trained
MPP — UC Berkeley, Goldman School of Public Policy
“[My biggest insight was]... Understanding that this organization we are building is its own entity has helped me take a different perspective on what's possible and is less limiting. I believe that it is the best of me and my co-founder and our governing council, so we don't have to let our insecurities inhibit the work of the organization.”
co-founder of a grass-roots nonprofit
The pomegranate
Why a pomegranate.
The marks on this site are pomegranates and pomegranate leaves. Pomegranates grow in my backyard in Oakland. And “why” is so much more.
In the Jewish tradition, pomegranate seeds a reminder of mitzvot, our commitment to contribute to the world around us: to do social good, to do well by others, and to keep finding the ways that's possible. Hundreds of seeds, one fruit.
That's the through-line between a tree in my yard and fifteen years of this work.
When I'm not with a team, I’m training for triathlons, making jam and hot sauce, or repairing one of our old home appliances.
Two ways to start.
A conversation costs you thirty minutes and commits you to nothing.