About Betsy Block
The team has what it needs. A catalyst helps it emerge.
That sentence is the whole of my practice. I don't arrive with the answer for your team, because the answer is already sitting in the room, distributed across people who haven't yet found the conditions to say it out loud. My work is 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 what it amounted to.
The plans were good. The evaluations were sound. And over and over I watched a solid strategic plan land in a team that couldn't hold it — and lose every bit of its oomph. Not for lack of skill or commitment. Something in how those people worked together sat in the way, and nobody had named it.
That's the sentence I started saying out loud. Half a joke, entirely true.
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, not attendance.
These four required years of documented practice, peer assessment, and portfolio review. Holding the team and individual accreditations at Senior Practitioner level at the same time is rare — 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
She sees, she says, she stays.
Coaching supervision client
The pomegranate
Why a pomegranate.
The marks on this site are pomegranates and pomegranate leaves. Pomegranates grow in my backyard in Oakland — so there's the plain answer first.
The seeds carry the rest of it. In the tradition I come from, they're a reminder to contribute to the world around you: to do social good, to do well by others, and to keep finding the ways that's possible. Hundreds of seeds, one fruit. Every one of them counts, and none of them does it alone.
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 making jam and hot sauce, or taking apart a home appliance that has no business being repaired by me.
Two ways to start.
A conversation costs you thirty minutes and commits you to nothing.