WHAT WE DO
Ellen Meyer Shorb, the principal of Blue Sage Partners, helps you lead through change.
Ellen brings experience and perspective to hone a strategic direction and translate vision into action. She models how to think big, be practical, and stay on track.
Ellen shows how to use powerful language to drive agreement and commitment with language that is simple but compelling. She works with you to expose competing interests, name difficulties that are plaguing your team, and engage the naysayers. This helps drive consensus, delineate a tactical to-do list, and inspire your team to action.
Most importantly, she leverages the talent in the room, practices approaches to work together better, and helps leaders and teams make progress on their most important challenges.
meet Ellen
Ellen’s passion throughout her career has been to help visionaries, teams, and boards address economic and social inequities in the world. She spent 10 years as a senior manager in three different nonprofits, followed by over 20 years as a facilitator and coach to senior teams and boards. Her sweet spot is helping clients articulate their vision and translate this into a strategy for action that achieves results. She thrives in complex, dynamic, and difficult situations, including challenging groups and personalities.
As a manager and as a consultant, Ellen has used a collaborative, facilitative approach to help people make progress on their most important and intractable challenges. At Enterprise Community Partners, she coordinated a diverse internal team heading 10 local offices to successfully apply for and run a $30 million loan and grant program to create safe communities with affordable housing. At an elite university, she helped three academic departments each align around a shared vision and strategy in order to make key hires, allocate resources, and rebuild civility. She taught strategy at Boston College Graduate School of Social Work and leadership at Northeastern University.
Ellen’s work has been informed by her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, a year traveling around the world, and by her work with some extraordinary thought leaders in negotiation (Ury, "Getting to Yes") and leadership (Heifetz and Linsky, Harvard). Ellen’s recent volunteer work includes: Town of Lincoln Finance Committee; Chair, Board Finance Committee, Safe Passage, Guatemala; Co-founder/Chair, Boston Regional Leadership Board Stanford Business School Women’s Circles.
20 years as a strategy and leadership consultant and coach
10 years as a senior manager in international and national nonprofits
MBA Stanford, MPP Harvard, BA Dartmouth
Dear Reader:
You may wonder if we are a good fit. Here are two things you should know about how I work.
First, I am primarily a facilitator, not a business analyst. I don’t give answers but rather leverage your wisdom and experience to help you make progress on your most daunting and important challenges. You and your team are the experts in your field. My added value is to be a convener, truth-teller, and mediator. Often, smart teams get stuck and strong people disagree, but behind this is a passion for the mission. I use this to engage your team, develop consensus, and inspire commitment.
Second, I share my tools. I talk about what I am doing and why. We will work together to design the process up front and then adjust it in real time as necessary. My goal is to both help teams make progress on their most immediate challenges, and strengthen the ability of the team to work through the next tough issue that comes after I leave.
I approach my work in this way in large part from what I learned from the time I spent in a small village in Honduras for the Peace Corps; my work with some extraordinary thought leaders in negotiation and leadership; and over 30 years in the nonprofit sector as a practitioner, consultant, professor, coach, and board member. And perhaps, from having four children and a long marriage.
I hope we get the chance to talk.
