I love helping people shine. I especially love finding what they do better than anyone else alive, and making that even shinier. I’m drawn to the impossible like a moth to a flame - except I hate getting burned. And, I’m notoriously impatient for results. Put that together with my obsession with helping people and groups collaborate and you’ve got the business I started in 1996 that focuses on sharing leadership with others. Over the years, it’s become clear that making collaboration easy to achieve is what drives me. At it’s best, the collaboration zone is like a hot knife through butter - easier and better than all other options. I want to help people get the “labor” out of their collaboration. Who said it has to be harder or take more time?

WHY COLLABORATION? WHY GROUPS?
It probably started with my family, who was in great need of collaboration help even before I arrived on the scene. From that early, invaluable window into group dynamics, I became a musician. For those of you who have never known the joy of making music with others, you have my deepest sympathy. There is nothing like it. When this works, you enter a deep playful groove with others where everything you do is a conversation. It’s my version of heaven. When I left the world of music and slammed into the corporate arena, I was stunned at how deadly most individual and group interaction was. If there was a groove, it was fast asleep. I could not believe people would settle for this, these gatherings of the living dead. So tedious. So unnecessary.

Of course, I had to do something. Truth be told, I couldn’t stop myself. I remember one especially tense meeting with my supervisor and a very unhappy client, a senior manager in our organization. My boss was being antagonistic and the situation was getting worse. As always, there was food involved: The sr. manager had offered us pretzels at the beginning of the meeting. I was the only one eating them. At the height of the tension, I threw a pretzel at the sr. manager to illustrate an important point. The silence that followed seemed eternal. I could feel my boss tense every muscle in his body so as not to strike me dead. The sr. manager had a stunned look on his face which made his subsequent howls of laughter all the more welcome. The meeting went much better after that and the sr. manager became a fan. (Although my boss did not. Can’t please everyone, I guess.) I kept doing the unexpected and the effective until I had been promoted several times and I’d achieved a reputation for getting the best out of project teams.

THE HISTORY OF CZ, aka The Pretzel Cure
I developed such a deep interest with what made great collaboration happen that, in 1996, I went out on my own. Almost. For the first few years, I partnered with my mentor, Jean Westcott. She had a complementary interest in meetings and group dynamics. We called our partnership Westcott & Williams and did some wonderful work together until Westcott decided to teach full-time. In 2002, I re-christened my business Group Performance Associates to better capture the nature of what I had to offer. I set about rounding up associates in the original sense of the word (not employees). I had several. Then, one by one, they either retired, moved away, or changed careers. I discovered I enjoyed working alone. In 2007, I decided to change my business name again, to something that fit better. I wanted something a little zestier, something that gave me a focus for the resources I wanted to provide, and the bigger difference I wanted to make.

I’m more obsessed than ever with cracking the code of collaboration. How do we share leadership the way musicians share - co-create - a piece of music? How to recognize the magic moment to jump in? I want every interaction to feel just like playing in a band - that playful, that challenging, that creative, that connected, that magical. That’s what CZ is all about. It’s what I’m all about.

Want to know more? I’ve written several case studies that show how CZ is working for companies just like yours.

Here’s a bio you can download and share. Here’s a resume showing my checkered past. 510.814.0159 - ezine sign-up