Barb Ryan

Move Forward With Greater Ease

Barb specializes in planning, facilitation and project leadership to help organizations build momentum, achieve clarity and align their team in the midst of change. Whether you are sorting out the current state or charting your course to a new vision, Barb provides added support and objectivity to help your team achieve results.

Planning

For those of us who plan, the benefits are many and accessible

Whether you are leading a company, department, team or personal process, taking time to plan delivers these results. Engaging an external consultant helps to reduce blind spots and decrease inadvertent straying or stalling mid-plan. When you and/or your team know where they are going and what action is needed to get there, results are achieved.

Planning is a pillar of Barb’s success throughout her career. She strives to keep it simple, having lived through elaborate processes that yielded big binders which then gathered dust. She works with clients to ensure intended outcomes are actionable, measurable and relevant.

Barb is a great fit with strong leaders with a clear vision. That can be a single-person business, an owner run enterprise, a manager led team within a big corporation. Her capacity to help translate that vision into action with planning tools and process helps the teams achieve success all around.

You’ll bring the plan to life with focused implementation and keep it alive with regular evaluation.

Everyone will see and celebrate the progress. And, if the winds of change blow in, your plan provides consistency for the conversations about changes needed.

Barb can put her process to work for your strategic plan, annual operating plan, project plan or personal development plan. For more than twenty years, Barb has been a planner, leading teams and efforts to develop products, sales territories, CRM system implementations, and organizational culture shifts. She tailors her approach to her clients’ needs and helps them bring their plans to life.

Facilitation

Barb is an objective, process-focused professional who can help your group manage information and expertise to achieve results. Whether you are problem-solving, idea-generating or resolving conflict, as a skilled facilitator, she supports the group purpose and goals with effective process and guiding presence.

Barb takes time to meet the team, clarify objectives, understand obstacles then set structure accordingly. In session, she ensures space for creativity and input all aimed toward the best outcome. With more than 20 years of facilitating groups with varied objectives, she will foster collaboration to yield results.

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Projects

When you need a bit of strategic added human-power in your business, Barb is available to step
in short-term. From interim leadership to client interviews to new employee resume review and
screening, Barb is able to deliver.

Her experience and quick-learning style enable her to add value fast and stay focused on the needed results. She builds trust quickly and her candor
provides insights for opportunities.

In recent years, Barb has been studying with the Center for Efficient Collaboration (www.efficientcollaboration.org). She facilitates in this spirit to find solutions that resonate well and work for all.

Contact Barb to discuss your organization’s needs.

Click here to read what Barb’s clients say.

About Barb

Barb knows how instrumental an outside resource can be to a leader driving change and she serves that role. Whether your team is just starting out or in the midst of change and feeling challenged, Barb services support the team by ensuring clarity and alignment to the vision as well as clear action steps to move it forward. She is a lover of variety, curious to the edge of nosy, and eager to help organizations and individuals enjoy the process of achieving their vision.

Barb’s career started at United Health Group in its entrepreneurial hey days in the late ‘80s. Opportunities to drive growth and innovation ran rampant as UHG grew and expanded at a mighty pace. This gave Barb the chance to work in a host of functions from customer and client services, to legal services, to regional sales. The pace was fast. The projects were riveting. The colleagues were so smart and it was a very energizing and exciting career, until it wasn’t. In 1998, Barb took a much needed two-year sabbatical to explore alternatives and restore balance.

Looking for variety and impact, she launched her consulting career in 2001, first designing and delivering mentoring programs for high-potential talent in large corporations with Menttium Corporation and then assisting entrepreneurial organizations implement visions big and small. Click here for some examples of the client work Barb delivered.

Working with leaders and teams in this way helped Barb see that an organization’s cacpacity and pace for change is dependent on the individual team members’ capacity for the same. In organizations where team members were burned out, stressed out, and uninspired, change was an uphill journey. This led her to expand my work into individual health and wellness. In 2016, Barb founded Wisdom Sister Studio to support the well-being of individuals.

Barb holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. She also dabbles in the arts, music, languages and travel feeding her endless curiosity. You can learn more about Barb on Linkedin.

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— Warren Buffett, investor

What clients are saying about Barb

"In her time with us, Barb worked with our many challenging personality types and diplomatically navigated us through our occasionally conflicting visions to land our team at an effective strategic plan with a high level of consensus about our shared goals and tactics to reach them. Continued contact with her helped keep us on track and resulted in efficiency and success."

Meg Payne Nelsonformer Director at Bromelkamp Company

"Working with Barb to birth my business has been invaluable! Not only does she listen to my needs but she translates them into practical, actionable steps I can take to succeed. I am a vision person and it's easy for me to get stuck seeing only the forest. Barb helps me find the trees and work with each of them to move forward with grace, ease and efficiency. With her professional and grounded guidance, I go from fuzzy to focused and feel confident in my ability to succeed. I highly recommend her services to anyone ready to create their future!"

Jennifer Alhasa

It’s great to work with Barb. She listened well to the challenges I was facing in my effort to plan for and organize, volunteer resources for a big event with ~275 participants. We established a structure to manage the multi-faceted needs (varied task assignments, timelines and shifts). She helped me organize the leaders to aid in better role definition and assignments, by creating essential job descriptions. Until I had her guidance and input I was overwhelmed with the Volunteer position. Barb brought calm, stability, and practical insights by listening to my needs and concerns. We were fully resourced for the event with prepared volunteers. I couldn’t have done it without her.

Lynn HallettVolunteer Team Leader, Intentional Eucharistic Communities 2015 Conference

“I’ve had the opportunity to work with Barb for the last five years. The majority of our collaborative work has been strategic planning and organizational development. I remain impressed with her ability to assess quickly the essentials of a project and employ her many skills to complete the project. She is organized and energized in her work. She always keeps our company priorities as the focus of our interactions. And most importantly she is an excellent communicator, available and approachable.”

Jan MainoVice President at Bromelkamp Company