Our Clients
What They Say
Raphael Gang
Chief External Relations Officer, 4.0
Christian is just…awesome. There are only a handful of people I’ve ever worked with (and I’m not one of them) who can shift between the strong eye on details needed for execution and the ability to connect dots required for strategy and leadership, but Christian is that person. Christian entered a role that was in crisis and in the span of six months, managed to 1) solve the urgent challenges facing us as an organization needing to provide coaching to founders, 2) create real buy in for evaluation and learning from our team, and 3) build a 2 year strategy with strong investment from our internal team. Prior to Christian, none of these areas were in good shape, but Christian’s leadership around strategy was just stellar. She used the urgent challenge of servicing our founders to identify key gaps in our current systems, worked collaboratively with our internal team and external consultants to build context, and then formulated a strategy that felt authentic, realistic, and aligned to our goals as an organization. More than the outcome, I was so impressed with her work ethic and approach to engaging with folks who weren’t entering conversations from a place of positivity.
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Lastly, I was really impressed by how she advocated for the work she does and why it’s critical to the success of the organization. Christian’s roadmap for the next 2 years gave visibility to the work stream and her relationship building meant that teammates could trust her in delicate conversations in which there were real tradeoffs. If you need someone to guide you through a process for building your organizational capacity for learning, I couldn’t recommend Christian more highly.
Christian played a crucial role in our development of our data-driven instruction (DDI) initiative. She walked our team through the development of a logic model, something that we have not yet done before in our work. She worked side-by-side with our team to help us not only articulate our short and long-term goals, but also articulate the changes in behavior that we wanted to see as a result of our initiative. As a result, we saw a ten-fold increase for the specific behavior we targeted through our initiative, which is directly related to Christian’s work.
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Beyond the logic model and initiative strategy, Christian also helped our team adopt strong practices for planning and reflection. Our team now regularly uses survey data to drive decision making and incorporates before and after action reviews with our key projects. It has helped us maximize our time, resources, and improve overall team effectiveness.
We are grateful for Christian’s leadership. She will be an asset and true value-add to your organization, especially if you are looking for ways to increase your clarity on how your initiatives will have lasting impacts on your organization.
Carrie Ramsey
Deputy Chief of Academic Achievement, KIPP Texas Public Schools
Esther Drake
Vice President, Adult Learning & Knowledge Management, Teach For America
Our Adult Learning Team was eager to understand the impact of our Center for Excellence in Adult Learning, a center we painstakingly built over 18 months. We assembled a project team to help us take on this work. As a member of that project team Christian played an invaluable role in helping us recognize that the first thing we needed in order to measure our impact was to create a logic model. She took us through the process of creating the model step by step in a way that was compelling, accessible and incredibly useful. Her guidance and feedback throughout the process produced both short and long term outcomes that have been game-changing.
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First, her work to support us in creating a logic model resulted in the metrics we still use to regularly measure the impact of our adult learning work and consequently make strategic decisions. Second, we have now decided that we need a logic model for our entire adult learning and knowledge management team and are in the process of doing so now. In doing that work we continually reference the logic model that Christian guided us to create last year.
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I am grateful to Christian for her expertise and her insight into how to ensure that we measure the impact of our work with quality, validity and rigor.
I’ve had the immense pleasure of working alongside Dr. Christian Bell as co-directors of a leadership institute, and her influence has inspired my own working style. Without pomp or circumstance, Dr. Bell embodies excellence in whatever she does: she is a high achiever, a creative problem solver, and brings a depth of knowledge about organizational and team achievement. She values efficiency and holds her time sacred, and as a result imparts respect on those she works with in equal measure. As invested as she is in creating simple and effective processes to achieve clearly defined metrics, Dr. Bell is also invested in the success of her team. In addition to defining expectations and tactics, she regularly communicates to check-in and offer support, all the while holding a vision of success for the team. Working alongside her has transformed the way I approach team projects and my own professional problem-solving tactics, and I consider myself fortunate to call her a colleague.
