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About Us

Photo of Liz Cruz, smiling, wearing glasses, with purple hair and a purple scarf.

Liz Cruz (she/they) is the Founder & Principal of Liz Cruz Consulting. Prior to leading her practice, Liz spent over 10 years in the corporate space (retail and technology) as a coach, leadership development program leader, and organizational effectiveness consultant. You’ll find Liz coaching individuals and teams, facilitating, nerding out about EQ, or ruminating on wholehearted leadership over a cup of (decaf) coffee. Liz enjoys working with a diverse mix of clients; a special area of focus is Queer (LGBTQ+) leadership development.

 

Liz’s approach is informed by her deeply held belief that each of us is inherently brilliant, and that the best solutions to our leadership challenges are found in our deep knowledge of ourselves. She is an eternal optimist, a queer leadership fanatic, a frequent teller of not-that-funny jokes, a lifelong artist (current love: watercolor), relentlessly curious, a deep empath, and despite all outward appearances, definitely an introvert.
 

Photo of Jen self, wearing glasses, holding a number 13 pool ball.

Dr. Jen Self, LICSW (they/them) is the CEO/Founder of Brick 13, a Critical Equity Educational Consulting and Coaching LLC. They are also a part-time Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Washington School of Social Work, and have coached, educated, and developed leaders across industries, from non-profits to government to corporate.


Jen credits their early experiences as a gender outlaw and time playing Pac-12 basketball for Cal as the impetuses for their life’s dedication to intersectional racial and gender justice. Dr. Self is a
visionary, an outcast, an innovator, a community builder, a chameleon, a connector of ideas and people, a musical theater nerd, a continual learner, a co-host of the podcast All the Things-PNW (Spotify), a creator, a parent, a pro-femme space advocate, a partner, a survivor of many things, always a radical truth-teller, and even on a good day, continually shaking off the teachings of White supremacy.

Coaching Specialties

  • Emotional Intelligence & Leadership

  • Promotion Readiness & Transition

  • Emergent Strategy & Consent-Driven Decision-Making

  • LGBTQI+ Leadership Development

  • Navigating the Corporate Space with Authenticity

  • Justice, Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion (JEDI) Executive Leadership

  • Executive Leadership Confidence

Subject Area Expertise

  • Emotional intelligence

  • Effective influencing

  • Leading for innovation

  • High-performing teams

  • Learning & development strategy & program management

    • Program & curriculum audit & review

    • Design, development, and facilitation of live workshop content

  • Building equitable organizations:

    • Ideological, Institutional, Interpersonal, and Internalized privilege & oppression

    • Anti-racism & Anti-Blackness

    • Gender & Sexuality

    • Intersectionality

    • Trauma & Mental Health

    • Organizational auditing

    • Interpretive & qualitative research

 

  • Higher education leadership:

    • JEDI for higher education

    • Mentoring for students

    • Higher education policy leadership

    • Curriculum auditing

  • Backgrounds in corporate, nonprofit, & academic sectors

Our Approach

We are committed to supporting you in creating meaningful and lasting change in your organization. Our approach is:


Holistic. We craft our approach to each project with careful thought for both individual participants’ growth and organizational change, and with the understanding that the best change happens when we address personal & interpersonal learning, team norms & practices, policy, and other levers simultaneously.


Responsive & Agile. From experience, we know that no two organizational change journeys are the same, and that these journeys are rarely linear or predictable. We are emergent strategists, intuitive systems-thinkers, and creative masterminds. We design our approach to most projects in stages, allowing discoveries along the way to inform how the process unfolds.


Humanizing & Emotionally Intelligent. Daily we are often asked to subjugate our emotional, physical, psychic, and spiritual selves to fit into the workplace. This comes at a cost to ourselves and in our effectiveness and teamwork. This has compounded throughout the pandemic. We want empathy and connection more than ever before and yet we struggle to know how to create that. We bring emotional intelligence, presence, vulnerability, healing, and other humanizing elements to every engagement.
 

Approach

Our Community and Partners

Our connections, familial, collegial, and friend, inform every aspect of our thinking and work. We are embedded within communities of thinkers, educators, coaches, and artists across the spectra of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, ethnicity, religion, and more. Our thinking is always informed by these connections and the scholarship of queer, trans, nonbinary, and Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC). Further, our partnership network is wide, deep, and richly diverse allowing us to conscientiously consider each project and assemble the “just right” team to meet your needs.
 

Our frequent partners & co-conspirators include:
 

Erin Jones
James Layman
Anjulie Ganti, MSW MPH
Fernell Miller, The Root of Us
Desireé Wilkins-Finch, Rise LWP
Heather Wellman, Venn Logic Consulting
Norma Timbang, MSW, New Transitions Consulting

 

Community & Partners
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