helping strong teams tackle tough Issues

SERVICES

  • Team Facilitation

    From strategic planning to staff retreats, Ellen brings respect, curiosity, and a steady patience to help smart teams work together better, for better outcomes.

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  • Leadership coaching

    Ellen works with smart, driven, and creative executives who are open to fresh, informed, and honest conversations in order to move to the next level.

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  • Executive Transitions

    As an Interim Executive Director, Ellen helps boards and staff assess, realign, and prepare an organization for the right permanent executive director.

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Ellen Meyer Shorb, the principal of Blue Sage Partners, helps you build extraordinary teams and lead organizations through change. 

How we work

Ellen has devoted her career to strengthening individuals and teams to be able to make progress on their most important and intractable challenges. 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 through language that is simple but compelling. She works with you to expose competing interests, name difficulties that plague your team, and engage naysayers. This helps drive consensus, delineate a tactical to-do list, and inspire your team to action.

Most importantly, she leverages existing talent and knowledge, practices approaches to work together better, and helps individuals and teams thrive.

  • "I have known Ellen for years and watched her help teams think strategically and communicate better. She listens, she guides, and she celebrates each team member, imparting both the skills and the confidence to thrive, individually and as a group."

    Annie Kuster, Member of U.S. Congress

  • "Ellen is a master facilitator who makes everyone in the group feel validated and inspired as they work toward a common goal. She is able to tackle the most complex organizational issues with extraordinary skill and dexterity."

    Barbara E. Will, Associate Dean of the Arts and Humanities
    Dartmouth College

  • "Ellen has a deft touch and a capacity for holding steady and staying focused in the heat of difficult conversations. Her openness to new and creative ideas enables her to be a remarkable resource for groups and teams dealing with complex issues and relationships."

    Marty Linksy, Faculty, Harvard Kennedy School

  • "Ellen’s insight, expertise, and commitment to constructive results make her invaluable. She is always prepared, analytical, diplomatic, and follows through. Ellen helped us move forward at critical junctures."

    Susanna Place, Former Board Chair
    Safe Passage, Guatemala

  • "Ellen helped us find our voice."

    Cathy Cogan, Director
    National Interpreter Education Center, Northeastern University

  • "Ellen helped us move forward, think in a new way, and be more than the sum of our parts."

    Erika Haas, Harvard Business Review
    Global Leadership Board, Stanford Women’s Circles

  • "Ellen brought invaluable skills to our nonprofit organization as we struggled to identify how to best streamline and use our energies. She has a piercing mind and genuine warmth which she combines with high energy and a unique ability to help groups find consensus."

    Heidi Webb, Board Chair
    Webb Innovation Center for Dyslexia

  • "Ellen helped bring our Board forward, clarifying our goals and vision. A year later, her work is still discussed at most Board meetings. People remember what she says. She is a diamond for the organizations and companies she works with."

    Susan Winship, Executive Director
    South Sudanese Enrichment for Families

about ELLEN Meyer Shorb

Ellen spent 10 years as a senior manager in multiple nonprofits, followed by over 20 years as a facilitator and coach to nonprofit senior teams and boards. Ellen’s collaborative approach is informed by her experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, a year traveling around the world, and her work with some extraordinary thought leaders in negotiation and leadership. She has a BA from Dartmouth, a MPP from Harvard, and a MBA from Stanford.

A few projects

  • C-suite transition

    Prepared regional environmental nonprofit for CEO transition with activities from coaching to strategy rollout to fundraising.

  • Business Model Adaptation

    Facilitated year-long Board decision on how to change business model, using market analysis, consensus building, and coaching tools.

  • Annual Staff Retreats

    Designed and ran six annual staff retreats for a public organization, focused on strategic and annual planning, roles, and public and internal communications.

More projects

Some of Our clients