Meet Becca

Welcome, Becca! Let’s dive right into our chat. We are eager to learn more about you and the experience you bring to our team and client network.

Tell us more about how you’ve landed yourself here today. What is the journey that Becca has taken personally and professionally to arrive in 2025?

When folks ask me about my journey, I always feel a bit like a Hobbit, because the best way I can describe it is “unexpected.” My career and life paths have had some surprising twists and turns, but the consistent driver has always been my desire to work with people and organizations who are starting to find their “spark” and helping them ignite it into their passion-fueled purpose and mission.

As way has led onto way, a specific meetup (CreativeMornings; highly recommend finding one in your city!) led me to interact with people who were definitely feeding their spark. In turn, I found out about Open Eye while I was transitioning to full-time coaching and consulting. And now in 2025, I get to engage my journey through the crossroads of technology, creativity, and people systems to partner in moving purpose, people, and product missions forward.

One thing that prominently stood out when we assessed your expert profile was your 15+ years of experience in the healthcare industry while coaching leaders, teams and organizations in parallel for most of that time. How have these two roles complimented each other over your career?

Working in multiple healthcare orgs as well as partnering with many layers within each one has simply re-emphasized that communication is the key to absolutely everything, including strategy, delivery, and efficiency gains. It’s tough to agree on strategy, data mapping, or product implementation when you feel like you hit cross-role communication barriers constantly. Even if you are agreeing.

Have you ever been in a meeting, and someone realizes they are passionately agreeing, when two seconds ago they thought they’d been arguing this whole time? Working in healthcare as a coach accelerated my “translation” skills, facilitating this realization far faster.

I’ll work with the executive who sees a strategy clearly, but they’re unsure how to seed their passion and purpose into their teams of technologists in a way that resonates. I’ll guide the developers, data analysts, and security engineers as they struggle to explain the ROI of technical requirements, risk concerns, and tradeoffs—areas of clear value that are tough to place in neat “is this CapEx or OpEx” boxes. Brilliant contributions at all layers get overshadowed when trying to explain value and priority with specialized or highly technical language; I help each area gain the words and perspective to meet each other where they are. I help them create a shared lexicon and mutual respect so they can move forward together.

As a follow up question, are there any stand-out ways in which each of these roles nurture a particular skill of yours?

I’m a big time language nerd with a passion for storytelling. Coaching in the healthcare industry, with many personalities and roles, has really honed my ability to surface and share peoples’ stories in meaningful ways.

We like to think cold hard facts are how we navigate the world, especially in a science-driven industry, but humans connect and thrive through our stories. It’s how we interact, build trust, gain understanding, make decisions, and describe value and purpose. It’s how we navigate and negotiate. It’s also how we attribute meaning to areas like organizational missions, product maps, and market strategies.

Helping people tell their story may seem a bit “woo-woo,” but shared stories become shared understanding, in turn becoming shared effort and success.

At Open Eye, we value a people-centered approach to success. How have you seen this philosophy shape outcomes in your previous roles, and why do you think it is critical to sustainable growth?

Beyond the overall innate value of doing right by people and valuing their needs and contributions, valued people deliver value. It’s really that simple.

We value people in an organization by making space for their stories, including them in our decision-making process, and being clear about where they will be included in the organization as it evolves.

I’ve found the single toughest roadblock during changes or a growth inflection point happens when suddenly, folks either don’t see how they will be included or don’t feel they are being considered. They don’t feel valued. They don’t see the value in the changes. Frustration and friction ensue.

When I guide scalability and sustainable growth in an organization, I ask how consideration, transparency, and pace of change are part of the growth equation. Do we have clear paths for input, and how will we either incorporate or communicate responses? Do we understand what pace of change is reasonable so we don’t burn folks out, even when we accelerate? Do we even know what a sustainable pace of delivery looks like for our organization? Have we asked folks doing the work day-to-day for their perspective before sweeping process changes?

Change fatigue and fear are real. Compounding that with confusing messaging, cookie-cutter reorgs, and unclear objectives around those changes means you will hit painful walls with your people. Growth pains are reduced when we consider how we’ll roll changes out, at what pace, and with the communication that will resonate for the organization’s specific people and culture.

It is safe to assume that experience in regulated industries like healthcare surely demands a balance between compliance and innovation. What is your approach to fostering creativity while ensuring businesses meet necessary regulatory standards?

The first thing I ask when finding ways to innovate with integrity is “what is actually required?”

So often, teams and organizations get stuck in “Z says this, therefore we must do it this way.” For example, I was working with an app development team that kept hitting blockers, frustrated that they couldn’t seem to get feature sets delivered because of compliance slow downs. Too many “signoffs,” too much “red tape,” too many “requirements.” So I asked “what is actually required; do we have the documentation for what will be audited and what the regulations and policies are?”

Lo and behold, when we started looking at the actual need, we uncovered the organization had slipped more into “this is how we’ve always done it,” unaware of the flexibility they had to improve and update their workflows, increase their throughput, decrease their stress, and stay compliant…all at the same time! When teams and organizations understand their real constraints – not merely what they perceive as their limitations – they tap their creativity with less fear and more confidence. It’s tough to take risks to innovate if you don’t first understand what “reasonable risk” looks like for you.

Mostly because we’re looking for some great inspiration to start 2025, we want to know what is your go-to book recommendation(s) for business leaders in 2025? How about podcast(s)?

I love recommending short reads, and two books consistently on the list are:

1. I Quit, But Forgot to Tell You: Attacking the Spreading Virus of Disengagement by Terri Kabachnick
2. The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann

I am forever catching up on podcasts and switching between several topics and vibes; a few consistent revisits for me:

• Let’s Know Things (Host: Colin Wright)
• Whoop Podcast (Host: Will Ahmed)
• The Minimalists (Hosts: Joshua Fields Millburn, Ryan Nicodemus, T.K. Coleman)
• LeVar Burton Reads (Host: LeVar Burton…of course!)

On LinkedIn, you’ve highlighted the joy you experience from moments when your collaborators experience a breakthrough in a challenge, or what you’ve coined a ‘lightbulb moment.’ What is the most notable lightbulb moment that you’ve experienced in your own career.

When I delved into formal coaching and leadership training over a decade ago, I realized helping people harness their own power more effectively and joyfully was my calling and not just a way to make a living.

I still remember a one-on-one coaching client early on who started our conversations filled with self-doubt yet full of expertise and brilliant perspective. Within the month, they were able to manage expectations of a particularly challenging client, improve communication with their manager, and achieve a promotion. They went from the verge of burnout and “how am I going to balance all of this” to clear priorities, relief in their schedule, and newfound confidence in their career. To the betterment of themselves, their team, and their organization. And I absolutely glowed knowing I helped them recognize their value and voice. I feel a little like Glinda sometimes. My lightbulb moment was realizing I could show folks they had the power in them all along. Any day I get to help someone flip that switch in themselves is a great day.

Thank you for taking the time to generously share yourself with us today. To wrap up our time together on a playful note, I would like to know which city in the world – that you’ve visited or desire to – represents your personality the best, and tell us why!

I enjoy good food, thriving nature, interesting books, and a dash of whimsy, so bringing us all the way back to Hobbit mode, I’d have to choose Mamata in Waikato, New Zealand.

For folks who are unfamiliar, the Hobbiton set from the Lord of the Rings films still exists there, and paying it a visit has been on my bucket list for a long time. Enjoy a hearty dish with plenty of potatoes, stroll through lush green, and visit Bag End (certainly on party business, of course)? Don’t mind if I do! It would suit me just fine, halfling-esque human that I am.

Thank you again, Becca! Welcome to the team.