How We Help Our Clients

Leadership training and development has been at the core of our management consulting services from the beginning, central to leader learning is diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-bias (DEI/AB) and the interpersonal relations skills necessary to advance these constructs. We bring deep, functional first-hand expertise often detailed through the teaching, yet painful, stories of prejudice and discrimination. Known for our all-inclusive perspective and 1:1 executive and/or life coaching applied where necessary, we capture value across boundaries and between the silos of any organization. Our outcomes reflect a multiplier effect from optimizing the sum of the parts, not just the individual pieces.

Learning and Development

Diversity

TWO will develop custom-tailored strategic plans to grow diversity across your corporate landscape. We begin with a thorough diagnosis of the extent to which diversity exists within your company culture. Then, based upon exclusive qualitative and quantitative data, expert analysis and bold thinking, we present this Diagnostic in undeniable fashion to your leadership for accuracy, prioritization of findings and commitment to next steps.

Because TWO, itself, is comprised of a diverse team, whose members have first-hand experience with prejudice, discrimination, unconscious bias and white complicity, we bolster client enthusiasm for becoming more diverse in race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. In fact, TWO shares an enormous understanding of how racial and social inequities operate in the workplace. Ultimately, we draw on successful models to help our clients assess, strategize, educate, and implement in alignment with their mission and values.

Equity – Inclusion

Typically, clients that approach TWO for broadening equity and inclusion are entrenched in some degree of demographic homogeneity. This is a barrier that results in a “Catch 22” frustration: Organizations may be unable to attract employees of color, women, and/or members of the LGBTQ community because they lack these minorities in their ranks. And they lack these demographic groups because they are unable to attract them!  Indeed, the human condition dictates that not many people of color (or even White for that matter) are eager to be “pioneers”, i.e. “the only one” across the corporate landscape.

As a remedy, we encourage clients to provide greater equity and inclusion by creating and positioning advancement training for the lower and lowest levels of current personnel – undoubtedly positions most often held by Black and Brown men and women including LGBTQ. Not dissimilar to the career growth programs offered at mid-management levels, such an advancement mechanism sends a powerful message to prospective minority candidates regardless of position that the prospective company is serious about equity and inclusion.

Anti-Bias

We provide anti-bias education through workshops and 1:1 coaching with a focus on application and outcomes at various levels of the organization. The content, scope, and target audience for these sessions are determined with the client. They depend upon the outcomes of the diagnostic assessment of the company’s cultural landscape.

TWO’s anti-bias programs are targeted to clients who wish to engage in a deeper self-examination including understanding the role of micro-aggressions in unconscious bias, unlearning stereotypes, examining current factors that exacerbate racial and LGBTQ conflicts; and facing White complicity in – and passive acceptance of – policies that advantage Whiteness, disadvantage Blackness and tolerate liberal exceptionalism.

Executive and Life Coaching

We connect with our clients because we know how to build an accurate and comprehensive assessment followed by an agreed-upon plan of engagement. Consistent with International Coaching Federation (ICF) requirements, our coaching is dynamic as we make modifications based upon the discoveries we experience along the way. Largely subtle, these adjustments result from ever-deepening client conversations combined with behavioral results we monitor on an ongoing basis.

Our effectiveness in handling feedback as well as the input of the buyer avoids triangulation. And always tasking accountability, we are mindful of whether the behavioral change stirring within the client is sustainable and if not, to what extent further coaching and supplemental content are warranted to make it so.

Although TWO is a consulting firm, when it comes to any engaged coaching, we never tell our clients what to do. The distinction between consultant and coach is clear and not to be confused: TWO as consultant focuses on the direct result/bottom line; its Managing Director as the firm’s only executive coach, leverages the soft skills surrounding teamwork, change, conflict, communication, et. al, that ultimately impact the coached client and his/her influence on the organization he/she leads.

Organization

Leadership and Talent

TWO was created 3 years ago as a derivative of the Leadership Best Practices and Diversity initiatives that Managing Director Larry Wilson had launched as Executive Director of Economic and Leadership Development at Rhode Island College.

Equity, inclusion and anti-bias initiatives require extraordinarily effective leaders at every level who have empathy and other emotional intelligence sensibilities. They also need an understanding of the personal and professional competencies of the partners, collaborators, senior and middle managers and co-workers they depend upon. TWO works with various management, HR and other key stakeholders on resonant leadership values, styles, and levels in the context of distinguishing how anti-bias contributes to a diverse, equitable and culturally inclusive organization.

Operating Model – Strategy Design

Our collaborating with and coaching members of the “Diversity Committee” is focused on positioning them to be the driving force behind the diversity and anti-bias effort. The Committee is periodically evaluated to ensure that its member composition best serves implementation and outcomes. Importantly, beyond the role it plays as activist to a diversity and Anti-Bias strategy, this committed group of individuals serves as an employee resource to assist personnel with all issues related to discrimination, bias and microaggression.

TWO builds an advisory relationship as well as a mentoring one with the Employee Resource Group to ensure that as the vital source for the organization’s diverse populations, the Committee understands company history relative to diversity, program goals, outcomes and benchmarks, and ongoing challenges.

Community

As an active voice for Diversity and Anti-Bias in the greater Providence area, TWO rallies its clients to “live their diversity commitment” and sponsor programming aimed at Black and Brown persons, women and members of the LGBTQ community. Four TWO clients, for example, just prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, supported the premier of Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail set to choral and orchestral music entitled “Let Justice Roll.” Heard by more than 325 people at Providence’s First Baptist Church in America February 2020, our Managing Director narrated Dr. King’s letter.

As another example, TWO supports 501(c)(3) Stages of Freedom in its effort to provide swim lessons for children of color ages 6-12. Wilson identifies with the mission of this minority owned organization not only because it illuminates Black, Brown, and LGBTQ history in and contributions to Rhode Island, but because he lost his identical twin to a drowning accident during those formative years.

Pro Bono Work

TWO serves as principal advisor to the tribal government of the Eastern Pequot Indians of CT as well as its 501(c)(3) Wuttooantam Foundation focused on tribal history, genealogy, community and political leadership. Wilson, a member of the Tribe, served as its CEO for Federal Acknowledgement from 1997-2003. Under his leadership, federal recognition was achieved, only to be reversed for political and racial factors in 2005.

Today, the Tribe, despite very limited resources, continues to fight for the rights and privileges afforded sovereign nations. Wilson has turned TWO’s attention to the Tribe, assisting its 1,200 members in their quest to have federal recognition and social justice restored.