Cartwheel Coaching and Consulting is a leadership development practice that helps small- and medium-sized teams improve team cohesion and performance while embedding diversity, equity, and inclusion into day-to-day practice.

“Our team is deeply invested in equity and inclusion work. A few years ago, we didn’t have the skills or the interpersonal relationships to do this work. With Eiko’s guidance, we strengthened our connection to one another and gained so many specific tools to work as a true team. Thanks to the foundational work we did with Eiko, we’ve gone from avoiding challenging topics to being leaders within our larger organization in bringing about positive change.”
— Brian T, Non-Profit Operations Manager

services

We customize our services based on our clients’ needs, context, and goals.

one-on-one leadership development

We work with emerging and seasoned leaders of color in social justice organizations to help them maximize their impact without sacrificing work-life balance. We are passionate about serving them because their voices are instrumental to sustaining the social justice movement and collaborative efforts towards equity, both as role models and as change agents.

Benefits: Leverage the strengths of your team, develop and nurture leadership, clarify goals, manage others more effectively, address competing priorities without overwhelm, surface limiting beliefs, acknowledge and celebrate successes, set and recalibrate goals, have space for reflection and growth.

training and facilitation

We work with teams that seek improved communication, collaboration, and effectiveness, in service of fulfilling their mission and living their values. We believe team building and DEI are transformative practices and norms to integrate and strengthen rather than as extracurricular activities that are brought in intermittently.

Benefits: Improve team functioning and performance, resolve conflicts productively, enhance leadership and management skills, celebrate success from collective results, form meaningful connections with colleagues, integrate work-life balance for improved performance.

technical assistance

We also offer technical assistance to teams and individuals in the following areas: team management and supervision; facilitation; evaluation planning; data collection, analysis, and synthesis; and feedback reflection.

“Our team has had retreats designed and facilitated by Eiko the past two years. These retreats have been wonderful and have yielded lots of benefits to our team: staff feel more connected, communication and collegiality has improved, and our team has higher morale. The last 6 months as we’ve left the office and been managing the challenges of COVID, I’m especially grateful for the ways in which our work with Eiko has strengthened our team. A few staff have even shared that they have been able to lean on each other personally for support during this challenging time because of connections they formed during our retreats.”
— Alison F, Chief of Natural Resource Management and Science, GGNRA

Our approach

We generally use similar processes to better understand each client’s needs and goals to develop a best-fit plan of action. These steps are not linear and not all areas may be relevant in every engagement.

  • Design our alliance: We have a shared understanding of how we’ll work together and revisit as needed.

  • Assess: We inquire, get curious, and listen to understand where you are now, your landscape (e.g., social and political context), and your values.

  • Set and refine goals: We surface goals, hold you accountable, and understand that we will periodically revisit them to make sure they are still relevant.

  • Develop a timeline and execute an action plan: We develop an action plan and refine as needed. Throughout the engagement, we work collaboratively with our clients and leverage your field expertise and team history.

  • Reflect and learn: We reflect on process and outcomes of our engagement, celebrate successes and achievements, and surface lessons learned. 

  • Set accountabilities/Keep the learning alive: We make sure that there is a plan to hold you or your team accountable and commit to the team’s goals. We equip you with tools and strategies so that the work doesn’t stop after our engagement.

“When Eiko was my coach, I was relatively new at Rising Sun - still in my first role as Director of Youth Programs. Six years later, I can remember how much it meant to my development as a leader to have someone committed to my growth, someone who truly listened, someone who asked the right questions, who both supported and challenged me. ”
— Julia H., CEO, Rising Sun Center for Opportunity
“Eiko is an intuitive and talented coach and facilitator who has guided our team in formation, trust-building, cohesion, direction, and alignment over the course of several years. Eiko does not shy away from the realities of challenges and change. Instead, she spends time listening and learning about current and emergent themes and offers ways to address these creatively and productively. In working with Eiko, our team has defined, and gained insight into what we do and why. Our team has developed guiding expressions of our identity, values, commitments. But it doesn’t end there! We continue to work with Eiko year after year because she identifies tools and practices that support our team’s deepening work and ongoing development.”
— Alisa S, Director of Nurseries, GGNPC

About

Eiko Sugano brings a combination of research, facilitation, and coaching experience to strengthen individual and organizational leadership and impact. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a Masters in Public Health, she spent four years managing and directing STI and HIV prevention health studies focused on high-risk youth, including homeless and LGBTQ youth. With a desire to apply her skill set to a broader field, she joined a San Francisco-based social sector consulting firm (Learning For Action), expanding and sharpening her technical, facilitation and management skills as a senior consultant and talent director. She deepened her leadership development skills by becoming a certified professional coach through the Co-Active Training Institute, and applies many of her coaching skills in both her professional and personal life, including parenting and relationships. She enjoys witnessing innate creativity and resourcefulness flourish in others and continually works on “walking the talk.”

Eiko was raised bilingually and biculturally in Providence, Rhode Island by Japanese immigrant parents. She spent her childhood years in both American and Japanese language schools on the east coast, but has been in San Francisco since 1999, where she currently resides. She is an avid runner and enjoys the many miles of great running that the Bay Area has to offer. Unless she’s injured or avoiding poor air quality from climate fires, you’ll often find her running in Golden Gate Park, the Presidio, Lake Merced, and Land’s End trails. She lives with her husband, son, and two rescue rabbits.

Sugano_Portraits_2020_007.jpg
 

Contact Us

Ready to get started? Curious to learn more about our services? Contact us and we’ll set up a time to talk.