Leadership is everyone’s vocation.
Better leaders create better companies. At Sway, we believe people who are satisfied with their lives, work, and calling show up to a company engaged and ready to contribute to the making of a better world. We want that to be your company.
The companies we work with make an impact on the world, whether that is the environment, their employees and employees’ families, or their customers. The work we do is from the inside out, starting with leaders.
Parker Palmer notes in his book, Let Your Life Speak, “Leadership is a concept we often resist. It seems immodest, even self-aggrandizing, to think of ourselves as leaders. But if it is true that we are made for community, then leadership is everyone’s vocation, and it can be an evasion to insist that it is not. When we live in a community, everyone follows and everyone leads... I lead simply because I am here doing what I do.”
Companies have the privilege to leverage their people filled with creativity, leadership, and counter-cultural thoughts into positions of impact — ultimately, shaping the future of the world. Sway works with you to identify this potential and ensure you and your company has lasting impact.
Ashlee Sikorski
Owner and Coach, PCC
Ashlee is a PCC-level certified coach through the International Coaching Federation and holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology as well a graduate certificate in Transformational Coaching. She has studied at the CP Enneagram Academy and is a practitioner of the Enneagram personality theory. This led her to found the Nine Shapes Project, a vehicle for more meaningful conversations. Her early background in higher education and community development gave her a passion for creatively re-envisioning community leadership and practices, and she loves facilitating this discovery process for leaders and teams. When not coaching, she is hanging out with her husband and two goats in their urban garden in Portland, Oregon.
Mission
Sway exists to refine competent leaders who release energy into their organizations.
Organizational Development Philosophy
Sway applies the following four concepts to each interaction and project: ensuring good systems are in place, asking questions that continually build one's own self-awareness, looking at data through a social-science perspective, and providing safe spaces for human vulnerability and connection.
Spaces
Being able to hold a space, whether virtually or in-person, is something we believe every leader should and can strive to possess. We find that learning how to be grounded and then leading from groundedness is foundational to one’s leadership capabilities. Our role as a facilitator and coach is to promote human development and transformation so that you can lead from a place of confidence and carry a present, warm, and powerful leadership space, which goes everywhere that you do.
Science
Organizing a diverse array of certified, seasoned practitioners who specialize in different fields, Sway uses a social science lens to implement everything we do. We make decisions based on data—data culled from your company via surveys and assessment as well as from applicable scientific literature. We collect this data, go over it with you, and use it to make informed recommendations. Coaching’s emphasis on discovery and the founder's background in cultural anthropology mean we work with a humble posture toward continually learning the answers and accompanying questions instead of “having” them—a posture that, we believe, is what science is all about.
Self-Awareness
We spend time engaged with how people’s motivations and fears, needs and wants, loves and hates are showing up. As experts who use the Enneagram personality framework, emotional intelligence, or various other assessments; and just generally as humans who have gone through a lot of life and unashamedly done tons of psychotherapy—we know that self-awareness is a necessity for any leader moving into the 21st century. Feel free to ask about any of the tools or assessments above. We love talking about them!
Systems
We engage with your company’s big picture and help you develop systems and organizational structures that serve your operational goals. Time and time again we see that systems create the structure under which leaders and teams thrive or crack under pressure. We dialogue with you about the benefits or pitfalls we notice in your systems and help you to envision and implement the best organizational systems and routines possible.
