CONVERGE
ADVISORY
GROUP

Brook Houchens is the Founder and CEO of Converge Advisory Group, started in 2019 - an organizational performance advisory firm that helps leaders diagnose and solve the people and organizational issues getting in the way of performance. She also serves as faculty with the Converge Leadership Institute, bringing more than two decades of executive, consulting, academic, and international experience into leadership education, workshops, executive learning, and thought leadership.

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Brook's work sits at the intersection of people, performance, and leadership. She advises executives and leadership teams on organizational performance and effectiveness, people and talent strategy, organizational design, culture, workforce planning, performance management, leadership alignment, and organizational change. She is particularly drawn to complex situations where leaders know something isn't working as well as it should...but the underlying cause or path forward isn't yet clear.

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Over the course of her career, Brook has held senior leadership and advisory roles with for-profit organizations including Bayer, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Red Hat/IBM, and CloudFactory, and management consulting experience spanning industries such as technology, healthcare, pharma, agriculture, higher education, executive search, and nonprofit and religious organizations. Her career has included leading large and complex teams, organizational transformation, talent and people strategy, global operations, and M&A work, including leading an acquisition and integration in Canada.

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Her work is equally diverse and has extended across North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and India, reinforcing one of the ideas that continues to shape her work today: organizations may differ dramatically in size, industry, geography, and mission, but many of the human and organizational factors that drive performance are remarkably universal.

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Brook's approach is also deeply influenced by her academic career in Oxford, England, where she studied, interned, and worked for five years within the University of Oxford system. She completed her undergraduate degree requirements in business management through an international work & study placement at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, which also led to earning her MBA from Oxford Brookes University. Her postgraduate research examined how internal organizational practices - including leadership, culture, employee experience, and the way organizations engage their own people - affect service quality and organizational performance. That research became an early foundation for a question that has followed her throughout her career: What actually enables people and organizations to perform at their best?

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Her academic and executive-education experience has also included work in Harvard Business School executive education, including co-facilitating work with leaders of multi-generation family-business dynasties. Today, she continues that combination of practitioner and educator through the Converge Leadership Institute, where she teaches and facilitates conversations around organizational performance, leadership, people strategy, culture, and the realities of leading through growth and change. Her goal is not simply to teach leadership theory, but to translate academic research and real-world experience into practical ideas leaders can use in their daily lives.

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Brook has also served in board and advisory leadership roles across corporate, nonprofit, education and faith-based environments. Those experiences have given her the opportunity to see organizations from multiple perspectives...as an executive, consultant, board member, researcher, educator, and leader responsible for implementing change herself.

 

What connects all of Brook's work is a fascination with why organizations perform the way they do. She believes underperformance is rarely explained by one person, one process, or one singular problem. More often, performance reflects the interaction between people, leadership, structure, culture, expectations, incentives, communication, and the environment in which people are being asked to work. Her understanding of that dynamic yields more powerful, effective solutions for her clients. That is why Brook's approach begins with diagnosis rather than a predetermined solution. Whether she is advising an executive team, helping an organization rethink its workforce and structure, facilitating a leadership session, or teaching a room of leaders, she encourages people to ask better questions, challenge assumptions, and understand what is really happening before deciding what to change.

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Through Converge, Brook's aim is ultimately simple: to help leaders build organizations where people can thrive and stellar performance can follow.

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