Leadership Team

DEBORAH HOWARD, Esq., M.S.O.D., founder and President of Guiding Change Consulting, Inc. is a leading organizational consultant, professional certified coach, and author who previously worked as a public interest lawyer. She brings intercultural insight and a passion for social justice to her work as a change catalyst — helping leaders and their teams transform themselves and the world by accessing their inner wisdom and tapping into their creativity, passion and potential. Her professional life began in the field of law with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a law degree from Northeastern University School of Law.  She went to law school with the goal of using the law to help create positive social change.  Becoming disillusioned with the adversarial process, she wanted to find ways to work with people to help them build and maintain connections rather than take sides in win-lose scenarios.  It was that desire that led her to return to school to receive her master’s degree in organization development from American University/NTL. Her work with organizational leaders and teams includes:

• Coaching leaders to live and work in alignment with their purpose and values, enabling them to re-ignite passion and bring out the best in themselves and others
• Working with team members to strengthen their relationships and collaborate creatively across differences
• Enabling leaders to make strategic decisions to overcome challenges, manage change and fulfill their organizational missions

Deborah’s experience also includes having lived, studied, and worked in Japan as well as working in Singapore and India.  While an undergraduate majoring in East Asian Studies, she spent a year at Waseda University in Tokyo, where she studied Japanese language and culture, also earning her black belt in Judo.  She returned to Japan later, after practicing law in Alaska, to study law for a year and a half at Doshisha University in Kyoto through a fellowship awarded by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Deborah is the author of Repairing the Quilt of Humanity: A Metaphor for Healing and Reparation, and Mystery of Memory: Telling My Truth, Standing My Ground.