What We Do

Change Management with Compassion

Listening Diagnostics

We map institutional culture as it currently presents itself, through structured listening across divisions, leadership, and frontline staff. Diagnostics are appropriate at the start of a new culture office, after a leadership transition, in the wake of a public incident, or any moment an institution needs an honest, defensible, exterior read of itself.

Restorative Workshops

We design and facilitate skills-based workshops on communication, conflict, accountability, and the gap between stated values and lived behavior. Single sessions or multi-part series for staff, faculty, supervisors, or mixed cohorts. Each session leaves participants with a practice they can use the next morning.

View a sample workshop

Strategic Repair

We work alongside leaders on the sequencing of cultural change — which repairs come first, what is delegated, what requires visible commitment from the top. This work is most valuable when an institution has reached the limits of what additional workshops or new offices can produce.

Hiring Practice

We work with search committees, boards, and hiring teams on the specific behaviors that govern who gets hired — and who doesn't. The work is grounded in structured evaluation, rehearsed interruption of coded language (“fit,” “connection,” “leadership”), and the discipline of returning to the rubric when deliberations drift. Half-day intensives or multi-session engagements timed to an active search, including executive and board-level hires. Designed for institutions whose stated values about hiring have not survived contact with the actual deliberation.

Read a sample practice document

About

Linda Chavers, Ph.D., is the founder of the Listening Practice. She works with colleges and universities, with nonprofits, and with the boards that lead them, on the slow, structural work of restorative and cultural repair — the kind of work most institutions describe as a priority and most consultants treat as a workshop.

Her practice draws on more than fifteen years inside higher education, most recently as the inaugural director of a restorative practice and mediation office at a public college, where she designed and ran the institution’s first listening-based diagnostic, multi-session workshop series, and supervisor support infrastructure.

Earlier in her career, she served as a Dean of Students at Harvard University, managing student crises, conduct cases, and the institutional response to high-stakes incidents — work where it becomes immediately clear whether an institution’s stated commitments are real. As a lecturer, she developed the facilitation discipline her workshops still rely on: holding a room across difference, translating dense material into usable practice, and refusing the easy abstraction. Through consulting on hiring practice and search committee training for mission-driven foundations and executive search firms, she built the rehearsed-interruption methodology now central to the Hiring Practice work. The Listening Practice is the synthesis of these chapters.

The slow work of cultural repair.