The Up-Ward Shift (TUWS) is a leadership and organizational consulting business formed by Dr. RJ Willis, predicated on a principle drawn from Ubuntu: "I am because you are." TUWS doesn't call the groups it works with clients - it calls them MOVERS, an abbreviation for Making Our Vision Evolve through Real Steps, reflecting a notion that sustainable change comes from thoughtful action, not platitudes. Whether you're a small company, a hospital system, a government agency, a charity, or a church, TUWS meets your leadership where it truly is - recognizing the history that built a team while helping them move purposefully toward what's future.
Executive Coaching Services and Executive Leadership Consulting Services
TUWS offers specialized executive coaching services for executives managing development, change, or the daily burden of operating a team. Coaching sharpens decision-making, communication, and delegation, while larger senior leadership consulting services target the organizational systems surrounding that leader — culture, accountability, and communication structures that either promote strong leadership or subtly undermine it. TUWS regards the two as connected: coaching one leader seldom holds if the environment around them remains the same.
A Leadership Consultant for Small Businesses
Small firms encounter leadership pressure differently than huge organizations – one failing manager or one quitting employee may effect the whole operation. As a leadership consultant for small firms, TUWS helps expanding teams enhance decision-making and communication without losing the people behind the growth, scaling the same rigor bigger organizations get to a budget and structure that suits a smaller team.
Trauma Informed Leadership Strategies, Backed by Doctoral-Level Expertise
Dr. RJ Willis brings over 13 years of experience as a Certified Peer Specialist and a PhD degree in Organizational Leadership to every engagement, including his work forming a charity aiding returning citizens re-entering the workforce. That background influences TUWS's trauma informed leadership methods – an approach that acknowledges people take their complete experience into work, and that a leader who knows this reacts to defensiveness, withdrawal, or disagreement with awareness instead of assumption. Learn more about the idea underlying this technique.
Corporate Wellness Programs for Employees and Team Building Activities
TUWS creates organizational wellness programs for workers around the underlying factors creating stress — workload, communication, and leadership behavior — rather than treating well-being as a once-a-year event. Where team building activities are part of an engagement, they're based on actual trust and communication rather than novelty for its own sake, because an afternoon of games seldom fixes a relationship harmed by unresolved conflict. Full service and price data are accessible for companies considering choices.
Church Leadership Training
Ministry leadership contains a dimension most consulting companies overlook: church leaders reconcile spiritual purpose with the practical needs of managing personnel and volunteers. TUWS's church leadership training works with pastors and ministry teams to build leadership structures that are both spiritually grounded and organizationally sound — preventing the volunteer and staff burnout that quietly drains so many congregations, and creating the kind of environment where people feel both called and supported.
Serving Every Sector, One Organization at a Time
Beyond small companies and churches, TUWS also works with government entities managing public responsibility, healthcare institutions bearing enormous emotional and operational demands, and NGOs undertaking people-focused work under continual strain. Each sector presents its unique priorities, but TUWS begins from the same basis across all of them: listening, clarity, trust, and responsibility. There is no uniform formula employed regardless of context – the business spends time analyzing each organization's environment before advising a path.
Why Organizations Choose The Up-Ward Shift
There is no template at TUWS. Every engagement starts with authentically knowing an organization's people, purpose, and challenges — then crafting a plan around what's actually true, not a generic leadership paradigm applied universally across every client. That's true whether the engagement is executive mentoring for one leader, corporate wellness across a whole workforce, or church leadership training for a ministry team navigating development.
Dr. RJ Willis's foundation premise leads that process: "What we do not face, we cannot overcome." Organizations who collaborate with TUWS are challenged to look honestly at what's occur
