About

Developing Leaders and Organizations on Purpose

Dr. Miller supports the developmental growth of leaders and their people with the voice of a coach, the mind of a Professor, the heart of a guide, and systems-level vision.

Utilizing my academic learning and professional experience, I’m invited to be a constructive companion to leaders, teams, and organizations ready to develop greater capacity together.

If you’re growing as a leader, you’re likely operating at the limits of your abilities all the time. This also means that the way you’re leading people, making decisions, and approaching problems isn’t good enough for the way you need to lead next.

You’re right, you do have more capacity to lead even if you haven’t been able to access it yet. If you feel dissatisfied, ineffective, or you’re getting feedback that you need to get better, you can develop more leadership capacity. You need to include all you’ve been, address the limits of where that will take you, and grow into a new stage of leadership.

This is where an in-depth knowledge of the way adults learn and change, Adult Development, informs the ways you can grow to become something new. My experience studying, teaching, and coaching from this Developmental approach acknowledges the ways you have been leading, names the leadership edge you’re on, uncovers the limitations that come from it, and designs a way forward, to become a new kind of leader.

Leaders like you want to grow, you’re ready to become something new without losing who you’ve been. I believe that your organization and the people you lead are all counting on you to grow this way.

I believe leaders want to grow, to become something new without losing who they’ve been. And I believe that the people and organizations they lead are counting on them to grow this way.

How Inquiry Partners started

Inquiry Partners exists to grow the capacity of leaders and organizations to better navigate complex internal and external dynamics, for developmental growth, meaningful connection with others, purposeful work, and personal enjoyment.

I didn’t intend to be a business owner. After college, I went to Seminary seeking deep spiritual work and an understanding of what makes life meaningful for leaders and their people. While later completing my PhD, I became professor in Leadership and Organizations and Adult Development. I researched how leaders and the people they lead can co-author their work together. I became deeply trained in unconventional teaching, coaching, and consulting methods based on group dynamics. My students knew me as a professor who could use the dynamics of the here-and-now moment, as a case study for learning complex organizational and psychological concepts.

While I was teaching, I started spending time coaching former students, who had started calling and emailing me for help. Many had taken jobs in established organizations; others were building diverse companies and non-profits from the ground up.

They all needed help stepping into expanded leadership roles, wanting to apply what they had learned in the classroom to real life situations. They started asking me to coach their leaders, train their managers, and help design their organizations to be incubators for people’s growth. My coaching and consulting business was born from of my academic background and the experiences I was having with leaders in organizations.

Over the years, I’ve done less teaching, and more coaching and consulting. More than ever, I am deeply committed to coaching and consulting that includes both rigorously trained inquiry and authentic meaningful partnership. Hence the firm’s name, Inquiry Partners.

In addition to my education and certifications, I draw on spiritual, emotional, and energetic dynamics to guide my inquiring partnership with clients. I cultivate my own values of curiosity, mastery, mystery, intimacy, and enjoyment in a deliberate, mutual commitment to growth for each of us.

About the Founder

I’ve held several roles in the fields of leadership, organizational change, spiritual and adult development. I taught at the University of San Diego and for Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Through the affiliation with Harvard, I led individuals and teams through learning about the psychology of change. I’ve been trained as a spiritual director and love to teach people about ancient wisdom traditions like the Enneagram, as well.

Through Inquiry Partners, I have been consulting and coaching leaders in multiple industries, and I’m certified in many coaching philosophies, consulting tools, as well as psychological and developmental assessments. Some of these help my clients build skills, grow their abilities to lead more people and more projects. But beyond those sometimes technical components, I’ve curated unique coaching methods, adaptive leadership training curriculum, and powerful consulting frameworks focused on preparing them for complex, uncertain, scaled, and often ambiguous leadership situations.

I believe that organizations can create and sustain teams that not only become environments for leaders to lead others, but they become places where leaders also develop themselves.

More About Cara

I grew up in San Diego, CA and currently work out of my office in the nearby city of Solana Beach. I spend almost all my personal time with family, eating Mexican food, going to the beach, and enjoying each other at our home in Encinitas. When I’m on my own, and not reading, I love listening to music and podcasts, travel, and infinite conversations. I met my husband and love that as my partner he has always actively shared the load of married life and parenting to support my education, gifts, and business. We have two elementary school-age daughters, Lilly and Fern. As a mom, it is the most meaningful thing in my life to know they are watching me grow as a leader, business owner, and woman.

From spiritual guide, to professor, to coach and consultant, I’ve discovered the best current expression of my training and gifts is as an inquiry partner to my courageous clients.

Let’s start working together

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