Introducing Rachel Stopard

I’m Rachel Stopard, a business transformation consultant, leadership facilitator, and more honestly - the person you call when something needs to change.

And if you know me well, my perspective is that often what needs to change is you.

My formal background is in neuroscience (Go Marauders!) and fintech, where I have spent a decade learning how to take complicated problems, understand the people and systems underneath them, and actually make things better. Within the last 18 months, I have entered the non-profit space which has been extremely rewarding.

I’ve led software migrations, built new departments, supported acquisitions, integrated technology, developed client and employee onboarding, and helped organizations navigate significant operational change.

But I’ve always been obsessed with something bigger than the work itself. I am driven to be the best version of myself. Making the day-to-day around me better. Making people feel like they matter.

My highly educated uncle once said, “Rachel always thinks the best of everyone.”

He was not intending it as a compliment. And when he said it, I was offended. But the truth is, I think he was onto something.

I studied neuroscience at McMaster, which probably explains some of it. I’m fascinated by how people think, behave, communicate, and respond to the environments around them.

When are we our best selves? And, more importantly, when are we not - and why?

I didn’t end up working in a lab. I ended up in fintech. I ended up in business (a total surprise to me).

After university, I taught myself both project & change management because I needed to. I needed clear priorities. Clear plans. People who understood where we were going and why - both employees and clients.

And I kept finding myself in the middle of increasingly nuanced problems: software migrations, acquisitions, data migrations, new departments, leadership changes, client onboarding, technology integrations, and processes that weren’t working the way they were supposed to.

But the most complex piece was almost always the people. How people responded to each other. What they assumed. What they weren’t saying. Where communication broke down. Where a reasonable process on paper created a terrible experience for the person actually using it.

At some point, I realized that the thing I was actually good at wasn’t being an expert in any one of those things. It was seeing the whole picture and being able to navigate through it.

I could sit in a room with a technical problem, an operational problem, a people problem and a leadership problem and start connecting the dots.

What is actually happening - and are we actually talking about that?

Do we have all the information? And by that I mean, have we actually asked the people closest to the work? Our frontline employees? Our clients?

When do people go silent? Why?

And, perhaps most importantly, what needs to happen next to make tomorrow better than today?

That became the foundation of my work.

Today, I work with organizations going through change - whether that’s a major transformation, a merger, a new system, a growing team, or simply the realization that the way things have always been done isn’t working anymore.

Frankly, I help make sense of the mess.

It feels like someone has handed me a giant ball of tangled yarn. I unravel it. I separate the pieces. I figure out what each piece represents, what matters most, and what needs to happen first.

Then we start putting it back together in a way that builds something beautiful, innovative and impactful.

Sometimes that looks like strategy. Sometimes it’s project management. Sometimes it’s building systems and processes. Sometimes it’s sitting with a leadership team and asking the uncomfortable question everyone has been avoiding. Sometimes it’s helping a manager navigate a situation they’ve been carrying around for six months because they don’t know what to do with it - and definitely don’t know how to handle it.

We ask a lot of managers. They carry the brunt of the organizational tension.

We expect them to lead change, support their people, communicate difficult decisions, manage performance, navigate conflict, understand strategy and somehow develop the skills to do all of it well.

But where do they actually go to develop those skills? To practice those skills?

Where do they get to be honest about what they don’t know?

That question is a big part of why I’m building the leadership work I am now.

I’m interested in the things we don’t say. The conversations we avoid. The assumptions we make about decisions that have been made. The flame of gossip that so often follows.

The gap between what leadership believes is happening and what people are actually experiencing.

Avoiding an issue doesn’t make it go away. It just makes it more expensive.

My work is about surfacing those things in a meaningful way - and then figuring out what to do next.

That’s really what I do.

I help people and organizations see what’s actually happening, make sense of it, and move forward. And hopefully - have fun and enjoy this sweet little life along the way.