About Phillip
Call me
naive.
I genuinely believe that our ability to come together — to build something greater than any one of us could build alone — is the key to everything. Innovation. Transformation. Maybe even survival.
I genuinely believe that our ability to come together — to build something greater than any one of us could build alone — is the key to everything. Innovation. Transformation. Maybe even survival.
Phillip Marcus Jr. is the guide for leaders who are done pretending the distance is fine. Bronx-raised, Federal Reserve-trained, ORSC-certified — and most critically — someone who has lived in every room he now coaches: the classroom, the boardroom, the staff meeting where everyone performs alignment they do not feel.
UR.human is not a coaching practice. It is a system diagnostic — for mission-driven teams whose problems aren't performance problems. They are relationship system problems. And they require a different kind of practitioner to see them clearly.
Early in my career I preached collaboration from the front of a classroom while quietly wondering what the point of being on a team actually was. I believed in the idea of it. I just hadn't felt it yet.
Then I became a leader. And two things happened in quick succession.
My co-school leader and I shared an office. Almost immediately, we shared something else — our actual lives. Not our job histories. Our stories. We saw each other past our titles, past what the org chart said we were supposed to be to each other. And because we saw each other, we could actually work. We could disagree. We could carry each other. We had each other's backs.
"That's what I know now: the condition for everything else isn't strategy or structure. It's whether people in that room feel safe enough to be real."
A few years later, I moved on to a larger team. More people in the room. And somehow — less of everything that mattered.
Silence became the culture. Not peaceful silence. Heavy silence. The silence of wanting to disagree but not feeling safe to. I felt it in my body. I felt it in my spirit. And eventually, that silence became a liability — for me, for the team, and for every person we were supposed to be serving.
What I know now is this: the difference between those two experiences wasn't talent, strategy, or structure. It was the space between people. Whether the team had managed distance or genuine presence. Whether the practiced rules matched the posted ones. That gap — invisible on any org chart — is where everything either holds or falls apart.
That's not a luxury. That's the condition for everything else.
"Most teams are not broken. They are performing wholeness they have never been given permission to feel. The work is not to fix them. The work is to tell the truth — clearly, carefully, together — until the performance becomes the reality."Phillip Marcus Jr. · UR.human
UR.human is not a coaching practice. It is a system diagnostic and repair facility for mission-driven teams. Most team problems are not performance problems. They are relationship system problems — invisible on any org chart, living in the practiced rules and the managed distances that nobody has language for yet.
Dysfunction doesn't live inside people. It lives between them — in the space between the ED and the board, between the stated values and the felt culture, between what was agreed and what actually happened. That's where I work.
Every organization has two sets of rules: the ones on the wall and the ones actually operating in the room. The gap between them is where trust erodes. My entry point is always that gap — never the individual.
When your best people begin to self-censor, perform alignment, and maintain careful emotional distance — that's managed distance. It's deliberate. It's costly. And it's always fixable once someone names it.
"The meta-skills lens was extremely valuable to digging below the surface of incidents and really getting at the why and how of communication becoming poor. The facilitator was extremely well-prepared for a difficult conversation — and gave space while still pushing back on everyone's statements."
Team Member · Coalition Leadership Team
Three thinkers whose ideas live in everything I do — not as academic references, but as lived frameworks:
Paulo Freire taught me that all development work is political — it either domesticates or it liberates. Conscientização, critical consciousness, is the capacity to perceive the systems shaping your reality and to act on them. That's what I want for every team I work with: not just better meetings, but a clearer-eyed understanding of what they're capable of building together.
Audre Lorde taught me that silence is never neutral — it is always a choice with a cost. Her essay The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action asks directly: what are you waiting for before you speak? In every team I've worked with, the most important thing in the room is what nobody is saying. Lorde gave me the framework to understand why — and the conviction that naming it is not just useful. It is necessary.
Marshall Ganz taught me that story is not decoration. It's the structure through which people find shared meaning and the courage to act. Every team I work with has a story — about who they are, why they're here, what they owe each other. My job is to help them find it and tell it to themselves.
"The distance between your posted rules and your practiced rules is exactly where your team breaks down. That's where I work."
This is the belief that animates every engagement. Not because it's the most popular framework in the market — but because after 15 years in every kind of institution, it's the truest thing I know.
"He's brilliant and thoughtful. He understands the art of questioning in order to push thinking. He is masterful in creating a trusting and caring space — one that allows you to question, reflect, and make decisions that help you become a stronger leader and a more intentional version of yourself."
Kim Lisa Hampton
"Phillip is highly perceptive and a true visionary. He has an innate conviction that people and organizations are destined for more — and he is able to foster that belief within the leaders he works with. He is deeply invested, empathetic, and data-driven. That combination makes for a coach who walks alongside you while pushing you toward your own excellence."
Alaina K.
UR.human is for leaders who have stopped pretending. Who know something is broken in the space between — between their values and their culture, their vision and their team. This is not coaching for people who want to feel better. It's for people ready to see clearly and build something worthy of the work they've chosen.
If the distance in your team feels familiar — or if you're ready to create the conditions where your people can show up fully — I'm here to support that work.
Practical language for what you can feel but can't yet name in your team
No pitch, no deck — just an honest conversation about what's possible
The 90-day team coaching engagement for mission-driven organizations