Strategic Leadership Behind the Scenes: A Coffee With Thomas Wynder, Chief of Staff

Background 

Thomas joins Karp Strategies as the inaugural Chief of Staff to the CEO. He brings over a decade of experience supporting senior leaders across creative and high-impact organizations, with expertise in strategic planning, operations, and cross-functional leadership. Throughout his career, he has managed complex initiatives, budgets, and executive operations at organizations including Essence Communications and UnitedMasters. At Karp Strategies, Thomas works closely with the CEO and leadership team to streamline operations, drive growth, and support the delivery of impactful, sustainable solutions for clients.

How do you like your coffee?

I don’t drink coffee. Ironically, when I was a kid, my mother told me the old tall tale that caffeine would stunt my growth—and I knew I wanted to be 6’4. I am 6’4, so I guess it worked out. I very rarely consume caffeinated beverages, but if I do, it’s tea only.

How did your career lead you to joining Karp Strategies? What about your past studies or positions lead you to working for an Urban Planning firm?

Karp Strategies is my first foray into management consulting and urban planning. My background is in creative industries, including media, advertising, and fashion, but the common thread has always been executive support. Over the past 15 years, I have worked as a Chief of Staff to senior and C-level executives and most recently Deputy Chief of Staff to a CEO. Looking to expand my skill set, I sought a sector change. The role at Karp Strategies aligned closely with my experience and strengths. I was fortunate to join the team this past May and am excited to continue learning about this new [to me] industry.

What new strategy approaches or frameworks have you learned that apply to Karp Strategies' work in urban planning or community development?

The way we market ourselves is very different from the sectors I have worked in previously. In a professional services business, we are marketing our team’s skills, time, and expertise, rather than a physical product. At Karp Strategies, we are the product—our time and expertise, the way we engage, and our mission and goals. At the same time, it is important to understand the fundamentals of marketing, including what you are offering and how to communicate it effectively. For example, at Karp Strategies, our projects demonstrate our capabilities, and we leverage them to showcase what we offer our clients and partners.

What do you enjoy most about working at Karp Strategies?

The impact of our work is a key reason I was drawn to Karp Strategies. One example is our North Flatbush Business Improvement work, which focuses on the communities that our clients are serving and building in. I worked on an economic impact assessment, a term I am becoming more familiar with, examining how construction can affect neighborhood businesses. I was also able to contribute to a housing development project in a neighborhood where I used to live. Having lived there for nine years gave me insight into the local nuances and community makeup, helping me understand how neighborhood context can inform the recommendations that planning practitioners make to clients.

What is the most important thing about your role as a Chief of Staff at Karp Strategies, especially one that might not be obvious?

I have found that roles like this require being aware of everything, everywhere, all at once. There isn’t an aspect of our business that I don’t touch, because my role sits in the Office of the CEO, and the CEO in turn touches every part of the business. From business development to marketing to project management, I need to align across all functions. Much like external-facing roles, it is about relationships and managing them effectively. I stay attuned to both junior and senior team members, understanding their capacity, roles within the team and how the firm is positioning itself. Comprehensive knowledge of the business is essential, and building strong relationships across the team is the secret to achieving it.

How do you see the field of urban planning and economic development evolving over the next five years, and what role does Karp Strategies hope to play?

The field of urban planning is fascinating, and part of the reason I applied to Karp Strategies is because of my mother’s experience in the field. Like many others at the firm, she has a Master’s degree in Urban Planning. When I was a child, our family often shared stories about the projects she worked on, including a traffic management project in Detroit. I remember hearing about this project as a child and realizing how deeply her work impacted residents’ lives. It highlighted for me the tangible impact of urban planning, especially in economic and workforce development. She later earned her JD and worked with the city’s corporation counsel.

Looking to the future, I see urban planning expanding into areas like marine highways, a sector that is often overlooked despite its central role in the economy. Events such as the pandemic demonstrated how disruptions to shipping and supply chains can have widespread effects. Renewable energy is another emerging market with significant growth potential, offering opportunities beyond environmental sustainability. Additionally, urban resurgence in many cities, coupled with patterns of urban flight, presents new challenges and opportunities. I believe these areas will continue to grow, and Karp Strategies is well positioned and equipped to work in these evolving sectors.  

How do you help the CEO balance the firm’s mission-driven values with the realities of business development and market growth?

We focus only on projects that align with our work and values. We strive to ensure that any partnerships we engage in reflect our mission. For example, if our focus is on economic development and emerging cities, we seek opportunities to help our clients build in that direction. In the NBT project, we were collaborating with our partners to serve the community and create a facility that advances that mission. This is how we approach projects and proposals: before participating, we ask, "How can we be impactful, equitable, and while also delivering value to the firm and our clients?" We recognize that purely profit-driven work does not drive meaningful impact, and our values have guided us through ten years in business.

Our work in ports, energy, economic development, workforce development, and stakeholder engagement aligns with both our mission and sustainable business growth. A key part of my role is ensuring that this through line remains clear and consistent across everything we do.

What’s one lesson you’ve learned from working closely with CEOs that has helped you be more effective in bridging strategy and execution?

“Do not let perfect be the enemy of good.” As many on our team have noticed, I tend to be a perfectionist. I want everything to be polished and presented in a way that reflects both myself and Karp Strategies at our best. We move at a fast pace, but the focus is always on putting our best foot forward. In some of the market research projects we’ve undertaken, we’ve had to pivot away from a well-researched approach and adjust quickly, knowing that we can revisit and refine our direction as needed.

Fast Facts

• Last TV show I binge-watched: Wednesday Season 2

• Restaurant I’d recommend: Marea on Central Park South. Great views, even better food.

• Best concert I’ve experienced: Beyonce Formation World Tour 

• Book that changed me: Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

• and A little life by Hanna Yanagihara 

• Favorite course in college: Writing Philosophical Arguments. It taught me what a logic fallacy is and how to avoid them in building arguments.

• Movies I’d pay to see again and again: Avengers Endgame 

• My heroes are: My grandmother, Ellen Stewart. She founded the La MaMa Experimental Theatre about 50 years ago in the East Village and was the first off-off-broadway theater producer in the Broadway Hall of Fame. The street where the theater is located is co-named after her. She is my hero because she forged her own path.

  
  

#CityBuilding #Resilience #SustainableGrowth #PlanningForTheFuture #WorkforceDevelopment #PortsAndEnergy #UrbanInnovation #MissionDrivenWork

Looking Forward: The Future of NYC Jobs with ABNY

A huge thank you to An Association for a Better New York (ABNY) for a thought-provoking panel on the future of jobs in New York City. As an urban planner, I am constantly reflecting on solutions to our city's systemic #workforcedevelopment challenges. While NYC created a staggering 900k new jobs over the past 10 years, it should come as no surprise that this growth was disproportionate across boroughs, sectors, and education levels.

Panelists Purnima Kapur, Gail Mellow, Seth Pinsky, and Ritchie Torres explored pathways to creating middle-income jobs centered around alternatives to higher education, on-the-job training and human capital investments, and job growth strategies tailored to a hyper-local scale. I've shared some highlights from the conversation here - dig in!

Center for an Urban Future Director Jonathon Bowles opened the conversation by sharing some data around our current workforce landscape. The numbers on a citywide scale are telling the story of a thriving job market with one of the lowest unemployment rates in our history. They’re also revealing vast disparities in the types of jobs that are driving this growth: we’re seeing an increase in high-wage tech jobs paired with a sharp expansion of low-wage sectors like home health care, restaurants, bars, and employment services. Growth in some of New York City’s traditionally high wage sectors like hospitals, finance, legal services, and manufacturing has slowed. In fact, we lost a staggering 13,500 manufacturing jobs in the past ten years. New Yorkers without bachelor’s degrees often do not qualify for middle income jobs and the data shows that attainment varies greatly between boroughs: 60.7% of Manhattan’s population over 25 years old holds a BA while only 30.8% of Queens’ population holds the same accreditation. With this baseline data in hand, panelists explored:

• What are we doing to create pipelines for middle income jobs?  

• How are we connecting our economic development and workforce development efforts?

• How can we address the geographic disparities between our boroughs and neighborhoods when it comes to access to high-quality jobs?

• What role should employers play when designing and implementing workforce development strategies?

“You can’t be pro-affordability and anti-economic development (or density),” shared RXR Realty’s Executive Vice President Seth Pinsky. “The only way to fix this problem is more development,” pointing to the massive displacement in the Bay Area as a cautionary tale of what New York City could look like without increasing density or expanding our existing housing stock. He also challenged the audience to consider how we can make it less expensive to do business in New York City. Companies in the finance sector, for example, have moved many of their middle income jobs out of state and, in turn, away from qualified New Yorkers.

LaGuardia Community College President Gail Mellow asked fellow panelists to revisit how we define economic development and who currently drives it. “When we think about economic development, we don’t normally have enough people in the room,” pointing to missing representation from those who design workforce pipelines and the communities they design them for. She believes that investing in human capital through education as early as high school, vocational programs, apprenticeships, and specialized trainings - in lieu of brick and mortar economic development projects - will nurture our missing middle class workforce. Mellow advocates for working with employers to design curricula and initiating feedback loops with those employers around what is working and where there is room for improvement.

City Council Member for District 15 Ritchie Torres shared that residents in his district are experiencing notably higher unemployment rates than the citywide average. As a result, he advocates for workforce development strategies that are designed on a hyper-local scale. “Economic development without human capital will only take you so far,” he notes. In fact, “it will perpetuate disparities we already have.”

We look forward to continuing the conversation around the future of jobs and again, thank ABNY for convening this panel of cross-sector experts. Karp Strategies often explores, designs, and informs strategy around workforce development. You can find selected projects where we delivered community and workforce development strategies on our website, here.