Consulting Engagement Lead

Toffler Associates The role.

Engagement Leads own the delivery of complex client work. You are accountable for the quality of the work, the health of the engagement, the performance of the team, and the strength of the client relationship. You will lead strategic engagements across Department of War (DoW) mission environments, make sense of ambiguous problems, guide teams and senior clients, manage engagement economics, and turn strong delivery into follow-on opportunities.

These behaviors are foundational to how we recruit, select, develop, and evaluate every practitioner erience matters; how you use it matters more.

team success ahead of individual recognition. Share knowledge, relationships, credit, and opportunities freely. Ask for help, offer it freely, and make the people around you better. Make choices that strengthen the team.

- Lead through sound judgment, preparation, and performance. Earn credibility through the quality, not title, résumé, or personal visibility.

- Remain curious and teachable regardless of experience. Seek and apply feedback, recognize blind spots and missteps, and adapt with openness and self-awareness.

- Consistently earn the trust of clients and teammates. Do what you say you will do. Communicate early, surface risks before they become problems, and make sure clients and teammates are never surprised.

- Take responsibility for leaving the client, team, and firm stronger than you found them. Build relationships, capacity, and knowledge that last beyond the engagement.

Lead complex engagements from kickoff through close, with clear outcomes, a strong workplan, high-quality deliverables, and no surprises for the client.

Turn ambiguous questions and incomplete information into a clear problem statement, hypotheses, analysis, decisions, and next steps.

Set direction, assign clear ownership, coach practitioners, review the work, address performance issues, and create the conditions for people to succeed.

Build trusted relationships, run effective meetings, facilitate difficult conversations, manage expectations, and know what matters to the client beyond the immediate scope.

Know the scope, schedule, staffing, burn, profitability, risks, and forecast; address problems early and elevate when needed.

• A minimum of 5 years of management consulting experience, including executive-level client engagement and leadership of teams.
• Proven ability to turn strategy into a practical workplan and move work across functions and levels of an organization.
• Strong systems thinking, analytical judgment, facilitation, executive communication, and relationship-building skills.
• Experience leading multiple work streams and teams while managing scope, budget, schedule, quality, and client expectations.
• Ability to work effectively with quantitative and qualitative data to create clear, executive-ready deliverables.
• Working proficiency with modern AI tools such as Copilot, ChatGPT, or Gemini to accelerate analysis, workflows, prototypes, and deliverables.
• Bachelor's degree; U.S. citizenship; ability to obtain and maintain up to a Top-Secret security clearance.
• Reside in and be willing to commute regularly within the Washington, DC metropolitan area in a hybrid work environment.

• You get to the heart of a problem quickly, challenge assumptions, and see connections others miss.
• You can command a room without needing to be the center of it.
• You can work across strategy, operations, people, technology, and AI without treating them as separate problems.
• You build relationships beyond the immediate project, recognize unmet client needs, and know how to turn those needs into follow-on work.
• You leave behind stronger clients, stronger teammates, stronger systems, and not just completed deliverables.

We are thinkers and doers.

For more than 30 years, Toffler Associates has helped leaders navigate consequential moments when the path forward is not…