Meet Dr. Tammy Martin-Causey

Her story

Dr. Martin-Causey has spent more than 20 years teaching professionals how to do difficult people work well. She began as a clinical program director in Greensboro, North Carolina, where she led a county-wide, multi-agency, multi-community planning effort and authored the $500,000 federal grant that funded it. That early lesson stayed with her: real change happens when people with competing priorities find a reason to move together.

After obtaining her Ph.D. in psychology, she continued her residency training, where she taught and supervised at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry and also consulted to the Simon School of Business. She later taught doctoral-level courses in Arizona. She then founded Tamaca Leadership and Integrative Psychology Solutions, bringing what she knew about people, performance and change to business leaders, organizations and individual clients.

Since Rochester, her work has centered on developing leaders. Through Tamaca Leadership she has designed scalable training frameworks and leadership development programs with executives and cross-functional teams, delivered leadership assessments and training, and coached emerging leaders through remediation and strength-building. She has spoken on providing strength, stability and leadership during financial stress, and on conflict, anger and difficult conversations in the medical office. She has also led in volunteer roles where influence matters more than authority: as President of the American Psychological Association's Division of Independent Practice, where she earlier chaired its task force on expanding the business of psychology, and on the boards of the Arizona Psychological Association and community organizations. More than 20 years of clinical practice, including programs she designed for a hospital, an insurer and a birthing center, keep that leadership work grounded in the realities people face.

Why this focus

Across clinical work, board leadership and coaching, the same thing keeps turning out to matter most: how people work with each other. Technical skill gets people in the door. Relationships decide what they can do once they're in. Today Dr. Martin-Causey puts special energy into helping technical founders and leaders, at any stage, build the relationship skills that fast-moving careers rarely leave time to practice.

Clinical work

Alongside her leadership work, Dr. Martin-Causey is a licensed psychologist and the founder of Integrative Psychology Solutions, PLLC, based in Arizona. She is a PSYPACT provider, which allows her to offer telehealth services to people in more than 40 states. She trains and supervises predoctoral interns, postdoctoral residents and master's-level counseling students. Her clinical work draws on CBT, DBT, trauma-informed care and exposure-based treatments, with measurement-based care to track how clients are doing.

She has also designed clinical programs for organizations beyond her practice: a substance use evaluation and treatment recommendation program for physicians with impairments, for a substance use treatment hospital; stress management services for physicians facing malpractice claims, for a medical malpractice insurer; and counseling for pregnant and postpartum mothers, for a birthing center. Earlier in her career she directed a child abuse services program, building its outcome measures. Clinical work keeps her grounded in what leaders and clinicians actually face, and it informs how she builds training that people use.

Leadership she has lived

Dr. Martin-Causey doesn't only coach leadership; she practices it. She served as President of the Division of Independent Practice of the American Psychological Association and now represents Arizona on the APA Council. She sits on the board of the Arizona Psychological Association and is Chair-Elect of the Association of Practicing Psychologists Caucus. These are volunteer roles where nobody reports to anyone, so every result depends on influence, consensus and trust.

She also built and has run her own professional practice for more than 20 years, entirely outside the insurance system. She understands entrepreneurship, payroll, risk and growth from the inside.