Dawson Consulting Group

Great culture starts with great leadership.

We help you build both

35 Years of Optimizing Top Leadership

About Us

Experience & Expertise

Chris Dawson is a senior trusted advisor with 35 years experience providing value for individuals, teams and organizations. It’s not just a marketing claim.

Many of our clients have repeatedly returned to us when a new set of challenges has arisen.Almost all of our business is word-of-mouth from former clients who want to share the value they received with an executive friend or colleague.

Dawson

We Are Expert In The Fields

01.
Executive Assessment

02.
Individual Coaching

03.
Team Optimization

Dawson Consulting Group has done a great job partnering with us to take our leadership programs to the next level. Their people and methods are top-notch, and they consistently look to add value year after year. They are professional, seasoned, and senior partners for us. - I'd recommend them highly.

Andy Billings

_ VP Profitability & EA University Electronic Arts

Dawson Consulting Group was invaluable in coaching our senior executives through a difficult culture change. They have a collection of tools, method and expertise that allowed to customize in several global geographies, but saved us the time of reinventing best practices that they had readily available.

Richard Dahl

_ Former President & Chief Operating Officer Inc. & former Chairman CEO James Campbell Company

Dawson [Consulting Group] did great work in helping us toward building and optimizing a better functioning executive team. They helped us create the additional tools we needed to grow to the next level. We found Chris to be a seasoned, experienced professional, who dealt effectively with challenges and created valuable guidelines that provided us with a roadmap to higher performance levels, he did so efficiently and effectively. Highly recommended.

Bob Hagerty

_ former Chairman & CEO Polycom now Poly, Inc

What Kind of Team?

Non-Team

Virtual Team

Real Team

High Performance

Ready?

Contact Us

FAQ’S

1. How do you manage confidentiality in the assessment process?

A. In the pre-hire assessment process we assure confidentiality to the candidate regarding any and all of their specific ‘life story’ information they have shared during the live interview; responses relating to former superiors, peers and subordinates and personal history. The assessment report draws conclusions about multiple data points across the live interview and test data but does not refer to any personal history. We offer a 1-hour gratis feedback session to pre-hire candidates – whether they are hired or not. Successful candidates receive a more extensive debrief as part of their initial on-boarding to the company.

2. What about confidentiality in the coaching process?

A. We assure the leader who is being coached can speak freely without fear of their concerns or criticisms being reported to superiors or others. However, coaching is not therapy and the organization has a legitimate claim on the results of the coaching. If a material concern comes up in context of the coaching we encourage the leader to take the initiative in communicating this to whomever it may concern. If the concern is more serious (I’m going to quit”) we would schedule a 3-way meeting with the sponsor of the coaching and ask the leader in coaching to share their concerns with their superior.

3. In your Team Optimization service how do you maintain confidentiality when you have done assessments and are coaching both individual team members and the team-as-team?

A. After the initial individual assessments have been completed for each team members, we facilitate a team meeting, usually about half-a-day, in which each team member summarizes and reports out to the team the highlights of what they have learned during the assessment process. This is also an opportunity for that team member to request examples of feedback they do not understand or disagree with. We facilitate that team member-to-team conversation to ensure it is constructive and closes with specific actions for the team member to go away with.

4. What would the role of the Dawson consultant be in coaching a leader about an organizational process – strategy, culture change, change management, organizational design, reduction-in-force, merger-acquisition?

A. The role of the Dawson consultant in such larger scale organizational processes can be whatever the executive receiving the coaching wishes it to be. This is generally a continuum from ‘completely offstage’ to ‘occasional participation as an observer with no active facilitation role’ to ‘various degrees of active involvement as project manager if the leader in coaching has literally never played a leadership role in the ongoing process’. The goal is always teaching and transfer of skills to the executive-in-coaching. In a strategy, organizational design or culture change initiative the consultant might take more of an initial leadership role as a way to model important initial kick-off events for the executive-in-coaching.

5. What about in the Team Optimization process? What role does the consultant play?

A. In the Team Optimization process the Dawson consultant is ‘master-of-ceremonies’ and owner of the process up through the point where there is an accepted set of individual and team improvement goals to hand off to the team’s leader. Though we always support the authority of the team leader, it is important that they occupy the role of ‘team leader’ not ‘facilitator’. When team issues have been clearly surfaced with an action plan the Dawson consultant might return in 3-, 6- or 12-months to focus on progress against objectives but the team improvement plan – for both team-as-team and individual team members is owned by the structural team leader.

6. Do you adjust fees for smaller organizations and start-ups?

7. Have you had success in working with difficult or toxic executives?