Leadership Team Development Intensive

Sound Familiar?

These are the things CEOs tell Wendy when they finally pick up the phone. Not because they don't have good people. Because good people alone aren't enough.

The Hallway Problem

The real conversations happen after the meeting, not in it. Your team nods along in the room and then disagrees in the parking lot. Decisions don't stick because buy-in was never real.

The Accountability Gap

Nobody holds their peers to standards. When someone misses a deadline or drops the ball, the rest of the team absorbs the impact in silence. You end up being the only one having the hard conversations.

The Silo Effect

Your leaders run their departments well, but they don't operate as a team. Information gets hoarded. Decisions that should take days take weeks. The organization pays the price.

The Politeness Trap

Everything looks fine on the surface. But underneath, real disagreements go unspoken. Important concerns get buried to keep the peace. Your team has confused harmony with health.

The Decision Problem

Half your leadership meetings are spent on things that don't belong at the table. Items that should be delegated. Updates that could be emails. Meanwhile, the strategic conversations never happen.

The Founder's Burden

You built this organization through relationships and hard work. Now you're the one everyone looks to for every decision, every conflict, every course correction. You need a team that leads alongside you.

This Isn't a Retreat. It's a Working Session on the Health of Your Team.

No ropes courses. No trust falls. No motivational speaker you'll forget by Monday. This is a two-day, facilitated deep dive into how your leadership team actually functions as a system — the good, the uncomfortable, and the things you've been avoiding.

Built on Patrick Lencioni's The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, this intensive uses real assessments, real conversations, and real practice. Your team will leave with a shared language for how they work together — and a set of behaviors they've committed to publicly.

"Your job is to surface what's real, not to make everyone comfortable."

Every team that walks in has respect. Most have track records. What they're usually missing is the ability to be honest with each other, disagree productively, and hold each other accountable without waiting for the CEO to do it.

The Five Behaviors Model

Each layer must exist before the one above it can hold. Everything in this workshop connects back to this framework.

Layer 5

Results

Collective outcomes over individual or departmental wins

Layer 4

Accountability

Peers hold each other to standards — it's not just the CEO's job

Layer 3

Commitment

Clarity and buy-in, not consensus — everyone leaves knowing what was decided

Layer 2

Healthy Conflict

Passionate debate around ideas, not political maneuvering or polite avoidance

Foundation

Vulnerability-Based Trust

The ability to say "I'm wrong," "I need help," and "I don't know" without fear

Every Engagement Is Custom-Designed

Before We Begin

We Start With Your People

There's no off-the-shelf agenda here. Before the intensive begins, Wendy conducts one-on-one interviews with every team member to understand the real dynamics — not the polished version. She identifies the specific patterns, friction points, and unspoken tensions that are holding your team back. The workshop is then designed around what your organization actually needs.

One-on-one interviews with every participant
Identification of team-specific dynamics, strengths, and blind spots
Custom agenda built around your organization's real challenges
Pre-workshop assessments to ground the work in data

The Intensive

Awareness Meets Practice

This isn't a workshop where people just listen and take notes. The content is designed to build real awareness — and then immediately practice the behaviors that need to change. Your team won't just learn about healthy conflict. They'll have one. They won't just hear about accountability. They'll practice the conversation, out loud, with coaching.

Real tools like the Decision Matrix to guide structured decision-making
Live practice of healthy conflict, accountability conversations, and commitment
Behavioral assessments married with real behavior change
Application to an actual issue your team is facing — not a case study

Real tools married with real behavior change results in stronger, more cohesive teams. That's not a tagline — it's what happens when the work is designed around your people, not a template.

Built on Real Data, Not Guesswork

Before the workshop begins, every participant completes assessments that give your team concrete, actionable insight into how they're wired and where they're stuck.

📊

Team Health Assessment

Anonymous scores across all five behaviors. Shows the team exactly where they are — not where they think they are.

🧠

Predictive Index

Behavioral profiles that reveal each leader's natural drives — dominance, extraversion, patience, and formality — so the team understands why they clash and where they complement.

💡

Emotional Intelligence

Self-awareness, self-regulation, social awareness, and relationship management. The pause between trigger and response — that's where leadership lives.

What Your Team Walks Away With

Not just insights — real commitments, real tools, and a real plan for what happens Monday morning.

✓

A shared language for how the team works

PI profiles, communication styles, and strength/shadow awareness give your team vocabulary to navigate friction without it becoming personal.

✓

The ability to have hard conversations

A four-step accountability framework your team has actually practiced — not just heard about in a presentation.

✓

A decision rights structure

Clear categories for what belongs at the leadership table and what gets delegated. Fewer meetings about things that don't need you.

✓

Written leadership commitments

Every leader writes, signs, and reads aloud one specific behavior they commit to changing — with a named accountability partner.

✓

A live decision on a real issue

Your team applies the full framework to a real problem during the workshop — not a case study, your actual challenge.

✓

A sustainability plan

Accountability check-ins within 3 weeks, a 6-week follow-up session, and a structure for keeping the work alive in every leadership meeting.

This Is Right for You If...

➜ Your leadership team has talented people who don't operate as a unit

➜ Meetings produce decisions nobody actually follows through on

➜ You're the one having all the hard conversations

➜ Real disagreements get buried to keep the peace

➜ Your team has grown faster than your leadership structure

➜ You know something needs to change but you're not sure where to start

Your Facilitator: Wendy Davis Dawson

Wendy doesn't do polished corporate workshops where everyone leaves feeling good but nothing changes. She does honest, direct, sometimes uncomfortable work that gets to the root of how your team actually functions.

With decades of senior-level HR experience and deep expertise in The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team, Predictive Index, and emotional intelligence frameworks, Wendy has facilitated leadership intensives for organizations that needed more than a motivational speech — they needed someone willing to name what no one else would.

She built The Dawson Group because she saw a pattern: good people, loyal teams, real talent — and leadership dynamics that were quietly holding everything back. This workshop is where she does her most transformative work.

Your Leadership Team Is Good. But They're Not Functioning Like One.