What Others Are Saying About Leslie Dashew
Testimonials by topic: Facilitation | Succession Planning | International Family Business Consultant | Organizational Development Consultant
Facilitation
Dear Leslie:
After attending the leadership conference, I appreciated much more how much skill and experience you brought to our Women: Health, Wealth and Happiness conference in Bermuda. It's more than that however. What I learned there was that in doing this work, it's more about who you are and not so much what you know, much more than learning skills and having experiences-- though this all counts.
Your awareness at the conference was so important in making the event one of exceptional quality. Remember how you told me about “the law of 2 feet”, as you heard how the women were having difficulty deciding which workshop to attend? How you decided to have a circle at the end, having monitored the tone of the conference. You were so present and engaged and picking up on what was being said around the conference. You exemplify the qualities of those special few who can do this work with excellence in my opinion.
A lot of work goes in to being the kind of person who can create the space you created for us at this conference. Your sharing of your own life in the keynote address was a very private and therefore very generous act. So I have learned a huge amount from you and also I learned to speak from the heart when it comes to talking about personal matters.
Fond wishes,
Nicola Jones
Bank of Bermuda
Succession Planning
Thought Leaders: Leslie Dashew: Succession Strategies
by Bill Lurz, Senior Editor Professional Builders Magazine
Most of Leslie Dashew's clients are not home builders, but a lot more probably should be. For 28 years, she has advised families with businesses how to handle the transition of ownership and/or management from one generation to the next or to an outside successor. It's hard to imagine an industry with more of those problems than home building.
Dashew is president of Human Side of Enterprise, a Scottsdale, Ariz.-based consulting firm. She has written two books, Working With Family Businesses: A Guide for Professionals and The Best of the Human Side. As a family therapist as well as an organizational development consultant, she tackles the tough problems inside families that often affect a company and hinder succession planning. Her clients come from large and small businesses in many industries across the United States and around the world. Her combination of expertise and experience could benefit many home builders.
Tom Bradbury, principal of Giant niche builder Colony Homes in Atlanta, says Dashew brings an objective point of view to transition planning that is desperately needed. "Leslie has done great things for my family and my company," he says. "And I know there's a lot more builders facing challenges similar to mine. In fact, among privately held builders, it's harder to find one that's not challenged in some way by succession planning."
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International Family Business Consultant
Our family was fortunate to have Leslie handhold and lead our family through what I consider to be one of the toughest family issues one has to face- a succession process! Her knowledge and sensitivity were tasked even more given the fact that our business and family are based in Mexico. Being a 4th generation business legacy, it is fair to say that Leslie led the way and gave us the courage and tools to enable this family to be focused on preparing the 5th generation for the responsibility of conserving the family unit and our business. What a beautiful gift-thank you Leslie!
Bruce Grossman, Grupo Continentale, Mexico
Founder of the Family Business Network in Mexico
Our family began working with Leslie Dashew over fifteen years ago and as we look back at our journey we were truly “blessed” to have had her as our “fairy godmother from hell”.
We had been through some unsettling times having to buy out a brother under not very friendly circumstances and spinning off part of our company to another brother. The two remaining brothers vowed to do a better job of being both brothers and partners.
We knew we did not have the tools to accomplish this on our own, so we reached out to Leslie to become an integral part of our team. We discovered why we had difficulty communicating by finding the differences in style and personality type using the Myers Briggs assessment. This was a key to making two very different personalities a function well together. We also used these and other tools Leslie provided to build a stronger management team for our mechanical contracting company.
Leslie also helped us to deal with other aspects of our family business. We dealt with the issue of compensation in a way that it became a non-issue between my brother and myself. We strengthened our board and made it a key to our success. The board was a majority outside board. Written rules for the next generation to enter the company were developed and implemented. We established a family council to help the next generation better understand the what and where of the family and the business.
Working with Leslie gave us focus to make both the family unit and the business more successful. She helped us become a more professional organization by being our beloved “FGFH”.
I wrote this three years ago and have “the rest of the story” to add now! My children have joined my business and issues have arisen, but Leslie’s belief in “long term” relationships kept us in touch. We have used her in our new business to help us success as family and business partners using both old and new tools. We could not have done it with out her!
Jim McCarl is now consulting with others through
his firm, the McCarl Group (www.mccarlgroup.com),
and serves on boards of directors of closely held companies.
Organizational Development Consultant
How did Leslie serve me and Coca-Cola in the ten years she was my coach and organizational consultant?
Wow, hard to say it all in just a few words. Leslie has taught me more than anyone else I’ve ever known. Perhaps the clearest example I can give of her help is when I re-created the way Coca- Cola counted its volume, an assignment the chairman described as “where the hardest part was not the technical issues but the people issues.”
One part was to create consensus across the bottle/can and fountain “silos” of the business – for timing and common definition of the measurements – and then to actually USE those measurements to run the business. Because the division executives would not sponsor the change, Leslie coached and facilitated me and others to create a shunkworks of mid-level managers, to put aside our organizational differences and to risk doing what was hard: to reach a common understanding of measurement and of implementing the measurement. She did that by the micro ways – to respect, appreciate, and support one another – and the macro ways – to set up and maintain a rhythm of meetings and goal settings and action plans and accountability. The second part of that same assignment was to create a “deal” with the U.S. Coca-Cola bottlers, independent organizations that were not contractually bound to change their volume reporting. She coached me to LISTEN to their needs (after I was once booed off the stage of a bottler meeting when I talked only about “the goals”). I went to them, criss-crossing the country to be in their plants and ride in their trucks, and I listened, I didn’t sell. I won their confidence to the point where bottler representatives participated in defining the common terms. I changed the corporate vision to incorporate the bottlers’ vision: creating one data base of volume (and one of the world’s largest database systems at the time) accessible by both corporate and bottler personnel. Throughout it all, Leslie helped me keep a focus and a longterm plan and helped me work through the innumerable issues of dealing with all the individual perspectives and conflicts.
The results? It took us seven years to build the system that bottlers and corporate still used today for Coke’s volume. The chairman described the changes to volume reporting as the most important change made during his time as U.S. division president because of what could only then be done to plan and execute. The positive experiences of cooperation spread, even spread upward to executive levels. And for myself and several others in that shunkworks group, that was our hallmark of teamwork, that we used to teach others teamwork.
As I write this twelve years after it was finished, I still say, “thanks!” to Leslie!
Prior to becoming an independent consultant, Jackie Stradley was President and CEO of Intellimedia Commerce, a software development firm for Internet sites and eCommerce systems. Previously she worked at The Coca-Cola Company for 20 years in operations, strategic projects, finance, strategic planning, national sales and systems.