Michael Allison Consulting

My approach to consulting – Helping people work together better

As a community organizer in Hartford I first learned how to help people form associations and exercise leadership to get important things done in their apartment buildings, their neighborhoods and their city. How people with little training can exercise great influence with the right type of support. As the Executive Director of the organization I began to learn how to balance the ED-Board role, to make difficult decisions about resource allocation and to exercise leadership in a way that brought out the best in other people. In graduate school I studied the field of organization development and learned much about group dynamics and organization design through study and experiential training. Ways that groups can undermine themselves – through avoidance of conflict, too much or too little dependency in relationship to formal leaders, and how various dimensions of organizational functioning need to harmonize for a group to work effectively. And as the Director of Consulting and Research at CompassPoint Nonprofit Services for fifteen years I learned a great deal about what we now call “capacity building” with nonprofit organizations.

My approach…
My approach to consulting is informed by all of these experiences: fundamentally, I am interested in helping people work together better. Especially in support of organizations doing work I am personally passionate about. Most often I work with organizations that are among the leaders in their fields – they are doing good work, some times very good work and want to do great work.

I take as my challenge and privilege to help my clients figure out how to do what they do better. My measure of success is the judgment of my clients as to how well I have helped them do just that.