Senior Consultant + Executive Coach

As a Senior Consultant, Dawn McAvoy has over 25 years of professional experience. Throughout her career, she has been driven to help leaders and organizations be more effective and do their best work. She has worked closely with CEOs and other executives to learn what strategies work well and where opportunities exist in manifesting their mission.

As an Executive Coach, Dawn brings empathy, curiosity, and support to each client experience. She meets her clients where they are, sharing tools and resources where appropriate. She builds a collaborative partnership that includes action planning and accountability measures to set them up for success. When she managed the coaching program in the Key Executive Leadership Program at American University, she worked with thousands of federal executives across many agencies.

Because of her passion for supporting purpose and mission-driven organizations, Dawn has consulted for numerous nonprofits and federal agencies. Her nonprofit work has involved succession planning, strategic planning, organizational assessment, and performance management. Her federal agency experience includes facilitation, organization development, or leadership development work for NASA, FCC, FEMA, NIH, USDA, and the VA.

Dawn’s sweet spot is solving problems with creativity, client care, and keen resource management. With an eye for identifying gaps, along with process and system development opportunities, she collaborates with leaders and teams to envision and create sustainable change while shaping an environment that fosters trust.

She earned her master’s degree in Organizational Leadership and bachelor’s degree in English. Her professional certifications are the DiSC, 5 Behaviors, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, EQ-i 2.0/360, and Certified Professional Career Coach. As a certified FranklinCovey facilitator, she has facilitated courses in the federal government, such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Project Management Essentials, and The 6 Critical Practices for Leading Teams.

Dawn serves on the Board of the Mid-Atlantic Facilitator’s Network (MAFN), is a member of the Project Management Institute (PMI), and has served on multiple projects for Compass DC since 2012, providing pro bono consulting services for nonprofits in the Washington DC area.