Transition Partners

People are the organization.
More capable, more imaginative,
more full of possibility than
the conditions around them release.

The work starts with you - your conditions, your craft, your capacity to navigate what's in front of you with curiosity and honesty. But the impact is always collective: how we lead together shapes what becomes possible for the teams and systems around us. That's the territory we work in.

Fab Collab - September 11 The Work

Care

We are still not enabling our human capacities.

This work is all about people. Their capability, their imagination, their potential to do something extraordinary when the conditions support it. Not as a sentiment - as the organizing principle. Most organizational change looks for what's broken. We start from what's already capable.

Connect

Real change doesn't live on the wall or on the slides.

The values statement. The strategy deck. The mission everyone can quote. None of these change how work actually gets done. What does: the informal networks, the honest conversations, the operating rhythms no one designed but everyone navigates. We work with those.

Change

Not a cascade.
A shift in conditions.

We start with what's already strong, surface what's getting in the way, and build the conditions for performance to compound. Not a program imposed from outside - change embedded through new rhythms, new approaches, and new behaviours that become the way the work gets done.

How we work together

The work

Two partners, one engagement. Susan has led transformation from inside the executive team; Dawn has worked strategy execution, people and culture, and systemic coaching from the same seat. You get the strategic perspective, the practical discipline and the human insight in the same room at the same time, rather than sequenced across a team of consultants. We work from Victoria and Toronto, across Canada, the US and the UK.

Individual · Leadership

Executive Coaching

For leaders navigating transitions, strategic pivots, or performance plateaus. Not just insight - a specific changed approach.

What changes

  • Clear role definition and a sharper sense of where to invest leadership energy
  • Delegation discipline that frees capacity for the work only you can do
  • Stronger presence and decision-making in politically complex environments
  • A practical leadership plan built for the next level of impact

Best for: Mid-to-senior leaders at inflection points - new roles, expanded scope, inherited teams, or plateaus in effectiveness.

Team · Performance

Team Conditions Lab

For capable teams not delivering capable results. Diagnostic, three workshops over 3–4 months, an upward mirror mechanism, and a 90-day sustain phase.

What changes

  • The structural and cultural factors blocking performance are named and addressed - not managed around
  • Shared governance, clear decision rights, and collaboration norms that reduce friction
  • Productive conflict replaces avoidance - hard conversations happen without the politics
  • Leaders who run the team system, not around it

Best for: Leadership teams in dysfunction, misalignment, or execution gaps. Organizations where "we've talked about this" hasn't worked.

Organization · Execution

Strategic Execution Support

For organizations where strategy won't translate into action. The gap between intent and outcome narrows. Execution becomes the organization's strength, not its weakness.

What changes

  • An operating model built to support sustained execution, not just describe it
  • Leaders who understand the change they're leading - and can drive it with their teams
  • Governance, KPIs, and accountability structures that connect daily behaviour to strategic outcomes
  • Organizational resilience: the capacity to adapt through change, not despite it

Best for: Organizations in transformation, post-restructure, or facing a step-change in execution demands. Leaders who need a partner who has led change at scale - not just advised on it.

Team · AI & Technology

AI Team Alignment Workshop

A half-day diagnostic and working session for intact teams implementing AI - with a practical framework for what it actually means for how the team works, decides, and leads.

What changes

  • A shared, honest picture of where AI is changing the work - and where it isn't yet
  • Clarity on decision rights, human accountability, and what leaders need to model
  • The conversation most AI implementations skip: what this means for people's roles, agency, and identity at work
  • A 30-day re-run diagnostic to measure what's shifted

Best for: Transformation leads and teams, strategy and HR teams, and everyone else who wants to work in new ways with the tech that's changing what and how we work.

The Transition Partners difference

Bold & Direct
We surface what's really happening - not what's comfortable to say. Hard conversations happen here.
Practitioner-Led
We've been in the seat. That's the difference between advising on change and actually knowing what it takes.
Systems-Focused
We fix root causes, not symptoms. Gains last because the whole system changed - not just the visible parts.
Adaptive by Design
Engagements evolve with the organization. The work in month 9 reflects what the organization actually needs in month 9.

What we are working on

The plan does not resolve the uncertainty.
It exports it.

Every executive team we have worked with has been asked to deliver a certain outcome along an uncertain path. The standard response is to convert that uncertainty into a multiyear plan and push it down the organization.

But everything the plan cannot answer lands on the layers beneath. Those leaders reconcile a fixed target with what they are actually seeing, and then operate anyway. They become the shock absorber. Because the plan is measured in years while the people executing it are measured in weeks and quarters, the middle spends its own energy bridging that gap, usually committing to something they cannot change without looking disloyal. That cost is real, it is paid by people, and it rarely appears anywhere it could be governed.

We know the alternative. Commit in stages, run probes, let the terrain teach you. The difficulty is that the commitments look small, the first two quarters look slower, and the evidence that it was working only exists in Q4, by which point you needed the patience to get there.

So the question we are working on is not how to close that gap. Everyone is working on that. It is what an executive team could commit to instead, concrete enough to govern and fund, that keeps them connected to what the layers below are actually seeing rather than requiring those layers to absorb it.

The organization already has a sensing capacity. It is sitting in the people currently being used to absorb the shock.

Current programs

Leadership development
for leaders in the middle of it

Second cohort · September 11

Fab Collab

"From here. Together. Learning forward."

You already know what good looks like. You've seen it, maybe led it. And right now, your leadership is being tested - by conditions that don't always make the work easy, by authority that isn't always formal, by support that isn't always there.

What you're navigating isn't a capability question - yours or your team's. It's a conditions question: what the organizational system is making possible, and what it's making harder than it needs to be.

And then there's the other layer - what we bring to the conditions. The habits that once worked and now close down options. The assumptions underneath our decisions we've never quite examined. Fab Collab makes room for both.

Session 1
September 11 · 90 min
Sessions 2–5
75–90 min each
Cadence
Every 3–4 weeks
Group size
6 leaders

What leaders bring

  • Getting traction without formal authority - influencing across teams and stakeholders who don't report to you
  • The conversation your team keeps almost having - naming what's in the room when no one else will
  • Leading from who you are, not just the role you've been given
  • When urgency becomes the enemy of the work - and the pace is set above you

The first cohort has been running since June, and what it taught us has already changed the design. We built the series assuming people would arrive having done the thinking. Session two taught us otherwise, not because anyone was disengaged, but because the middle of an organization is where every unplanned thing lands first. Preparation is the first casualty of a bad week.

So every session now generates its own material in the room. If you came prepared, you arrive warm. If you did not, you are not behind. That sounds like a small change. It is actually a different theory of what a cohort is for.

Second cohort, September 11. Six leaders, five sessions, no fee. You get the work, we get the learning. That exchange is the whole arrangement.

Download the overview

In development · 2027

Leading from Here

The integration of what Fab Collab is teaching us: how leaders read the conditions they are working in, and what it takes to make work actually work from the middle of an organization.

Grounded in complexity and probe design (Snowden), friction as a design variable (Sutton and Rao), psychological safety (Edmondson), and systems thinking (Senge, Meadows). But the spine is evidence from the cohorts themselves, gathered session by session.

More when it's ready to share.

Register for Fab Collab

Session 1 · September 11, 2026 · Six places · No fee

Thank you. We will be in touch shortly.

About

Dawn Campbell Dawn Campbell, ACC
ICF · ACC Team & Systemic Coaching · Henley Business School Executive Coaching · Royal Roads University Honours Business Administration · Glasgow College Honours Anthropology · UWO / McMaster Victoria, BC
linkedin.com/in/dcampbellcoach

Twenty-five years inside.
Now working alongside.

Transition Partners is the practice Susan Michalik and I run together, working in organizational change and performance, leadership development, and team coaching. I started it on my own. It is ours now, and the work is better for it. I hold a Professional Certificate in Team and Systemic Coaching from Henley Business School.

"You get the strategic perspective of a senior executive, the practical mindset of a doer, and the human insight of a credentialed coach. This combination means we tackle hard problems together - with warmth, courage, and pragmatism."

Twenty-five years inside organizations across financial services, technology, healthcare, and the public sector. I've been a senior leader, a Chief of Staff, a change practitioner, and a head of people and culture - which means I've been in the middle of what you're navigating, not advising on it from the outside.

My work draws on a conditions-based approach to organizational performance. The belief underneath everything: most leaders and organizations are more capable than the systems around them are currently releasing.

Career highlights

  • AVP Strategy Execution & Chief of Staff Great-West Lifeco / Canada Life 2016 – 2025
  • Head & Consultant Lead, People, Performance & Culture KPMG International · 160,000 employees 2013 – 2016
  • Leader, Learning Operations & Learner Experience TD Bank Group 2010 – 2013
  • Senior Consultant WestJet · Ekati Mines · David Suzuki Foundation
Susan Michalik Susan Michalik, CPA, CA
CPA · CA Financial Services · Digital Transformation Toronto, ON

Twenty years leading transformation
from the inside.

"The hardest moments in transformation aren't the ones with clear answers. They're the ones where the plan has stopped working, the board is watching, and the organization is exhausted. I've been in those rooms many times. I focus on bringing the judgment to find a way through - and the discipline to leave the team stronger on the other side."

Susan Michalik, CPA, CA brings 20+ years of senior leadership in financial services and digital transformation. She has earned the reputation for driving transformation while preserving stability - advancing ambitious change while safeguarding people's capacity to deliver.

Her background as a CPA/CA shows up less in financial reporting and more in pattern recognition - seeing risk in the numbers before it surfaces operationally, and grounding transformation strategy in what the business can sustain. She leads with empathy, curiosity, and grounded optimism. Her M.O.: build trust quickly, ask the questions that matter most, and leave teams stronger, clearer, and more capable than when she arrived.

The stakes are high: aligning strategy, stabilizing teams, and delivering measurable results when direction and confidence are at risk. There is a path through.

Career highlights

  • VP Digital Operations & Planning Canada Life 2019 – 2025
  • AVP Strategy and Transformation Great-West Lifeco 2016 – 2019
  • AVP roles TD Insurance and TD Wealth Management 2009 – 2014
  • Senior Manager, Corporate Human Resources TD Bank Financial Group 2003 – 2008
  • Senior roles in Finance, Operations, New Product Development & Audit Canada Trust · Rogers Communications · Arthur Andersen
linkedin.com/in/susanmichalik