Areas of Focus

Organizational Governance

In addition to assisting with internal board dynamics, we support and optimize boards’ governance capabilities and practices across three main areas:

• Board–CEO alignment and strategic partnership

• CEO assessment & succession

• Risk strategy and oversight

Board Chair–CEO alignment and strategic partnership
The working relationship between a CEO and the board chair is among the most complex and consequential in institutional governance. Our expertise in the psychodynamics of professional relationships in organizations is purpose-built for helping board chairs create successful alliances with chief executives through overcoming challenges and obstacles or developing a more aligned and robust strategic partnership.

CEO Assessment
We bring a wealth of experience in assisting directors in their regular assessments of CEOs.

Leveraging Dolus’ core expertise in understanding complex individual and interpersonal traits and capacities, we provide psychologically sophisticated insights on CEO performance outside the scope of conventional personality tests and KPI evaluation instruments.

Dolus’ bespoke assessments are custom-calibrated to the unique attributes and dynamics of the leader specific to a given organization and culture, and are designed to complement directors’ reliance on conventional performance metrics to help them more accurately assess the executive and then leverage that assessment to catalyze constructive collaboration between the boardroom and the C-Suite.

CEO Succession
Dolus understands the diverse challenges and requirements of executive succession and transition, and we help boards successfully prepare for and navigate the complex demands of leadership transition.

With knowledge and competence cultivated over many years, we’re skilled in facilitating the board’s work throughout the CEO succession process.

We’re experts in separating signal from noise in assessing candidate successors—providing deep insights about character and ability, and forecasting the prospective incoming leader’s impact and integration in organizational culture—to help boards make the best possible selection.

Our suite of Board services are designed to help clients in a range of leadership transition scenarios, whether a planned leadership transition, removing an incumbent CEO, the transition from founder-led to next generation leadership or any of a number of special situations.

In all of these situations, we usually continue in an advisory role to assist the incoming CEO, the management team and the Board in a seamless transition.

Visit Assessments and Succession in our CEO + Executive Team Advisory Services Practice Area to learn more.

Risk Strategy + Oversight
Directors need to be knowledgeable and involved in supporting a portfolio of risk management activities.

We’re skilled in assisting boards, in coordinated collaboration with senior management, to develop strategic risk trajectories along with robust risk mitigation postures and procedures across a range of operational areas and vulnerabilities—cybersecurity, technology, fraud & corruption, culture & ethics, executive malfeasance & insider threat, and reputation.

We’ve found many boards benefit from expert guidance in understanding the complex psycho-social and psychodynamic elements that amplify risk as precedent to developing agile, sophisticated plans to mitigate or avoid the two major classes of risk:

• External–caused by an act of malice or other damaging impact event.

• Internal–self-inflicted by avarice, hubris, ineptitude, negligence, denial, or willful blindness.

A critical feature of our risk-mitigation work with boards involves helping directors move beyond “security theatre”—the practice of investing in countermeasures intended to provide the feeling of improved risk management while doing little or nothing to actually achieve it.

We help boards cultivate and embed a strong values and principles-oriented culture into the company’s DNA as a feature of its risk management apparatus, and to establish a corporate vision aligned with its commercial mission which is legitimately supported in practice across the enterprise.