Services we provide
Leadership development, organizational transformation, executive and team coaching, coach training, facilitation, creative direction and design, and advisory work for organizations and schools.
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A holding company built around one conviction: people deserve better than what most systems ask of them.
Dunbar Group & Associates LLC is a consulting and creative holding company focused on leadership development, organizational transformation, and the creation of intellectual property that supports human growth and emotional wellness.
The company
Two halves of the same idea.
We provide leadership, design, facilitation and consulting services — and we develop and steward original brands, books, digital platforms and other educational and creative products, including Lil’ Sass & Friends.
Most firms pick a side. They either advise organizations or they make things. We have never found those to be separable. The ideas that change how an executive team operates on a hard Tuesday are the same ideas a seven-year-old needs when a feeling gets too big to hold — the difference is the form, not the substance.
So we do both, deliberately. The consulting practice funds and sharpens the creative work. The creative work tests whether our ideas survive contact with people who have no professional incentive to pretend they are working.
What we hold
The structure, plainly stated.
Dunbar Group & Associates LLC is the parent. These are the practices and properties that sit beneath it.
Intellectual property we steward
Original brands, books, digital platforms and educational products — created, published and licensed by Dunbar Group, including the Lil’ Sass & Friends universe.
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Principal
Christie Mann
Executive and leadership coaching and training that equip leaders to lead more purposefully and bring more humanity into the workplace.
Christie Mann is a principal of Dunbar Group & Associates and the co-founder and CEO of UpLevel Productions, the group’s leadership transformation practice. She has spent close to two decades inside the rooms where leadership is actually decided — coaching executives, training coaches, and facilitating the kind of conversations most organizations work hard to avoid.
She has served as faculty, associate partner and executive coach with the Co-Active Training Institute since 2013, and previously led Corporate Client Solutions there. Her client work spans financial services, professional services, engineering, hospitality and education, including long-running leadership engagements with BMO Financial Group, Stantec’s emerging leaders programme, and McDonald’s Restaurants Ltd. Women’s Leadership Network. She has also served as a facilitator and executive coach with The Trium Group.
She holds an MA from the University of Santa Monica, is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC), and holds the Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential from the International Coach Federation.
The creative work
In 2018 Christie began writing The Adventures of Lil’ Sass, an emotional wellness children’s book series on a mission to help adults and kids build a healthier, happier, more resilient relationship with their emotions. The series has since grown into a universe of characters, accessories, discussion guides and — most recently — a storytelling app that turns a child’s real feeling into an illustrated book where they are the hero.
She is an Amazon Best Selling Author and a Readers’ Favorite Five Star recipient, and hosts The UpLevel Podcast, ranked by Feedspot as the #4 Best Workplace Mental Health Podcast and one of the Top 10 Best Coaching Culture Podcasts.
What she works on
- Emotional leadership and resiliency — developing range as a performance capacity
- Building coaching cultures and training internal coaching cadres
- Executive presence: the ability to stay regulated and honest under real pressure
- Navigating end-of-life and grief in workplace, family and community ecosystems
- Educational change — coaching skills for teachers, students and school leaders
“Conscious leaders create conscious cultures.”
What we believe
Four positions we are not neutral about.
Emotional range is a leadership capacity
Not a soft skill. A leader who cannot sit with uncertainty, conflict or grief will manage around them, and the organization pays the bill in decision quality and turnover.
Capability beats content
A program that leaves nothing behind is an expense. We train internal coaches and equip leaders so the capability stays in the building.
Feeling is a right, not a reward
It is a human right to experience your emotions — all of them. That conviction runs identically through our executive work and our children’s books.
Trust is built in the details
How you handle a child’s data, a leader’s disclosure, or an uncomfortable finding says more about an organization than any values statement.
Next step
Want to know whether we are the right people for this?
Tell us what you are working on. We will listen properly, and we will say so if the answer is no.