Dexterity Management advances operational effectiveness though strategic planning, new program creation, infrastructure development, and increased staff achievement. Dexterity Management is available for short-term projects or ongoing staffing support.
Method: Dexterity’s approach to development is equal parts art and science. Dexterity works with clients to understand donors and funders, then tailors an approach that appeals to donors' giving interests and supports the client to cultivate personal relationships and individualized materials. This work is balanced by consistent follow-through, scheduling, tracking, and engagement to ensure success. Dexterity can support clients in expanding donor and corporate support pools by leveraging networks and designing systematic follow up. Finally, through its detailed tracking and management processes, Dexterity ensures that all donors receive timely information, acknowledgments, and follow-up as needed.
Experience: Dexterity Management’s CEO, Molly Singer, has over 15 years of experience in grant writing, individual donor cultivation, and corporate sponsorship development. She has worked with major national and international foundations (Ford, Bertelesmann, Pew) as well as local DC foundations (Cafritz, Moriah, Weissberg, Marpat). She has successfully written local, state, and federal grants; managed teams of grant writers; and overseen the full spectrum of grants management activities. In addition, she has led strategic corporate and individual outreach efforts. While serving as Deputy Director at Metro TeenAIDS she doubled the organizational budget in three years, and diversified funding streams by engaging new foundations, individual donors, and corporate sponsors.
Method: Dexterity Management ensures that staff members’ skills and aptitudes fit their positions so they and their organization can both thrive. Dexterity combines asset-based work with tactical individual and group planning to achieve successful, measureable staff performance and organizational success. Dexterity facilitates the development of annual organizational goals, and works with teams and individuals to establish goals and work plans that align with these goals. Through this process, Dexterity assists in identifying organizational and staff development needs to accomplish the goals throughout the year. This approach ensures that staff have both a clear vision for how their work fits into the organizational strategy and measureable performance outcomes. Dexterity also provides one-on-one and team training on management and leadership development, including coaching emerging leaders.
Experience: Molly has won acclaim for her ability to motivate and direct staff. As a first responder to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Molly managed the 10-member special projects team whose mission was to respond to operational and management issues, working closely with the 600 field operatives, diagnose problems, and partner with stakeholders to solve these problems. Over 80% of the staff members were new to disasters and most lacked formal professional training. Singer was one of four leaders asked to return to the site for additional strategic support during a management change. Molly has also worked to recruit, develop, and align staff during periods of organizational growth or turnaround.
Method: Dexterity Management makes order out of chaos. Using an objective perspective, Dexterity identifies opportunities to improve your organizational / operational systems and implement effective solutions. This includes re-aligning (or establishing) work-flow methods; developing or streamlining human resource processes and documents; and re-designing work spaces, from entire offices to closets and storage areas. We specialize in supporting individuals and teams to achieve the new goals and objectives. Dexterity can deploy operational skills on a large scale for organizational moves or changes, or on a small scale for single events or projects.
Experience: Molly’s work is distinguished by high levels of efficiency and productivity. She and her teams have developed prioritization methods, communication tools, and accountability systems to ensure that staff know a process, are able to participate effectively in it, and can maximize their contributions to an organizational goal. As a special assistant in the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina, she developed communication and management systems that ensured 600 project officers received timely information and had access to accurate disaster records. The system ensured that Hurricane Katrina’s victims received timely reimbursement for rebuilding and access supports.
Method: Dexterity has developed strategic planning tools that work. Our methods help organizations identify assets and gaps; define organizational and field needs and opportunities; develop goals and create a step-wise process to achieve those goals. These tools include complementary implementation components so organizations can track progress and shift efforts to work on new goals and objectives, as milestones are met.
Experience: Molly benefits from having participated in and facilitated strategic planning ranging from national to community-based organizations as well as with governmental entities. She has also worked on strategic planning teams during leadership transition. Molly’s special skills are in creating achievable strategic plans that connect an organization’s passion and vision with realistic opportunities and practical realities. Molly’s ability to ask targeted questions and direct conversation was the essential quality in moving through a strategic plan block at a national local government association where senior staff were unable to separate “favorite” from priority and financially viable projects by developing an analysis process that focused on agreed upon priorities and needs and removed pet projects discussions.
Method: The key to effective communication is ensuring your intended audience receives, understands, and acts upon key messages. Success in this area requires careful message crafting, delivery, and formatting for each audience group. Molly has a depth of experience in creating and delivering essential information, ideas, and concepts using the most appropriate format, thereby ensuring user attention and engagement in these days of information overload.
Experience: Molly has deployed communication strategies in a range of settings and media including writing speeches, newspaper articles, cartoons, posters, web content, Twitter and Facebook updates, and reports, memos, and other documents. She is widely praised for her innovative methods to ensure that the target readership is engaged and responsive. As a responder to Hurricane Katrina, Singer designed and launched an informal comic book / newsletter that was colorful and lighthearted yet answered ongoing operational and legal questions, provided staffing updates to track the movements of 600 people over the area of the disaster and created a venue for field agents to ask questions or highlight ongoing issues outside of the hierarchical management chain. The weekly publication which was printed and distributed through coffee stations, became the central reading for all disaster responders.
Method: Dexterity Management helps organizations determine and prepare to deliver most critical services during or after a business interruption such as extreme weather, power outages, epidemics, and/or man-made disasters. Dexterity ensures that your organization has a documented disaster preparedness plan and process redundancies to achieve continuity of critical business functions. Dexterity works with organizational staff to implement regular tests and response exercises to identify gaps, protect critical business processes, and ensure maintenance of services. Dexterity creates a maturity model that prescribes steps and activities over a multi-year period to implement readiness plans. She has experience in a range of settings from helping critical care organizations ensure that sick clients receive services; to homeland security settings; to major financial organizations, ensuring that $8 billion a day of federal funding is not at risk.
Experience: Molly Singer worked with the US Coast Guard to conduct multi-jurisdictional, multi-party emergency response trainings in Boston. These sorts of trainings were praised after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, when the region’s response community came together seamlessly. Molly also served as special assistant to Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) executives during Hurricane Katrina, when she worked closely with local, state, federal, private and non-profit entities to address the multiple dimensions of disaster response and recovery. After Hurricane Katrina, Molly was asked to lead a team for Freddie Mac to develop a business continuity plan for the organization’s $851 billion in assets. She worked directly with Freddie Mac’s C-level leaders and made recommendations for improved procedures and legal compliance.
Method: Through facilitation and engagement Dexterity has worked with a range of coalitions, networks and associations to define purpose and ensure that the collaborative outcomes are greater than the sum of their parts. This happens through careful facilitation with stakeholders, comparison of similar opportunities and defined goals and outcomes. Dexterity can provide soup-to-nuts management of all aspects of collaboratives, reducing the member burden and increasing member engagement.
Experience: Singer has supported national coalitions, inter-agency working groups, community collaboratives and public / private / government efforts to ensure that multi-partnered projects are designed with a mission, have clear roles and expectations, and are resourced to accomplish their goals. She also works to support the operations as a champion and backbone of the effort to leverage participants’ engagement most effectively, ensuring that they have the information, inspiration and resources to participate. Currently, Singer is the staffer for an informal network of 20 community education groups, serving over six million students, in fostering a learning community and deeper collective impact work. The group is assessing whether and how to formalize its engagement over a two year trial period.
Method: Through organizational, facilitative and non-profit skills, Dexterity can help launch a new organization with a programmatic plan, strategies for growth, staffing, funding and board management. Likewise, Dexterity supports staff and leaders to manage through organizational change and re-alignment. Dexterity’s approach ensures that changes to mission, programs, infrastructure and cultural aspects are balanced in order to build a stronger organization.