About Us and Dragons
Our purpose is to support leaders and change practitioners to create healthy teams and organizations. Organizations and teams that are both productive and engaging for their employees and customers will serve their owners and communities .
On behalf of that purpose the Center for Human Systems offers consulting, training, and coaching designed to take leaders, managers, and organization development practitioners to higher levels of expertise and success.
Michael F. Broom, Ph.D., CEO and President
Michael is an Organizational Psychologist who for over 45 years has helped all types of organizations increase their productivity and employee engagement through…
- Master Classes for Leaders and Change Practitioners
- Strategic Planning for a clear sense of vision and focus
- Team Building for fully coordinated work efforts
- Conflict Management that turns power struggles in synergy
- Performance Management for responsible and motivated employees
- A Diverse Work Force which can meet the needs of a diverse market place
- Positive, Stimulating Cultures that support learning and productivity
Dr. Broom is a powerful executive coach, organizational process consultant, and trainer. His philosophy is to…
- Work with clients to identify and resolve their own issues
- Leave clients with higher skills levels than they previously had
- Build high levels of productivity through powerful relationships of reciprocal influence
- Empower clients to self-discover their own inherent excellence
He has been a full-time and part-time faculty member of the Johns Hopkins University Graduate Programs in Applied Behavioral Science. A past member of the board of directors of the NTL Institute in Applied Behavioral Science, Dr. Broom has chaired that organization’s Transformative Social Change Committee. He was recently on the Board of Trustees of the national Organization Development Network. He also has been adjunct faculty at Georgetown University, American University, Fielding Graduate University, and Morgan State University teaching courses in human and organizational development.
Dr. Broom is author of Power, The Infinite Game,co-authored with Dr. Donald Klein and The Infinite Organization which celebrates the positive use of power in organizations.
In 2015, he was honored the national OD Network with their Lifetime Achievement Award!
Soo Lee Davis, Vice President
Soo Lee is a transformational leader and deeply experienced change management practitioner. She has over 30 years of experience
leading large organizations and is renowned for shifting the culture of teams to be more accountable, transparent, and engaged.
Soo Lee is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and earned a Master of Business Administration from the Kelley School of Business in Bloomington. Soo Lee retired as a Colonel from the U.S. Army, serving in healthcare operations around the world. She served on boards of directors for three different hospitals, the largest being a level II trauma center in Honolulu. She also led multinational teams in both combat and humanitarian missions in Afghanistan, South Korea, Pakistan, Germany, Haiti, and Angola.
Soo Lee excels at helping organizations achieve high-performance by building better use-of-self skills in leaders; designing strategies that allow teams to operate as human systems; and transforming power dynamics away from win/lose power struggles to collaborative, energy-producing synergy that are the hallmarks of the best teams and organizations. Soo Lee holds certifications from the Center for Humans Systems in Change Management and Human Systems Management. She’s built a consulting practice in Sacramento, serving clients in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. She is partnered with the Center for Humans Systems and together with Dr. Michael Broom, delivers a highly effective professional development program for leaders and change management practitioners.
Our Associates
Tony Bennae Richard
Tony Bennae Richard is a change agent and disabled veteran who served in the United States Navy for twenty-four years as a hospital corpsman, healthcare administrator, and organization development consultant. He has led, designed, and participated in numerous leadership, organizational change, organizational equity, inclusion and justice initiatives, and change experiences. Under the womentorship of Dr. Alice Cahill (CAPT, Retired), he designed and facilitated countless leadership and facilitation courses, interventions initiatives that improved the effectiveness and efficiency of Naval Medicine. While still on active duty, he imagined a world absent of injustice, wars, fragmented relationships, broken bodies, and wasted human capital.This vision, mixed with a unique blend of personal and professional life experiences, formal and informal education, and extensive exposure to different cultures and people, gave birth to The Bennae Group, which provides customized experiences that increase the health and effectiveness of individuals and the systems in which they live, work and play. By delivering interventions that leave participants affirmed, challenged and changed, he works with individuals and organizations committed to doing the heart work, and hard work, of culture change and transformation. He has considerable experience with executive coaching and supporting leaders and their teams with their organizational change and improvement efforts.
Tony is a member of the National Training Laboratories (NTL); board member of the Educational Training and Development Alliance; adjunct faculty member with the Georgetown Organization Development Certificate Program; and holds life memberships in Kappa Kappa Psi and Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.
David Shelor
Dr. David Shelor has spent the past 25 years dedicated to helping individuals, teams and organizations identify core strengths, connect with deep values and develop leadership competencies, transforming these resources into concrete actions and sustainable positive change. As an organizational leader, coach and consultant, Dr. Shelor understands deeply that every significant achievement happens in teams, from raising a child to landing people on the moon. He is skilled in helping leaders grow their own abilities to build and motivate highly effective and innovative teams that bring benefit to their stakeholders, organizations, communities and themselves. He knows from experience that when leaders understand themselves and their influence, when team members are heard and empowered, and when organizations connect with their values and strengths and focus their efforts, they are collectively unstoppable in changing the world.
An ordained pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA), Dr. Shelor has coached leaders and consulted with organizations in a variety of sectors, including nonprofit social services, the arts, primary, secondary and higher education, government, business and religious organizations. He holds a Masters of Science in Positive Organizational Development and Change from Weatherhead School of Management at Case-Western University in Cleveland and is a certified executive coach. He is also founder and owner of Florentica, LLC and a trainer and board member of the Center for Emotional Intelligence and Human Relations, providing emotional and social intelligence training for leaders.
Vicki Cotter
Vicki Cotter M.S., SPHR, CPCC, ACC, has coached, trained, facilitated and developed leaders, leadership teams and individuals at all levels in organizations large and small, public and private, and in the US, Europe and Asia. She is known for her fierce courage and ability to speak the truth.
Vicki has a Master of Science in Human Resource Management, and holds the designation of Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR). She is a certified coach with credentials from the International Coaching Federation and The Coaches Training Institute. She is also trained in the neuroscience of coaching and leadership, and on the faculty of BEabove Leadership, where she teaches advanced coaching skills.
Wendy Fraser
Wendy Fraserexcels at understanding team dynamics and the developmental needs of leaders and people working inside organizations. She brings creative energy that is grounded in practical tools and models while working with groups to leverage their best talents toward becoming stronger. Wendy has over twenty years of organization development experience and has worked with public, private, and non-profit organizations throughout the United States and internationally. As a continuous learner, Wendy earned her doctorate at Fielding Graduate University in Human and Organizational Systems and holds three masters degrees. Wendy also likes to teach and facilitate learning with others and is a faculty member with Brandman University’s Master of Arts in Organizational Leadership program and with the University of Washington-Tacoma’s Professional Development Program. Wendy lives in Olympia, Washington with her husband and two children. She is an active volunteer in the schools and community service organizations.Mary Orton
Mary Orton has been helping organizations with change processes for over 20 years. For nine years she has consulted with local and federal government agencies, Native American nations and tribes, and non-profit organizations. She has a master’s degree in the constructive engagement of conflict and was adjunct professor at the Arizona State University Law School. She has authored chapters in two books, the latest published by United Nations University Press about contentious public participation processes in international waterways.Why A Dragon?
Dragons are known through out the world in virtually all climates, cultures, and eras as beings with horns, claws, breath of fire, great size (some small), wondrous wings (some wing-less), and marvelous colors. These serpentine creatures forever populate our myths, legends, novels, and movies. Dragons are strong, fierce, powerful, and persuasive. As such, they are creatures of magic and power. In some Western, Christian-oriented cultures the magic and power of dragons is a masculine symbol of destruction to be slain. How ironic that it is a man’s (St. George’s) job to slay the dragons before it devours all that is feminine. In other cultures, dragons are positive symbols: Chinese dragons are symbols of good fortune. In the Aztec, Olmec, Mayan world, their dragon—Quetzalcoatl—symbolizes sustenance and re-birth. In the old Slavic world, some dragons—Zmaj —were friends of humans while others—Azdaja—were friends of witches and such. When they would fight great storms would occur.
Dragons are creation of the human psyche representing the passion, fierceness, and magic of humankind that have been repressed in the name of the rationality and civilization that are supposed to bring us peace and safety. Unfortunately, as we deny our passions, our fierceness, and our magicality, we also deny ourselves possibility: the possibility of creating humankind, our societies, communities, organizations, and families to be as healthy, productive, and engaging as we would like them to be.
The Center for Human Systems (in its vast and unbiased wisdom) is clear that dragons are good or evil depending on how we are collectively treating ourselves. When we treat ourselves and others well with support, compassion, even fun, we are creatures of fertility and good fortune. As such, they are not only creatures of power and magic, but also creatures or possibility. When we treat our collective ourselves poorly as if some must lose while others win, the price we pay is high in discord and ennui from which wars, environmental destruction and poverty result. It is the dragon of our collective selves that give us the ability to see ourselves as human systems that we can take charge of rather than they being in charge of us.