Leadership Advisor · Organizational Researcher · Author

Most organizations know something is off. The harder question is why.

I help organizations and leaders understand what’s really happening. Then we navigate what comes next together.

About Dr. Dana E. Sims

Most organizational problems look straightforward until you’re inside them. Dr. Dana E. Sims has spent more than 15 years working from the inside, where the complexity is real, the history matters, and the easy answers rarely are.

The foundation for her career began with her doctoral research at the University of Central Florida where she examined interorganizational trust and psychological safety’s impact on whether people in organizations feel safe enough to do the right thing when it counts. She completed her doctorate in Industrial Organizational Psychology in 2009, but trust and psychological safety have been the intellectual cornerstones of her work ever since. She believes trust and psychological safety are not abstract concepts but operational conditions that determine whether organizations can actually learn, change, and perform. That research grounding is what separates diagnosis from opinion in everything she does. Her peer-reviewed research, book chapters, and industry publications, including work published alongside some of the most cited scholars in organizational psychology, and her regular presence at national conferences mark Dr. Sims as a recognized thought leader in her field.

The Work

Dr. Dana E. Sims did not plan to spend her career in federal organizations. She stumbled in after the 2008 economic crash ended her first consulting job, where she worked with Fortune 500 companies and organizations across industries to build the leadership skills needed for employee retention and performance. When the firm closed in the crash, she landed in federal service and stayed.

She stayed because the work matters. Government organizations and public sector exist to serve the American public, and the people who show up every day to do that work deserve better than the dysfunction and the accumulated weight of how things have always been done. That conviction has shaped her career.

Dr. Sims was intentional about every role she took, building specific capabilities along the way. Her first role was within the Department of the Navy where she worked in instructional design and acquisition. Then she moved on to Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), where she developed a leadership program development and performed organizational development work, understanding early that you cannot meaningfully separate the two. At the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Learning Institute she locked into leadership development and built rigorous, research-based leadership programs for three levels of federal leaders with real measures of impact.

Then she made a deliberate move that surprised people. She left an environment where her PhD gave her immediate credibility and joined the Office of the Chief Information Officer at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), a technology-driven environment where being a psychologist was not an automatic advantage. She learned a new domain, earned credibility on different terms, and expanded her practice from leadership and soft skills into technical training strategy, multi-million dollar budget management, and acquisition. She came out with a capability set most organizational psychologists never develop.

The Sea-bbatical

In 2018 Dr. Sims made a decision that very few people in stable federal careers make. She left.

Not for another position. Not for a better opportunity. She left because years of giving more to her work than it gave back had taken their toll, and because she understood, in the way that burnout eventually forces clarity, that she needed distance to find her way back to herself.

She learned to sail. She and her partner sold most of what they owned, bought a 41-foot sailboat, and moved aboard with their sheltie and their cat. They have lived aboard ever since. During her sea-bbatical, they sailed the Chesapeake, the Bahamas, the Dry Tortugas, and up the eastern seaboard as far as Bar Harbor, Maine. The sheltie loved every beach they found. The cat, who passed away a few years ago, was a sailor to the end.

But her sea-bbatical was not all sunsets and umbrella drinks. She quickly learned that sailing is ninety percent boredom punctuated by ten percent sheer terror. There were storms she was not sure they would survive including an electrical storm miles offshore. They sent coordinates to a contact ashore, battened down the hatches, and pressed hard for land. And then there was Hurricane Dorian while in the Abacos, Bahamas. They took the last available weather window back to the United States and the storm tracked north. They were lucky. Many of those who stayed were not. She is honest that the decisions that got them out involved bad judgment, ignored advice, and no small amount of luck. She wrote about what that experience taught her about leadership, and you can read the full account here.

What the sea-bbatical gave her was perspective that no amount of seniority inside an institution could produce. When the decisions are real and the consequences immediate, organizational problems look different. Not unimportant, but rarely life and death, even when they feel that way. She also learned, in conditions where it was not optional, what trust, communication, and shared decision making actually look like in practice.

She came back ready to do the work differently.

The Return

Returning to federal service meant returning at scale. At the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA), Dr. Sims led a $10M+ portfolio, a 14-person distributed team, and a research-backed leadership ecosystem redesign for an organization of more than 6,000 employees. Her mixed-method Leadership Insights study informed a 13-program redesign and was presented at the Association for Talent Development’s International Conference. She built a coaching culture and launched evaluation frameworks connecting program outcomes to agency goals.

Most recently she served in a senior learning strategy and operations role at the Department of Transportation Office of Inspector General (DOT OIG), taking on acting Chief Learning Officer responsibilities during a period of significant organizational change.

What she found across both chapters confirmed what the water had already begun to teach her. The gap between what organizations say they want and what they are genuinely prepared to do is wider than most leaders acknowledge. The leaders who most need honest counsel are often the ones least likely to receive it.

It was time to build something of her own.

Fedability: The Origin Story

Fedability did not start as a business plan. It started during a pandemic.

In 2020, while still living aboard and watching federal organizations scramble to respond to a crisis none of them had prepared for, Dr. Sims began consulting independently. Agencies that had resisted remote work for years suddenly had no choice. Some still wanted their people back in the office because it was how things had always been done, despite evidence that the work could be done effectively from anywhere. Leaders who had never managed at a distance were struggling. Organizations were making decisions about the future of work without the data or the frameworks to make them well.

Dr. Sims spent that period doing what she does best: understanding what was actually happening, separating the real problems from the manufactured ones, and helping organizations and their leaders work through change they had not chosen and were not ready for.

That work clarified something important. The most valuable thing she could offer was not a program or a framework. It was the combination of inside knowledge, research rigor, and hard-won perspective that no firm could replicate and no standard methodology could package.

Public service is again in a period of unprecedented uncertainty. The assumptions that have anchored public sector work for decades are being tested in ways few anticipated. Trust and psychological safety, never easy to maintain in complex organizations, are under particular strain. People are being asked to do more with less, to lead through ambiguity, and to hold their organizations together in conditions nobody prepared them for.

That is exactly the environment Dr. Sims was built for.

Fedability is now a fully independent practice, grounded in research, built from the inside out, and designed for organizations and leaders who are ready to look honestly at what is actually happening and figure out what comes next.

The Storms of Leadership

The Book

Dr. Dana E. Sims is writing The Storms of Leadership, a book about what leading in complex organizations actually demands, told honestly, for the leaders who already know the textbook version is not the whole story.

The title is not accidental. The storms she navigated on the water were real. So are the ones her clients face every day in organizations that are more complex, more political, and more resistant to change than anyone in a leadership seminar will admit.

It is not finished yet. When it is, it will be worth the wait.

Ready when you are

If any of this resonates, if you are leading an organization through something that has not responded to the usual answers, or navigating a moment in your own leadership that you would rather not face alone, Dr. Dana would like to talk.

Not to sell you something. To have an honest conversation about what is actually going on and whether she is the right person to help.

Selected Publications

Burke, C.S., Sims, D.E., et al. Trust in leadership: A multi-level review. Leadership Quarterly — Finalist, Best Paper, Center for Creative Leadership

Salas, E., Sims, D.E., & Burke, C.S. Is there a Big Five in teamwork? Small Group Research

Sims, D.E. Fundamentals of organizational management, leadership, and culture. Clinical Laboratory Management textbook

Selected Speaking

Association for Talent Development International Conference — multiple appearances

Maryland & Kentuckiana ATD Local Chapters— invited speaker