Women of Vision Honoree - Michelle Dodgson - GRI

Women of Vision Honoree – Michelle Dodgson

GRI was honored to nominate Michelle Dodgson for the DJC Oregon Women of Vision award. For nearly four decades, Michelle has been a steady force at GRI—one whose impact transcends titles and job descriptions. Over her 39 years with the firm, she has not only helped shape departments and operations but also served as an invaluable sounding board to company leaders, offering perspective, pragmatism, and a deep well of institutional knowledge. In the marketing and business development space, she continues to be a quiet powerhouse, contributing to wins, strategy, and growth with grace and determination. Michelle has held a variety of roles, evolving alongside the firm she helped grow—never tethered to “the way things have always been done,” but instead advocating for smarter, future-focused ways of working. Her influence is present in nearly every corner of the company, and her voice has long been one of GRI’s most trusted.

Before GRI had formal, organized departments – there was Michelle, the foundation of GRI’s shared services line. Her dedication, integrity, and leadership consistently inspire our entire Administrative, Human Resources, Marketing, Production, and Business Development teams. She brings a thoughtful, solutions-oriented mindset to everything she does, and her ability to balance deep technical expertise with mentorship and operational vision makes her a true standout in our industry.

What are significant accomplishments of the nominee within her company?: Over her 39-year tenure at GRI, Michelle has made countless significant contributions that have shaped the company’s identity and long-term success. Her strategic vision and deep institutional knowledge have made her a go-to leader within the company, someone who not only understands the technical aspects of our work but also the importance of structure, efficiency, and collaboration.

Beyond organizational leadership, Michelle has mentored generations of employees, cultivating a culture of professionalism, inclusion, and shared growth at GRI through:

Responsible for training across multiple departments and monitoring onboarding processes for completion.
Dedicating her daily workflow to onboarding a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) that now houses all GRI’s critical project data. GRI utilizes this platform to track opportunities, revenues, and projections to win more work, improve our business development, and client relationships.
Spearheads major operational workflow transition and facilitating collaboration across multiple departments.

Her ability to adapt and lead through change, all while upholding GRI’s core values, makes her one of the most influential figures in our company’s history.

Provide some examples of the nominee’s involvement in the community: Michelle demonstrates an unwavering commitment not only to her profession but also to her community, both within and beyond the workplace. She is actively involved in SMPS Oregon, where she contributes her industry knowledge and leadership to support professional development and networking within the A/E/C community. Her engagement with SMPS reflects her dedication to building strong industry relationships and sharing best practices.

Within GRI, she plays a key role on the Events Committee, helping to plan and coordinate initiatives that foster employee engagement and strengthen company culture. She also serves on the Quality and Risk Management Committee, where her deep experience of company practices and document retention ensures that GRI maintains high levels of technical compliance and consistency across projects. These internal contributions have a meaningful impact on the well-being and professional growth of her colleagues.

In addition to her industry and company involvement, Michelle has volunteered a significant amount of her time with organizations that support the wellbeing of animals, causes that align closely with her values of care, compassion, and community service. Her involvement across these various arenas speaks to her multifaceted commitment to making a positive difference in the lives of others, whether through professional mentorship, internal leadership, or service to the broader community.

What leadership and mentoring efforts has the nominee shown? Throughout her nearly four decades at GRI, Michelle has been a steady, respected leader and mentor whose influence reaches every corner of the company. Michelle is a rare kind of leader—one who proves that leadership isn’t about title or authority, but about influence, trust, and consistency. She has never sought a formal management role, despite the company asking her to step into one on numerous occasions. Instead, she leads from within, working alongside her peers, offering guidance, sharing institutional knowledge, and mentoring with patience and humility. Her insight is sought out and her direction followed not because of hierarchy, but because of the respect she has earned through decades of quiet, steady leadership. Michelle has built deep trust across the organization, showing that leadership can be collaborative, not directive—and that’s what makes her presence so impactful.

Michelle is known across the company as someone who is approachable, knowledgeable, and always willing to share her time and expertise. She has mentored countless employees, especially younger professionals, helping them grow into their roles and advance their careers with confidence. Her mentorship is both formal and informal, ranging from providing guidance on technical and procedural matters to offering support during career transitions or personal challenges.

Michelle has thoughtfully crafted and continuously refined a comprehensive onboarding checklist tailored for both new hires and promoted team members across GRI. This organized system ensures that everyone receives consistent, thorough training and the resources they need to succeed from day one. Beyond just creating the checklist, Michelle actively oversees the entire onboarding process and has played a direct role in training and mentoring every shared services team member who has walked through our doors. Her commitment has set a high standard for how we welcome, integrate, and support our team. As a member of GRI’s Quality and Risk Management Committee, she plays a key role in upholding the company’s professional standards and ensuring that institutional knowledge is passed down thoughtfully and intentionally. Her mentoring efforts have helped shape GRI’s culture into one where continuous learning, collaboration, and mutual respect are deeply valued.

Her leadership is not about commanding attention; it’s about building trust, cultivating potential in others, and consistently doing the right thing, even when no one is watching. That quiet strength is what makes her an exceptional role model and a cornerstone of GRI.

What change has the nominee led/inspired? Michelle has been a driving force behind meaningful and lasting change at GRI, particularly in streamlining operations and fostering cross-departmental collaboration. One of her most impactful contributions was leading the integration of project, resume, and marketing assets into a unified database. This initiative eliminated duplicate efforts, reduced data-entry errors, and created a single, reliable source of information that all staff, regardless of department, can access and utilize.

Michelle has been instrumental in creating, monitoring, and updating our CRM system, incorporating robust opportunity tracking features that have significantly enhanced our business development operations and visibility. Thanks to her efforts, we can now provide real-time updates on critical KPIs, allowing us to more effectively assess market sector health and make data-driven decisions. The result is a more efficient, cohesive, and accurate system that supports both project delivery and business development.

Recently she co-led a comprehensive overhaul of our General Conditions templates, collaborating with Legal, Engineering, and Executive Leadership to sharpen language, remove redundancies, and align every clause with current industry standards. She then introduced a version-control log, ensuring updates can be tracked and applied seamlessly. The resulting unified template is the firm standard and has already streamlined document preparation across all offices.With 35+ years of institutional knowledge, Michelle also serves as the firm’s informal historian, bringing valuable context to decision-making and helping maintain continuity across generations of staff and projects. She has used this knowledge not to maintain silos, but to actively break them down. She’s a champion of collaboration between technical teams, accounting, and shared services, encouraging a culture where communication and mutual respect drive success.

Her ability to identify inefficiencies, propose thoughtful solutions, and unite people around shared goals has inspired a shift in how GRI operates, not just in terms of tools and processes, but in the way teams interact and support one another. Her influence has improved day-to-day operations and has had a lasting impact on GRI’s culture of teamwork, accountability, and innovation.

What visionary and insightful leadership has this individual exhibited? Michelle exemplifies visionary and insightful leadership through her ability to see both the big picture and the smallest operational detail and to bridge the gap between the two with clarity, foresight, and purpose. She has supported the company vision at every stage and a cornerstone in supporting a successful growth evolution at GRI, particularly in how information and teams are integrated across the organization. By recognizing the long-term inefficiencies of siloed data and processes, she championed the development of a unified platform for project, resume, and marketing assets, streamlining workflow and laying the foundation for scalable, future-ready systems.

Her insight extends far beyond operations. As someone who has spent 39 of GRI’s 41 years with the firm, Michelle has a deep understanding of where the company has been and a clear sense of where it needs to go. She consistently leverages that perspective to guide decision-making, mentor others, and build bridges between departments that historically operated independently. Her ability to connect people, processes, and purpose has helped foster a culture of shared ownership and transparency.

What sets her apart is her quiet yet powerful leadership style: she leads with humility, listens deeply, and acts with intention. She doesn’t chase trends; she anticipates needs, aligns resources, and nurtures lasting change. Her vision for a more integrated, collaborative, and resilient GRI has not only come to life, but it also continues to shape the way we work and grow together as a firm.

Tell us a story or instance when this individual went above and beyond what was expected of them. There isn’t just one story that defines how Michelle goes above and beyond—because she does it daily, without prompting, and without expectation of recognition. Her impact is built on a thousand small but critical moments where she steps up to support the team, often putting the needs of others before her own. Michelle routinely sets aside her own priorities to make sure proposals go out the door, systems get fixed, or team members get trained and supported. She is the first to offer help and the last to seek credit. Her choices reflect a powerful truth: leadership isn’t about climbing a ladder, it’s about showing up for your team. Michelle lives that value, and in doing so, has made herself indispensable—not just because of what she does, but because of how she does it.

Her ability to juggle high-level strategic planning with day-to-day problem-solving makes her an invaluable asset across departments. She doesn’t just identify what needs to be done; she takes the initiative and follows through, always keeping the bigger picture in mind. What’s more, she does it all with humility and a calm, can-do attitude that inspires those around her. Moments like these illustrate why staff within GRI instinctively turn to Michelle when the stakes are high; she leads, executes, and lifts others up, all in one seamless motion.