Maril Gagen MacDonald, Founder & CEOFollowing is the conversation that Manage HR had with Maril Gagen MacDonald, Gagen MacDonald’s founder and CEO. She is a nationally recognized leader in communication, strategy execution, and business transformation. Maril has pioneered a discipline that collaborates with corporate leaders to energize and mobilize their workforce behind a company’s strategic goals, culture, and brand in order to optimize business performance. Her clients include some of the world’s leading companies, including Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola, DuPont, GE, Johnson & Johnson, and United Airlines. In addition to being the founder and CEO of Gagen MacDonald, she’s also the founder of Let Go & Lead, an online community dedicated to new philosophies and strategies for leadership.
Please elaborate on the key services that Gagen MacDonald provides.
Our core services exist primarily in the white space between a company’s silos. These include areas such as purpose, culture, change, transformation, leadership, and employee engagement. In each of these cases, there is no function or department that has sole ownership over how these entities live within an organization. Rather, they require immense cross-functional collaboration and a deeply shared sense of alignment.
With team members hailing from a wealth of different backgrounds and possessing expertise in areas such as internal communication, executive communication, change management, organizational design, digital technology, and branding, we help facilitate collaboration and foster alignment. Ultimately, we help clients bring their strategies, structures, and cultures into harmony in order to overcome barriers to success.
How is Gagen MacDonald helping clients weather the unprecedented challenges presented by the pandemic?
Today, we see interest in many areas that have been accelerated or heightened by our experience with COVID-19. For instance, many companies that switched large numbers of employees to remote work have recognized significant vulnerabilities in their internal communication infrastructures and are rapidly developing new channels to reach their employees in fast and mobile ways. We’re also seeing tremendous interest in developing resilient cultures as companies contend with and navigate the stresses and uncertainties of 2020 and what’s to come in 2021. We’re working with many clients to help them develop resilience on both individual and collective levels.
Finally, this year’s unprecedented disruption has driven home the reality that companies now exist in a permanent state of transformation. Executives of all types recognize that there is no “normal” coming. To thrive in the future, organizations need to have clarity of purpose, maintain a close and constant understanding of their customers’ needs, have the capacity to innovate, and possess the skills necessary to operate with agility. As a result, we are seeing a lot of demand in helping our clients re-imagine their immediate futures.
Our core services exist primarily in the white space between a company’s silos… Ultimately, we help clients bring their strategies, structures, and cultures into harmony in order to overcome barriers to success
There are several key points that differentiate us from our competitors. First, strategy execution isn’t a bolt-on service we provide to clients: it’s the sum of what we do. While many of our competitors—including management consultants, HR firms, and PR agencies—have flocked into this area and scrambled to build their capabilities over the last several years, the human struggle of change has been our sole focus since we were founded 23 years ago. Second, we have a unique talent mix. Whereas our competitors tend to bring forward teams of people with similar backgrounds, our teams blend skills and perspectives encompassing many disciplines. These include corporate communication, executive communication, visual design and branding, digital solutions, organizational design, change management, and leadership development.
While traditional consulting firms have a strong MBA-led orientation, PR firms primarily assemble talent with communications backgrounds, and IT and HR firms both tend to attract candidates with resumes in those respective spaces, we set ourselves apart by uniting broad skill sets but concentrating their focus. We’ll continue to expand on those investments by adding to our roster of talent in areas such as diversity & inclusion, employee wellbeing, and communication technology. We’ll also continue to be deeply involved in industry associations, such as the Page Society and Conference Board, where innovative thinking is on display.
Finally, we differentiate ourselves in how we operate as a partner. We roll up our sleeves and lead side-by-side with our clients, often deeply embedded within their organizations. We’re frequently told that we operate as an extension of their team. For our clients who often feel scolded or criticized by consulting firms who seem determined to tell them all the ways they’re doing their work wrong, or others who fail to learn the ins and outs of their business, this is a welcome relief.
Our goal is to help our clients create an employee experience that gives people a clear understanding of their company’s purpose and strategy; the tools, processes, and trustto do their jobs successfully; and a spark of inspiration to bring their biggest, boldest, best talents forward. To stay ahead of the competition, our job is to continually refresh our understanding of employees’ anxieties and motivations and draw a clear picture of how technology and economic forces are reshaping the workplace.
Please elaborate on a case study where Gagen MacDonald helps one of the clients in attaining what they wanted.
We led a biopharmaceutical company’s change management and communication efforts related to its transformation. Taking a human-centric approach, we worked with leaders across the business on building employee belief around the transformation’s value for the company and for them as individuals. This entailed aligning executives and leaders at all levels around a shared understanding of the transformation’s goals, a comprehensive change management plan that sequenced new initiatives in a digestible and sustainable fashion, tools and resources to help managers effectively communicate changes to employees, and creative communication channels and tactics to make the transformation relatable and engaging.
Eighteen months after the transformation began, 96 percent of employees reported a willingness to embrace new ways of working if it would help the company compete. By the end of two years, the transformation led to significant cost reductions and increased investment in R&D, plus faster decision-making and simplified work processes.
What lies ahead for Gagen MacDonald?
We have been pioneers in helping companies contend with the human struggle of change for 23 years. In our early days, this was a nascent field. Executives considered things like culture and employee engagement secondary concerns, if they were concerns at all. Today, these topics routinely surface near the top of the list of what’s keeping CEOs up at night. We were founded with a vision of transforming the companies that transform the world.
Our roadmap ahead involves staying true to our vision while continually pioneering new means of transformation. Our challenge ahead is helping our clients unlock the potential that lies in technologies and cultural dimensions that can enable smarter, faster, more innovative, and more meaningful work for tens of millions of people worldwide.
