ADVISORY SERVICES

 

MAC Advisors’ principles of engagement start with respecting the integrity and interests of our clients and their organizations. 

Our leadership advisors operate from a platform of fascination and possibility. In one-on-one client engagements, we interact with respect, urgency, humor, and patience, help clients explore divergent options—and always explore the “other right answer” to any question. In group work, we specialize in designing training that is highly experiential and engaging. Our facilitators are simply the best in the business.

 

 

 

 

One-on-one coaching/advisory engagements with senior executives

As a leader, are you known for your unique and valuable contribution and considered to be mission-critical in your venture? We help you build key leadership competencies, identify and walk your brand, expand your sphere of influence, plan your line of succession, and become the kind of leader your people would follow through a fire. 

 

Culture transformation initiatives to enhance team cohesion and performance

In a high-pressure environment where people are being asked to do more with less—and faster—teams need to be as aligned and productive as possible. With so much pressure from the outside, they can’t afford friction on the inside. The programs we design and deliver promote sustainable performance characterized by laughter in the halls. Typical elements include: 

• Building inspiration and motivation through identification of individual and shared purpose and vision.
• Developing Principles of Culture and Leadership along with skills training to support these agreements.
• Branding the team—How does the team achieve the distinction of “best of breed”? What kind of influence do they want to have? What’s the contribution they want to make? How do they want to be known and seen in the organization? How are they seen currently?  How does the team close the gap?
• Fine-tuning via conflict resolution and other team-specific interventions as needed.

 

Assimilation/integration of two cultures and new-employee orientation programs

When two organizations merge, the union of their cultures is best done consciously and deliberately to ensure that the combination of the two exceeds the sum of its parts. Also, whenever new employees join your organization’s team, they need a crash course in “how we do things around here.” MAC Advisors provides accelerated learning in both realms. 

 

Team coaching

Following team interventions, trainings, and/or cultural assimilation programs, team coaching is invaluable in order to maintain and build upon key learning and reinforce new practices. These coaching engagements combine an ongoing learning curriculum plus coaching around effective responses to the pressing issues of the day. 

 

Strategic rightsizing advisory

The marketplace is dangerously competitive and firms that are slow to adapt are in peril. What appear to be complex people decisions, when viewed with educated outside eyes, can become brand-focused, systematic strategies and tactics in support of short- and long-term market positioning advantages. 

MAC Advisors offers an effective, replicable blueprint for guiding professional firms through rightsizing that’s based on strategy and infused with respect. We help you to identify and support mission-critical contributors—now and pointed at the future—and to execute rightsizing decisions with emotional intelligence.

Using an approach based on inquiry, collaboration, and humanity, we partner with and through your existing board, leadership team, human resource professionals, and line managers and staff to get the job done in such a way that you won't need us the next time around.

 

Executive career transition guidance

MAC Advisors provides senior executives with one-on-one assistance in transitioning to a new job or field of interest, including leadership coaching, personal branding, CV and resumes, and position placement strategy.

 

Business development

We never suggest that you try to sell something that no one needs or wants. Rather, MAC Advisors specializes in hearing your stories, helping you position your product/service as unique and different from your competition’s, describing it in an irresistible way to a target market that can benefit from your offering, and creating a system to deliver on the transaction to the full satisfaction of all parties.

 

Board governance

MAC Advisors works with you to build capacity in the five fundamental aspects of highly effective boards:

• Business domain: What game are you playing?
• Metrics: What are the rewards for success and how will you measure them?
• Stakeholders: Who are they and how do you measure their full satisfaction?
• Focus: Does your team have all its oars in the water pulling at the same time in the same direction and determined to finish first?
• Safety: To what degree are you at risk…and at what cost? Do you do the right thing as well as the best thing? This, by the way, may be your most potent differentiator. 

 

Training programs

• The Bigger Game: Strategic Visioning and Planning: This powerful model provides a process for strategic visioning and planning, identifying individual and team purpose and vision, charting a course toward realizing the vision, and expanding leadership skills exponentially along the way. The Bigger Game builds team engagement, innovation, alignment, and collaboration like nobody’s business. MAC Advisors’ President Caroline MacNeill Hall co-authored The Bigger Game: Why Playing a Bigger Game Designs Who You Want to Become, a 2009 book that serves as a text for the program. We offer one- or two-day Bigger Game programs along with a half-day “teaser” course—all customized to each client organization’s specific needs.
• Leadership agility programs: Leaders are responsible for driving the bottom line. Key to that is getting the most out of their people. “Getting the most” means having people pulling in the same direction with all their energy, intelligence, and creativity. What’s required of leaders? The classic emotional intelligence lenses of self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and social management made manifest through an array of specific skills: respect, curiosity, inquiry, feedback, inspiration, empowerment, and knowing when to offer help, provide resources, and/or back off and let people create results on their own. So the first sentence of this paragraph should be amended to say: Leaders drive the bottom line by developing people.
  
  MAC Advisors helps leaders learn to develop people and inspire them to bring their best to work each day. Our leadership agility programs range from one-day to four three-day retreats spaced out over the course of a year, with learning labs in between.

• Sales/customer service training: Our interest here is helping to create customers for life. What gets in the way? All too often, the “human element” is totally lost in the script-driven customer service process, both in person and over the phone. This is frustrating for the service rep and infuriating for the customer. Deeply rooted in emotional intelligence competencies, our training programs in this area assist customer service professionals to adopt a stance of compassion, curiosity, and authenticity that enhances customer satisfaction with each interaction regardless of the outcome of the call.  
• The Institute for Medical Professionalism: Patients don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Through a series of programs developed by Denver anesthesiologist Dr. Dianne Ansari-Winn and MAC Advisors President Caroline MacNeill Hall, The Institute addresses the urgent need for better communication and leadership skills among medical professionals. The Institute offers physicians, nurses, and other medical professionals a menu of coaching, training programs, and consulting services designed to:
  
  
  • improve communication and emotionally intelligent leadership competencies for the sake of high-quality patient outcomes;
  • transform the culture in which medicine and other health-related services are practiced;
  • and improve patient satisfaction with care received. 
  
  The Institute’s programs include leadership training for Chief Residents, in-service training in communication skills and leadership principles for hospital medical and administrative staff, and training programs for clinical practices, groups, HMOs, and other medical professionals seeking to improve patient outcomes and raise their scores on the HCAHPS Survey.
  
  The Institute for Medical Professionalism offers highly experiential half-day, full-day, or multi-component programs extending over six months or more.  Our flagship program package is designed to raise communication and leadership skills while transforming the culture of medical institutions on both the clinical and administration sides. 

• Stress management: The RESET Button
  Many people in large organizations have become distracted, anxious, and isolated by what amounts to addiction to technological multi-tasking and relentless time pressure. Creativity and innovation  require a wholly different internal state—presence, connection, compassion, and openness to what’s known and what isn’t. It takes awareness, discipline, and habits of recovery to return to presence. Using principles of neuroscience, MAC Advisors trains clients to discover, experience, and integrate their personal RESET Button, a powerful ritual that restores presence of mind.
  
  
  
  The RESET Button is available as a half-day or full-day program with built-in follow-up mechanisms to ensure that RESET practices become habituated and contagious.