McCarron and Company
A New Approach To Building High-performing Leadership Teams

When it comes to any national or international championships, most sports enthusiasts have their eyes glued on the players. But what’s often forgotten are their coaches on the sidelines, who are equally important to their victory as any other player on the field. Just like a coach plays a crucial role in a team’s success, so does a leader in an organization, who always strives to increase overall performance and generate positive results. “Leaders drive organizations to success by acting as the pacesetter in building strong teams and empowering them by becoming better leaders themselves. We at McCarron & Company lead them toward a culture of performance and accountability,” states Jim McCarron, the Founder and Owner of McCarron & Company.

As someone who has been a sportsman in the past, McCarron always showed a keen inclination towards coaching. Throughout his career, he observed how important it is for a leader to get the right people in the right position and create favorable conditions to inspire their teams to perform at their fullest potential. These executives also need to equip their team members with the knowledge, skills, and resources to achieve the business objectives.

Viewing this need among several leaders, McCarron founded McCarron & Company and took up a thought partner’s role for clients. Along with his team of consultants, McCarron helped executives analyze all the available information, encourage their team members to work cohesively, and make informed business growth and development decisions. The company focuses on assisting leaders in building high-performance teams and leading them with a singular vision and in the same direction to achieve a common goal.

In conversation with ManageHR magazine, McCarron elaborates on how he made his passion for coaching a reality with McCarron & Company and its role in developing leadership skills and competency to create buy-in with unified efforts. Combining McCarron’s passion for coaching and his background as a business leader, creates in him the perfect ally to drive change, coach business leaders, and/or be a strategic mentor & trainer for any team within your organization.

What are some of the most potent challenges your clients face, and how do you address them?

Most clients find it challenging to create cohesive leadership teams as there exists a huge gap in the way organizations perform and how they are led. This brought about the need to develop leadership skills, especially when executives take on leadership roles without much preparation or experience and lack the much-needed support.

We help organizations build high-performing teams by analyzing the areas of unproductive conflicts and nonalignment. Several clients are seen to function with individual goals and egos that hinder team objectives. Once a client is onboarded, we want to understand how cohesive their leadership teams are—which is the key to a successful organization. Our company is working with clients to develop individual leaders and leadership teams and make them work together. It is our strong belief that it takes teamwork and constant learning to help organizations achieve their goals.

What does the client engagement process look like?

Along with helping clients build strong teams, we also transform organizations into results-driven companies that support a culture of teamwork. Firstly, we work with organizations to develop a solid strategic plan to establish a clear vision of short-term and long-term goals. After this, they can determine the factors that will drive that plan, create alignment, and buy-in throughout their organizations. When it comes to strategic execution, our approach is to look into how clients build their goals and execute it, followed by an in-depth analysis of their five-year or three-year plans and narrow it down to a one-year objective. Our clients are then encouraged to focus on their business 90 days at a time, which establishes a progressive and linear approach in fulfilling their long-term goals. The next aspect that we work with is building a leadership team. With world-leading assessments to assess the current leadership structure and DNA of the entire team, we compare their predetermined competencies and help them build a vision, craft it, and create an alignment around it. Our company takes a distinctive approach to leadership development by focusing greatly on understanding the aspects that make a strong leader and also the attributes they lack. After this, they need to understand each team member’s full potential and their strengths as a team, which helps them excel and play to those strong points and bridge the existing gaps.

Our company is also focused on teaching clients how to become a team. We instill the five behaviors that make a successful team among our clients, as advocated by Patrick Lencioni in his book “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team”, in partnership with Wiley Workplace Learning Solutions. These principles play a crucial role in helping teams overcome the absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, and inattention to results. We combine the performance and culture of teamwork by building a strong foundation of trust, enabling teams to conduct productive disagreement. Through this process, they can easily commit to any decision in unison and be accountable for it, which finally leads to achieving the team’s collective results. Our Leadership Edge program is directed toward an organization’s key management and helps add to its leadership skills and develops management competencies among managers. This service also allows to create an alignment between the leadership and the key management teams and help them work together towards a common goal. We also provide several support programs after clients have been onboarded and create long-standing relationships with clients—we lockstep with them in training every individual in the organization and support them with their overall objectives.

What does the future hold in store for the company?

In the current pandemic situation, we had to make significant changes in how we communicate and coordinate with clients. Our company was flexible enough to adopt new technologies to enhance our interactions with them. Several opportunities have opened up for us to expand our program to larger organizations worldwide as well as across the entire U.S. With our industryagnostic approach, we have successfully worked across all industries, higher education institutions, and nonprofits to engage their workforces effectively. We are going beyond the stereotypical top-down style in various organizations and helping them become more autonomous and team-based with our five behaviors programs. Our program fits the need for a higher level of engagement, leadership development and skills, and collaborative decisions for all our clients across the nation and the globe.