Margaret Downs

Advisor

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Margaret helps leaders thrive in their careers, navigate change, lead diverse teams, and build healthy, effective organizations. Building on more than 30 years of experience as a consultant and executive, she supports clients:

1. As an executive coach, working one-on-one with senior and upcoming leaders who want to expand their leadership ability, rise up in their organization, build their confidence and executive presence, lead with emotional intelligence, build powerful, diverse teams, and make change happen. Margaret is certified through New York University’s Advanced Diploma in Coaching program.

2. As a consultant, helping clients make strategies work in complex organizations, update their organizational design, and improve organizational, team and leadership effectiveness. Margaret’s consulting career began at Bain & Company where she helped the firm’s Fortune 1000 clients build and execute powerful business strategies.

Margaret’s expertise ranges across executive coaching, strategic planning, organization design and transformation, change management, and leadership development. Her industry experience encompasses media and information, professional services, engineering, healthcare, financial services, and non profit. Sample assignments are provided below.

In addition to her tenure at Bain & Co. as a manager and associate, Margaret has worked at Bain Capital LLC as an executive vice president, serving in a business development and marketing role for this private equity firm. She also managed APM’s strategy consulting group (before its acquisition and rebranding as CSC Healthcare, APM was a leading U.S. consulting firm serving the health care industry.)

Margaret received an M.B.A. degree from Harvard Business School. She earned her B.A. degree from Harvard College, magna cum laude with highest honors in history and Phi Beta Kappa. Margaret also holds an Advanced Diploma in Coaching from NYU’s School of Professional Studies and has completed additional graduate coursework in organizational psychology.

Sample Engagements

• Strategic planning: Design and manage planning processes to identify key strategic issues and opportunities, and to mobilize the leadership team around a plan of action. Managed all aspects of strategic planning for a leading information services company including annual plan process and M&A activities.
   
• Organizational planning and change management: Conduct strategic organizational reviews and advise leadership on decisions to restructure management team roles, responsibilities and compensation incentives, and to realign supporting organizational structures and workforce. Work alongside key functional departments to support implementation of organizational changes. Specific examples:
• For a national publisher, managed organizational redesign and change management efforts alongside a large-scale program of digital transformation and cost reduction.
• Conducted organizational assessment and helped leadership of information services company update the organization to increase customer focus, enable international expansion, innovate and manage dynamic products, and manage increasing scale.
• For an engineering services company, developed a 3-year organizational roadmap to support continued growth while improving the operating margin. Work resulted in key leadership role changes and paved the way for an acquisition.
• Merger integration: Assisted in development of organizational plan for merger of two divisions acquired by global professional services form; co-chaired task force charged with integrating business strategies of two merging media companies; supported integration of acquisition by engineering services client.
• Leadership development: Design and advise senior executive succession planning, and leadership team reorganization. Conduct team-building and leadership development programs.