McCarron & Company: Building High Performance Leadership Teams

“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. 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.

McCarron, a proven leader himself, 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.

Most clients find it challenging to create cohesive leadership teams as there often exists a huge gap in the way organizations perform and how they are led. This brings 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 their gaps in Leadership skills and areas of unproductive conflicts and nonalignment.” Several clients are seen to function with individual goals and priorities 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. Our strong belief is that it takes teamwork and constant leadership growth to help organizations achieve their goals.

By combining a leader’s passion with a solid plan and process, we transform organizations into results-driven companies, supported by a teamwork culture. Firstly, we work with organizations to develop a solid strategic plan to establish a clear vision of their long and short-term goals. After this, they can determine the factors that will drive that plan, create alignment, clarity, and buy-in throughout their organizations. Our approach is to learn how clients build and execute their goals when it comes to strategic execution. Our clients are then encouraged to focus on their business 90 days at a time, establishing a progressive and linear approach to fulfilling their longer-term goals. We then focus on the Leadership team to ensure they have the necessary competencies and cohesiveness to execute the plan. 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 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. “When Leadership teams start to understand the bandwidth they have as a team, versus a singular approach, they realize their true potential as a team. When they become one cohesive leadership team, they synchronize their teams through-out the entire organization”.

We teach clients how to ‘team.’ We instill the ‘Five Behaviors’ program 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 create clarity and buy-in, committing to unison decisions and being accountable for it, which finally leads to achieving the team’s collective results.

In the current pandemic situation, we had to make significant changes in communicating and coordinating 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 across the U.S. and globally. With our industry-agnostic 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.

As we enter a post-pandemic era, faced with economic uncertainty, racial unrest, and evolving remote virtual work teams, our skill sets as leaders will never be more challenged. Our people will look to leadership to be decisive and provide direction; show courage and provide a vision for the future; be agile and adaptable; a resonate leader who is attuned to their culture and work environment, and be able to effectively communicate and synchronize their teams in a virtual work setting. Leadership is a responsibility, not an entitlement, and the best decision you can make as a leader is to recognize your shortcomings. My advice to all leaders is ‘know who you are’ and ‘know who you are not.’ The bandwidth of a Leadership team when it comes to Leadership competencies is so much greater than what one leader can possess. Understand your leadership team’s capabilities, and simply put, ‘do it together,’ not alone.

Leadership needs to be a shared responsibility in organizations, and the need for a cohesive leadership team has never been greater. Leadership as a shared responsibility is where all team leaders create alignment to the vision, mission, values and goals of the organization. Through a collaborative and cohesive leadership system, the team members of the organization achieve the collective results of the organization on a consistent and sustainable basis.

In closing, decide why your organization exists and build a cohesive leadership team that is united in vision, purpose and values. As a team create clarity and buy-in throughout your organization; restructure your organization to support your plan with very clear roles, responsibilities, and goals. Then execute your plan with discipline, together, as one team.

The Leader Upfront

Jim McCarron, Founder and Principal

After 30 plus years in leadership roles, which includes founding and leading his own company for 17 years; serving in a top leadership role for two of the nation’s largest contractors in the Residential and Commercial Construction Industry, and a leading wholesale/manufacturer of building products; Jim launched McCarron & Company and works across industries to create a corporate culture of performance and accountability for clients. He is highly recognized for his work developing high-performance teams, working with sales departments, management teams, executive leadership development, and strengthening the culture and morale of global & diverse organizations. Jim is a proven leader that possesses the rare combination of experience and skills in Operations, Sales, Turn-Around Management, Change Management, Cultural Transformation, and Organizational Development. Clients from diverse industries all over call on him to drive change, coach business leaders, and be a strategic mentor & trainer for a wide range of teams within their organization.