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Mark Leach

Senior Consultant

Mark Leach is a renowned researcher and management consultant with a particular interest in strategy, leadership development and transition, and issues of diversity and inclusion in organizations. Along with Robin Katcher, Managing Director, Mark is leading MAG in its new strategic direction focused on supporting and transforming social justice efforts to more effectively operate at not just the organizational level but also at the leadership and network level in order to help build broad, long-term political power, scale up impact, and win on a wide-range of progressive issues.

As a MAG consultant and coach, he has worked with a range of social justice nonprofits and funders, including the Center for Reproductive Rights, the National Center on Family Homelessness, the John Merck Fund, Abortion Access Project, the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Project, Heifer Project International, US Action, and Urban Libraries Council.

Mark has also led MAG’s development of a leadership coaching model that supports leaders in stepping into the new roles that their organization and movement are calling upon them to fill and stretching their leadership styles to be ever more effective, adaptive, and authentic. In order to improve MAG’s capacity to support executive directors who are called to lead their organizations through frequent changes and to manage unprecedented levels of complexity, Mark continues to explore new research in areas such as adult development theories and complexity of the mind and apply them through coaching.

Tying all of his experience together is what he describes as a passion for finding shared understanding across lots of different worldviews and experiences. "I've had a lot of academic training but also a lot of practical experience," he notes, "I'm able to share with clients both what is in the literature and also the everyday experience of other organizations. I feel really lucky to work at MAG because I get to do this work with organizations whose missions I love."

Mark published a monograph, Table for Two: Can Founders and Successors Co-Exist So Everyone Wins?, in June 2009. While conventional wisdom says a founder should leave an organization entirely after stepping down, Table for Two explores the conditions under which a founder and successor can co-exist - maximizing the founder's assets for the overall good of the organization and reinforcing one anther's success in their new roles.

In partnership with the Meyer Foundation, Mark conducted a study and published a report, Outsourcing Back-Office Services in Small Nonprofits: Pitfalls and Possibilities. The report explores outsourcing as a potential solution and reveals the structural constraints and possibilities in outsourcing to small nonprofits to improve their back-office functions.

Mark's recent articles include "Organization Development for Social Change" in the Handbook of Organizational Development and "Changing Organizational Systems from the Outside: OD Practitioners as Agents of Social Change" in The NTL Handbook of Organization Development and Change: Principles, Practices and Perspectives.

Prior to joining MAG, Mark worked as a consultant and researcher in nonprofit and private-sector settings. His work focused on a diverse range of issues including international development, inter-organizational collaboration, and diversity and inclusion in organizations. He was Senior Consultant at John Snow, Inc., Senior Associate at the Institute for Development Research, and Principal Consultant at Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group. Mark's academic background includes a Masters in Public and Private Management from the Yale School of Management, and a Doctor of Business Administration from Boston University.

Staff

Mark Leach

Senior Consultant