Chris Gagnon

Senior Partner, Dallas

Coleads the Organization Practice globally and is head of McKinsey’s OrgSolutions group, helping clients organize in an integrated way by applying analytics methodologies and tools to improve culture, talent, change management, agility, and leadership

About Chris

As global coleader of the Organization Practice, Chris is passionate about helping clients accomplish sustained organizational health. He believes that by focusing on three essentials, organizations can move quickly to address new challenges and opportunities and therefore thrive in a fast-changing world. First, organizations need to integrate their culture, talent-design, change management, enterprise-wide agility, and leadership initiatives. Second, they can harness analytics methodologies and tools to remove instinct and personal bias from decisions. Last, they should align the organization—and its people—around consistent, personally significant principles to create stable processes, tasks, and roles and to ensure successful decision making.

Some of the tools Chris and the OrgSolutions group have developed include the Organizational Health Index (OHI), OrgLab, and People Analytics. By bringing “hard” data to the “soft” art of organizational leadership, these tools remove instinct and personal bias from critical organizational decisions.

Chris has long been active in knowledge creation and publishing. He led the team that cowrote Real Change Leaders: How You Can Create Growth and High Performance at Your Company. He has published articles in the Harvard Business Review and the McKinsey Quarterly on topics such as analytics, leadership, organizational health, and agility. He has also worked in several sectors—private equity, hospitality, and leisure—including hotels, casinos, and the fitness industry.