Chris Gagnon

A leader in the People & Organizational Performance Practice, Chris oversees McKinsey’s portfolio of digital solutions and helps shape organizations fit for the future through an integrated approach that transforms organizational health and sustains overall performance by aligning organization design with culture, talent, change management, and leadership. He has worked with clients in many sectors, including consumer products, hospitality and leisure, private equity, and technology.

In Chris’s role as coleader of McKinsey’s organization work, he has been able to direct initiatives related to two of his passions. First, he led the firm’s efforts to bring hard data, tools, and analytics to the soft topics of organization. Some of the tools he has developed with the OrgSolutions group include the Organizational Health Index, OrgLab, People Analytics, and the a new tool to personalize change-management initiatives. Second, he led the firm’s research into the “beyond the matrix” organization, learning from the most aggressive organizational experiments and approaches in the world to bring clients new methods that are faster, more tech enabled, and more human centered.

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 (Harmony Books, 1995) and has published numerous articles in the Harvard Business Review and the McKinsey Quarterly on topics such as agility, analytics, leadership, and organizational health.

Chris now lives in Austin, Texas, after spending much of his career in the Northeast. In his free time, he enjoys working out, playing chess, enjoying blues harmonica, and coaching youth basketball.