Aaron De Smet
Aaron counsels leadership teams as they transform their organizations to improve performance, organizational health, speed, and agility. He is also an expert on organizational design, corporate culture, leadership development, team effectiveness, capability building, and transformational change.
Much of Aaron’s work focuses on helping large distributed organizations to achieve growth, innovation, productivity, and organizational agility. He serves clients across several industries, including agriculture, biotechnology, chemicals, energy, financial services, and healthcare.
Aaron, who writes frequently about organizational topics, has published many articles in McKinsey Quarterly and elsewhere. Recent published work includes:
- Organizing for the future: Nine keys to becoming a future-ready company, January 2021
- Psychological safety and the critical role of leadership development, February 2021
- Building workforce skills at scale to thrive during and after the COVID-19 crisis, April 2021
- It’s time for leaders to get real about hybrid, July 2021
- Return as a muscle: How lessons from COVID-19 can shape a robust operating model for hybrid and beyond, July 2021
- Organizing for sustainability success: Where, and how, leaders can start, August 2021
Aaron is a member of the master faculty of the Change Leaders Forum and of the Organizational Agility Forum, which he helped establish. He has also led McKinsey’s thinking on organizational health and was on the teams that developed the Organizational Health Index (OHI), OrgLab, and Influencer.
Before joining McKinsey, Aaron worked at several other consultancies, as an independent consultant, and served as a research associate at the Institute for Behavior Resources. He has a PhD in social and organizational psychology from Columbia University, where he specialized in organizational dynamics, culture, human-resource management, leadership effectiveness, and strategic change.
