
Better Communication. Focus. Insights. Self-Care. Training. Facilitation. Goal-Setting.
Better Leadership.
Creating conscious + effective leaders
MER Leadership Design helps Chief People Officers and HR professionals to optimize their senior talent and teams, creating more conscious and effective leaders.
We offer 1:1 executive coaching, training, and facilitation — with a focus on marketing and media agencies, early-exit-phase startups, and non-profits.
By integrating these three leadership pillars, we create a more effective foundation for positive change, and provide a coveted benefit for the organization.
“Marie Elena sees your potential and inspires and supports you to get there. As a first-time CEO, she helped me work through my initial imposter syndrome, develop strategies for coping with the complex challenges of restructuring and pivoting a company, and provided tools to sharpen my mental acuity and focus around fundraising.”


Learning & Development
Services
MER Leadership Design’s integrated approach provides a unique lens across the entire organization — leveraging a deeper understanding of the strengths, challenges and opportunities for individuals, departments, and teams.
- 1:1 Coaching
- Training
- Facilitation

1 :1 Coaching
As an executive, all eyes are on you. You hold yourself and others to a high standard. You provide support for your staff, your teams, and your colleagues. But how are you supporting yourself?
One-on-one Executive Coaching helps ground your decision-making, clarify your thinking and communication, and offers you an objective thought-partner. Someone who can help you reframe things in a productive way, avoid pitfalls, and ensure you are driving long-term vision as well as executing against short-term goals.

Training
What if you had a trainer who understood your company, its mission, its people — and who delivered a professional development experience that took staff beyond insight into action?
MER Leadership Design offers a curriculum with structure and flexibility to address your company’s needs, including communication, self-awareness, performance management, conflict resolution, and team building. The investment value and impact multiplies when training is integrated with 1:1 coaching and facilitation — resulting in better employees (and better humans).

Facilitation
What if you had a neutral third-party who could see and communicate challenges more clearly than the team could? Who could foster collaboration between and among departments and business units?
Facilitation breaks down silos and elicits productive communication and problem-solving. It makes meetings more efficient and effective, navigating group dynamics to keep your objectives on track. Facilitation helps ensure that all voices are heard and ideas are captured with action steps to move decisions forward.
“Change comes from within, and Marie Elena is a powerful catalyst. She is a consigliere, a counselor, and a coach, the rare person in a leader’s orbit who has no agenda other than helping them find a path where both internal harmony and external success can coexist.”
“Marie Elena guided us into being better communicators, collaborators, and arbitrators. She pushed us to apply common sense tools to real-world challenges, and identify specific steps we could take. The experience has made me more confident as a leader, with some great advice to fall back on.”
“Invaluable in helping me examine myself… how I receive information, respond to situations, and come across to others. As someone overseeing two large teams, I’ve found Marie Elena’s style to be incredibly flexible and complementary. She connects inputs from multiple conversations, finds commonalities across personal and professional situations, and provides easy-to-remember “cheat codes” to help quiet my mind and reference the work we’ve been doing.”

Marie Elena Rigo brings a unique lens to the business of coaching, with more than 30 years of experience spanning the agency, corporate, and non-profit worlds.
She holds a master’s degree in psychology, is certified as a Positive Intelligence/ Mental Fitness Coach and leads executives and teams toward a deeper understanding of themselves and others as they navigate the challenges on the goal line and soul line of life.
Marie Elena believes that the answers to clients’ questions lie within. She also knows that the brain requires helpful frameworks to be more productive and support generative thinking. She uses these mental models to guide clients from insight into action.
Because effective leadership and self-actualization are inextricably linked, the workplace arena is a fertile growth environment. Combined with traditional skills training, Marie Elena supports VP-level to C-Suite execs in discovering new pathways, avoiding pitfalls, and becoming more conscious in their professional roles and in their lives.

