Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™
Strategic Advisory
Bring the thinking that’s changing how leaders lead into your organization.
We’re at a turning point.
As AI reshapes how we work, it’s easy to forget that whatever challenge your organization is facing, it’s almost always a people challenge. I help C-suite, HR, and team leaders apply effective empathy to connect and engage with each other, the people they lead, and the customers they serve. That’s how you strengthen leadership and boost performance, innovation, and collaboration across the board.
There are a few ways to bring that results-driven thinking to your organization, from one electrifying moment to a lasting shift in how your leaders lead and your culture performs.
If you’re a CXO, HR leader, operational leader, or entrepreneur navigating any of this:
- Teams that are misaligned, disengaged, or quietly running out of steam
- Performance, collaboration, or innovation stalling out, even with strong people in the room
- Leaders avoiding hard conversations, second-guessing priorities, or burning out trying to hold it all together
- Leaders who want to intentionally lean into their strengths, reveal negative default patterns quietly running the show, and transform their team, themselves, and even their personal relationships
- A brand story or customer experience that feels flat, inconsistent, or invisible in a crowded market
Learn about my Advisory and consulting services
Click the service to learn more.
Keynotes | Leadership Workshops | Leadership Coaching | Enneagram Coaching | Strategic Advisory | Brand Strategy
Strengthen from within to catapult impact.
The root of so many of these tough challenges – dysfunctional teams, missed product launches, angry (or fickle) customers – is a lack of empathy. Let’s infuse empathy into your leaders, culture, or brand for radical success.
Leaders
Connect and engage teams to foster innovation, collaboration, loyalty, and higher performance.
Culture
Connect and engage with each other to boost innovation, retention, morale, and productivity.
Brands
Connect and engage with ideal customers to increase loyalty, profitability, growth, and impact.
Let’s infuse empathy into your leaders, culture, or brand for radical success.
How I Can Help
Advisory and consulting services
Keynotes
One moment. One room.
Immediate impact and motivation.
The talk that energizes and reframes how leaders think about empathy, not as a soft skill, but as a performance driver that works alongside accountability, plus the practical strategies to act on it starting Monday. I delight crowds at company events, association and customer conferences, sales kickoffs, and annual summits, on topics like empathetic leadership as a competitive advantage and my Both/And leadership paradigm for the age of AI.
Book a call to discuss your next conference or organizational event.
Maria has an amazing approachability that enables her to take complex strategies and translate them into actionable steps we can all begin to use the next day. Her most recent talk was incredible as the audience was deeply engaged and continued to reference her talk throughout the day! I know one of our top companies also hired her to come in and do training for their team after seeing her at the SIM Women Leadership Summit. Maria is an incredible thought leader!
Kristen Lamoreaux, President/CEO, Lamoreaux Search and Founder, SIM Women
Leadership Workshops
One session. One interactive experience. Skills they can use immediately.
A working session for senior leaders, exec teams, or company-wide development programs, giving leaders concrete frameworks they can practice and apply right away, built around your team’s actual gap. Some teams need to build human skills like connection and curiosity. Others need to pull back from people-pleasing and burnout so they stop avoiding the difficult conversations that matter. Standalone or woven into your existing L&D program.
Book a call to design your workshop.
Maria is an engaging, inspiring speaker who brings all of her knowledge, life experience, and delightful personality to her speaking engagements. Over the course of our 3-day leadership retreat, Maria’s presentation was the favorite! She helped the group understand the business case for empathy and provided practical tools and strategies for strengthening empathy in the workplace.
Jaime Goff PHD, SHRM-CP Director of Leadership Development, CHRISTUS Health
Human-Centered Leadership Coaching Cohorts
Six months. Ongoing.
Behavior change that sticks.
Most training fades within weeks if it’s never reinforced. This 6-month experience takes leaders through a structured journey covering self-awareness, decisiveness, and the difficult conversations they’ve been avoiding, for deeper, more sustained development and retention through ongoing application. I lead the full peer-supported journey – with virtually no lift for your HR or L&D team – so the shift actually sticks.
Book a call to explore a cohort for your leaders or team.
I couldn’t be more pleased with the results and meaningful engagement with our team. Maria led a large group of our state and senior leaders through a thoughtful, engaging conversation on how to use empathy effectively—not just as a feel-good concept, but as a core leadership tool. Maria fostered close connections and gave us tools we can immediately apply to better support our teams—without burning ourselves out. If your organization is serious about building strong, empathetic leaders, I can’t recommend Maria enough.
Blake Campbell, Senior Director of Leadership, Best Buddies International
Enneagram Coaching & Development
One person. Deep work.
The lever for real growth and change.
The Enneagram is a powerful framework for understanding core instinct and motivation, not just personality, that reveals the unconscious fears and desires driving how your leaders think, react, and lead, especially under pressure. As a certified integrative Enneagram facilitator, I use it as a lens to uncover the default instincts and motivations quietly shaping every leader’s success, the same instincts that, unexamined, just as often hold them back. It’s coaching that’s as enlightening as it is practical, revealing the why behind the what, so change finally sticks. Every engagement is layered and shaped around the individual’s specific leadership challenges, never a template.
Offered as a package that includes the Assessment and Analysis and three (3) 60 minute, one on one coaching sessions to discuss and craft a development plan.
Book a call to explore and get started.
Working with Maria and the Enneagram helped me finally name the motivations and sticking points in my leadership approach. Within days, I applied our insights with one of my employees. Tough, but it drove more buy-in than my default approach would have. It’s now an important part of my toolkit that I keep coming back to. Real strategies, real results, in just three sessions.
Steve Hartman, C Suite executive, advisor, & investor
Strategic Advisory
Zoomed out. Diagnostic.
Tell me what’s broken.
I sit down with exec teams and HR leaders to audit your current leadership development or culture and L&D curriculum, pinpoint the gaps between where you are and your goals, and recommend the right experts and courses to close them, including ones I don’t teach myself. When the work touches cultural alignment or organizational transformation, I bring in a seasoned partner to navigate it. Structured as a day rate or project engagement, no ongoing retainer required unless you want one.
It has been a true pleasure working with Maria Ross in the Department of Surgery at Northwestern Medicine. She brought a unique and impactful perspective to our team through her expertise in empathy-driven leadership, communication, and culture building. Her ability to translate the principles from her research into actionable strategies created measurable improvements in collaboration and team dynamics.
Dr. Satish N. Nadig MD, PhD, FACS. Department of Surgery and Vice Chair of Faculty Development, Northwestern Medicine
Brand Strategy Engagements
A different category, same connection and engagement. Brand, not leadership. Exclusive.
For CMOs, CEOs, CROs and Heads of Brand or Marketing. An exclusive, limited engagement to land on the empathetic brand messaging that attracts your right-fit clients and customers, for organizations that treat empathy as a core value, not a slogan. Only a small number are taken on each year.
We needed to update and evolve our brand story and differentiators, and hired Red Slice to partner with us on this work. Maria “gets it” – her background in tech marketing, her proven methodology, and her high degree of empathy and ability to work with non-marketing stakeholders made our project a success. Maria and her team delivered a high-quality, scalable, and exciting brand platform that will help take our business to the next level.
Gina Hortatsos, CMO, LogicGate
Ready to join the revolution?
Find out how empathetic your brand is RIGHT NOW, and join our newsletter to start shifting your perspective and transforming your impact.