Margreet (“Maggie”) van de Griend has been a consultant for most of her adult life and is the founder of Sokrates Partners. She believes she can do her best work as a “professional outsider”: passionately engaged with each client’s success, but not a part of the organization. This allows her the freedom to ask lots of probing questions, even the difficult ones.
Maggie’s core strength, according to one of her recent clients, is “building bridges”. Not just bridges between people and teams, but also between opinions, cultures, different work styles, silos in the organization, and different objectives and interests. Her work spans the range from facilitating strategic planning, to culture change, to designing and leading top leadership team interventions; the guiding theme of her work is always helping clients solve their own problems, rather than solving problems for them.
She moved from the Netherlands to the US almost two decades ago and maintains homes in both countries, with New York her primary residence and Amsterdam secondary. She is very attached to the Dutch culture of pragmatism and direct expression, as well as the typical dry sense of humor of her native land. But she also enjoys living in a culture that encourages ambition and optimism, and is grateful for the the entrepreneurial opportunities she has found in the United States. In her work with global clients, she aspires to bridge the Atlantic, and bring the best of European and American culture together.
When she is not serving her clients, Maggie can likely be found on horseback in some remote mountain range, or working on her manuscript titled, “New Amsterdam”, which is about notable cultural differences between Amsterdam and New York.
