Meredith Persily Lamel and Mimi Darmstadter are the founders and lead coach-facilitators for Working MAMA. They bring to Working MAMA twenty-five years of collective professional experience, spanning corporate, non-profit, and government environments. Their areas of expertise include leadership learning and performance, curriculum design, group facilitation and training, executive coaching, and organizational development.
Meredith and Mimi’s roles as mothers complement their experiences and inspired their design of Working MAMA. Naomi (age 1), Drew (age 3), Eric (age 9), and Ari (age 11) are an ongoing source of pride and learning for them.
About Meredith:
Meredith founded MPL Partners, LLC, an organizational consulting and leadership coaching practice that focuses on individuals and organizations in transition. Through her practice, she facilitates leadership retreats, conducts management workshops, and provides highly customized leadership solutions for organizations, teams, and individuals. Her work with individual professional moms, as well as her recent experience becoming one, inspired the creation of Working MAMA. She also works as a coach for MOMreturns, an executive coaching program that works with women who are returning to work after having children.
Meredith was Director of Training and Consulting for The Congressional Management Foundation. Through CMF, she performed assessments for House and Senate offices, facilitated retreats, coached Chiefs of Staff, and designed and delivered management training programs for senior congressional staff. She also wrote a management column entitled Chief Counsel for Roll Call newspaper.
Meredith was a Director of Executive Education of a leading consulting firm, based in Washington DC. Meredith was principally responsible for sharing best practices and insights with global clients through a variety of educational channels, including on-site presentations and teleconferences for multiple Fortune 500 companies. Her areas of expertise included leadership development, succession management, performance management, executive coaching and employee engagement. She also consulted in the areas of management capacity building and strategic planning for USAID-funded projects for an international healthcare consulting firm.
Meredith graduated with an MBA, with concentrations in strategy and organizational behavior, from The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and earned her BA with honors from Brown University. She earned a Certificate in Leadership Coaching from Georgetown University and is credentialed as an Associate Certified Coach by the International Coach Federation. She is an authorized facilitator of The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® (MBTI®) and The Leadership Circle Profile™. She is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish.
About Mimi:
Mimi founded My Life’s Work Coaching & Consulting, in 2008. In addition to life and leadership coaching practice, Mimi consults with organizations on workforce engagement, learning and performance, and leadership development issues. She is a frequent speaker on these topics. Mimi authors a blog entitled Weekly Words where she proposes questions that spark opportunities for reflection and action.
Mimi’s interest is working with high-achieving working mothers is reflected in some of her specific services. In addition to her Working MAMA activities, she regularly offers workshops that provide an opportunity for women to explore their life’s work. Mimi is also coach for MOMreturns, an executive coaching program that works with women who are returning to work after having children.
Between 1996 and 2008, Mimi held senior management roles for Covance Inc, culminating her her position as Senior Manager for Training and Development. In this capacity, she led the design and execution of numerous leadership development programs. She also championed Covance’s diversity training program and created a number of different programs to support employee effectiveness in a diverse workplace. Another highlight of her tenure at Covance was the design and administration of a global mentoring program. In 2001, Mimi received a Covance Way Award (e.g. employee of the year), awarded to 2% of the workforce for her work on culture building activities and other HR initiatives.
Mimi began her professional career as a training manager for the National Network for Youth. In this position, she provided training design and delivery services to youth workers nationally in the areas of health prevention services (e.g. HIV/AIDS).
A health enthusiast personally, Mimi is also a fitness instructor.
Mimi is a graduate of Georgetown University’s Leadership Coaching Certificate Program. She earned a Masters Degree in Social Service Administration from the University of Chicago. She holds a double Bachelors Degree in Psychology/Creative Writing from the University Michigan in Ann Arbor where she was the recipient of a Hopwood Award for Underclassman Fiction Writing.