Maria Mentzer
Release the performance trapped inside your organization | Enterprise Performance Leader | CMO, See to Solve
Sacramento, California, United States
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Maria Mentzer helps leaders build winning teams that create more value, better and faster. Whether success means growth, profitability, quality, customer satisfaction, shorter cycle times, flexibility or resilience, creating value together is a skill that teams and leaders can develop. Maria has a proven recipe for developing it.
As CMO of See to Solve, Maria helps organizations release the performance trapped in the people and resources they already have. Building on the research of her colleague and operational excellence thought leader Steve Spear, she developed the Model Line Workshop and a practice recipe that helps teams and leaders turn value-creating behaviors into habits. She has tested and honed her recipe through delivering hundreds of Model Line Workshops across healthcare, high tech, global consumer businesses and government, spanning a wide range of business functions.
Maria brings more than 20 years of leadership experience across engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, operations, sales and marketing. Her work has grown from leading improvements inside Intel to helping leaders and teams tackle complex performance challenges across organizations. She is an MIT Leaders for Global Operations alumna.
Her specialty is making improvement ridiculously easy through a “just show up to practice” approach. Teams solve problems that matter to them and see immediate results, with leaders developing alongside them. Growing skill, belonging and visible progress make the experience so valuable that people get hooked and ask to come back for more. That intrinsic motivation keeps them practicing, discovering opportunities, testing changes and spreading what works.
As practice spreads across an organization, the gains compound. Maria has led improvement efforts and coached leaders and teams in organizations with thousands of people. Her work has helped a semiconductor fab move from average cycle times to the fastest in the world, a business unit rise from bottom-ranked customer scores to number one, and naval shipyard teams move from late delivery to ahead of schedule.
Maria brings energy, humor and real-world stories to the stage, along with a soft spot for skeptics. She loves the moment someone discovers they can change a problem they had learned to live with. Her talks share a recipe honed in real work, inviting audiences to question familiar routines, recognize what is holding their own teams back and discover how much more is possible.
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Give Them the Ball: Stop Chasing Buy-In. Make Getting Better Together Addictive
What would make your most skeptical team member ask to come back for more improvement practice? What would make their leader want to join them?
Maria Mentzer has spent years developing and honing a proven recipe for exactly that. Through hundreds of Model Line Workshops across industries and business functions, she has made improvement ridiculously easy to enter and such a valuable experience that people get hooked.
Teams solve problems that matter to them and see immediate results. Leaders develop alongside them, practicing how to help. Growing skill, belonging and visible progress build the intrinsic motivation to keep going. With continued practice, value-creating behaviors become habits, learning spreads and the gains compound.
In this energetic, story-driven session, Maria shares what makes that experience work, including the preparation and support that make “just show up to practice” possible. She connects her practical recipe with the research of her colleague and Operatinal Excellence thought leader, Steve Spear, and draws on real engagements to show how much performance organizations can release from the people they already have.
Expect humor, a familiar skeptic and a chance to examine your own approach. You’ll identify one barrier that makes improvement difficult in your organization and choose a change that makes practice easier, more meaningful and worth coming back for.
Format: Interactive keynote or conference presentation, adaptable to 30–45 minutes.
Audience: Leaders, continuous improvement and operational excellence practitioners, transformation leads, and anyone responsible for helping teams improve how they work.
Participants will:
• Identify a barrier that makes improvement difficult to start or sustain.
• Explain how meaningful practice builds skill and intrinsic motivation in teams and leaders together.
• Choose one practical change that helps people participate, create value and want to keep improving.
Win with the Team You Already Have: Release the Performance Trapped Inside Your Organization
How much more could your organization achieve with the people and resources it already has? What would change if teams could see problems earlier, solve them faster and spread what they learn?
Creating more value together is a skill that teams and leaders can develop. Maria Mentzer has spent years developing and honing a proven recipe for building it, drawing on operating-leadership experience and hands-on delivery of hundreds of Model Line Workshops.
In this energetic, story-driven session, Maria shows how leaders help release performance through everyday work. Teams tackle problems that matter to them, test changes and see immediate results. Leaders develop alongside them, practicing how to create the conditions for improvement and coach their teams through it.
The experience builds skill, belonging and visible progress. People get hooked and want to keep going. As that practice spreads, the gains compound across the organization.
Building on the research of her colleague and Operational Excellence thought leader, Steve Spear, Maria connects the leader’s daily behavior with an organization’s ability to learn, innovate and deliver. She shares lessons from work that has helped teams move from average performance to industry-leading results.
Expect humor, candid stories and a chance to examine your own leadership habits. You’ll identify one barrier holding your team back and choose a practical change in how you lead, support or coach improvement.
Format: Interactive keynote or leadership conference presentation, adaptable to 30–45 minutes.
Audience: Executives, business-unit and functional leaders, operations leaders, and managers responsible for team performance and leadership development.
Participants will:
• Recognize how leadership behavior can help or hinder a team’s ability to create more value.
• Explain how teams and leaders develop skill and intrinsic motivation through meaningful practice.
• Choose one change in how they lead, support or coach improvement.
This is the leadership-focused adaptation of Maria’s flagship talk. Examples and emphasis can be tailored to the audience and industry.
AME Milwaukee 2026 International Conference
Presenter and facilitator, “Release the Performance Already Inside Your Organization.”
Four-hour interactive workshop combining a leadership case and hands-on simulation to help leaders build continuous improvement into everyday work.
Executive Immersion | Automotive Supplier
Co-leader and facilitator of a three-day executive immersion hosted at a Toyota Tier-1 automotive supplier.
Leaders practiced observing real work, identifying problems, testing improvements and reflecting on the leadership behaviors that help teams learn and create value. The experience connected executive leadership development with hands-on practice in an operating environment.
Cross-Industry Leader Immersion | Distribution Center
Co-leader and facilitator of a 2.5-day leader immersion hosted at a global consumer goods distribution center, bringing together leaders from multiple industries.
Participants practiced seeing problems in real work, developing and testing improvements, and sharing what they learned. The experience helped leaders develop their own skills while practicing how to support learning and improvement within their teams.
COO Leadership Team Workshop | Global Consumer Goods Company
Presenter and facilitator of an interactive leadership workshop at a COO staff meeting.
Participants explored the leader’s role as sponsor and coach through the Jack Smith case, then applied the learning by collaboratively mapping two real processes. The session connected leadership development directly to seeing and improving the work.
Executive Leadership Accelerator | Global Consumer Goods Company
Presenter and facilitator, “Unleash Your People’s Problem-Solving Potential.”
Half-day executive leadership-development session exploring how leaders build teams that see problems early, solve them together and spread what they learn. Participants examined their roles as sponsors and coaches, assessed their leadership capabilities and developed personal practice plans.
Healthcare Systems Process Improvement Conference 2025
Co-presenter with Steve Spear, “Wiring the Winning Organization: Creating unassailable value to society through managing the ‘social circuitry’ of a learning organization.”
A 90-minute intensive session in the Operational Excellence & Resilience track, exploring how leaders build organizations that see problems, solve them and learn faster through their work.
Northeast Lean Conference 2024
Speaker, “How I Wired a Winning Organization.”
A practitioner presentation drawing on Maria’s experience building high-velocity learning and organizational performance, showing how teams and leaders develop the behaviors that help them create more value together.
AME Atlanta 2024 International Conference
Co-presenter and workshop facilitator with Steve Spear.
Interactive workshop combining practical examples, lessons learned and “ideas into action” breakout activities to help participants apply Lean, Agile and DevOps principles.
DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas 2023
Speaker, “How I Wired the Winning Organization!”
A practitioner presentation on building high-velocity learning and organizational performance, drawing on leadership experience at Intel and hands-on work with teams.
Blue Yonder ICON 2022
Customer panelist representing Solidigm, where Maria served as Senior Director of Global Operations. Participated in a recorded, interview-style customer discussion in the ICON exhibit hall.
Maria Mentzer
Release the performance trapped inside your organization | Enterprise Performance Leader | CMO, See to Solve
Sacramento, California, United States
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