Emerging Leader Development Programs
How do you identify leaders before they’re leaders and create change from the bottom up? At EDC, we believe emerging leader programs are the foundation of a successful talent pipeline and a key tool for companies to focus on the future. Our programs assess and identify key talent, develop leadership skills through real-world experiences, and engage senior executives in mentorship and support.
CASE
STUDY
Learn how we created an Emerging Leader Program people actually wanted to attend and united an inefficient and siloed organization.
THE CHALLENGE
Getting leaders to work across the organization
Our client, a large-scale manufacturer, spent years growing through aggressive acquisition. The resulting organization had the capabilities and capacity to tackle customers’ unique challenges, serving them at immense scale and in novel ways. However, each acquired business group had their own culture, values, and set of business norms. The result was a failure to deliver on promised value of the acquisitions.
​
The CHRO had worked with EDC at a previous organization and invited us in to help with their current challenge: senior leaders saw the need for a new way of working but needed a way to help their upcoming leaders unite under a new strategic vision—one that required them to give up old habits of success and embrace new, uncertain ones.
​
The program goals:
-
Realize how much their customers' worlds and therefore their needs had shifted.
-
Understand how a strategic approach where decision-making came from the center, rather than being implemented in each individual facility, would make the company more profitable.
-
Recognize that the changes, which often stood in direct contrast to existing practices, were enthusiastically supported by senior leadership.
-
Create a vision and culture for the company that the emerging leaders could carry to their reports.
THE SOLUTION
EDC’s emerging leader development program
Critical elements we incorporated into the experience included:​
-
Work with senior leadership to understand the vision for a united company and strategic direction.
-
Make the development experience feel like a great business meeting—not a boring class. A framework where our client’s emerging leaders learned new skills by investigating issues relevant to their work.
-
Engage a member of senior leadership to attend each cohort to provide context and process realizations. These senior representatives helped make the process transparent and served as a visible symbol of support and accountability.
-
Integrate internal and external experts into the experience to highlight how changes were unfolding industry-wide, and not just in this organization.
We ushered these emerging leaders through a common, self-driven realization: the world of their customer is drastically different, and they must embrace a new way of doing business to remain relevant and successful.
THE IMPACT
A fundamental reframe of business practices
The program we created alongside this client was voluntary for their talent. Emerging leaders organization-wide were invited to a cohort, but had to see the value in using their time to attend. To date, we’ve run 13 cohorts; that’s over 600 people that have chosen to attend.
The lessons learned have helped leaders change the practices of this organization, allowing them to more fully realize the promise of each acquisition strategically.
As one of the participants shared, “I can’t put numbers to the ROI of this program, but I guarantee it’s high.”
Meet the Team
Cade Cowan
Cade is known for his insightful understanding of leadership in today’s ambiguous environment. He began developing leaders as Director at Coca-Cola University’s Bottling Investments Group and has subsequently worked with executives, CEOs and boards from Microsoft, Hewlett Packard, Walmart, Aetna, PayPal, Johnson & Johnson, and more. He is the co-author of Leader: Balancing Contradictory Answers to Unsolvable Problems, published by Jossey-Bass in 2014.
James Brooks
James specializes in helping companies find, assess and develop world-class leaders and a robust talent pipeline. He has consulted with some of the world’s largest and most admired companies, including AbbVie, BlackRock, Cisco Systems, Morgan Stanley, Nike, the NBA, and Johnson & Johnson. James has a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational psychology from DePaul University where the focus of his graduate research was on 360-degree feedback and behavioral change.
High-impact solutions.
Distinctly human approach.
Ron Meeks
For the past 20 years, Ron has guided and supported global clients such as Johnson & Johnson, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Exelon, and Daimler AG in their strategies for developing senior leadership talent. Focusing on executive teams and boards, Ron uses his past experience as a line executive to design and deliver customized sessions that bring together strategy and leadership development.