Issue link: http://www.insightdigital.biz/i/1323073
B Y M A R Y B E T H M AT Z E K P H O T O G R A P H B Y S H A N E VA N B O X T E L / I M A G E S T U D I O S w w w . i n s i g h t o n b u s i n e s s . c o m J a n u a r y 2 0 2 1 • I NSIGH T | 13 PERSONALITIES Cultivating leadership of leadership professionals from around the country that helped us put this program together. When we started the program, its focus was on executive leaders, which are leaders that are already in the C-suite or vice presidents. ere is another program for senior leaders, which is for senior managers and those at the director level who may at some point move into a C-suite role. e core curriculum and content are really the same, but the conversations, the depth at which we get into some of the topics, look very different because of the roles that people play within their organization. We are intentional about making sure that we have people slotted into the correct cohort. How have companies responded? What's really interesting is that organizations approach us. When I go and work with an organization, I try to understand what their leadership development, process or pipeline looks like. We want to enhance and collaborate with that — enhance their current programming and collaborate with them, versus replace what they're doing. A good example is working with U.S. Venture. ey have a great internal program and we are the capstone to their internal program. Aer employees have gone through that internal program, they are sent here to go through our senior- or executive-level programs. We've had organizations approach us as well and say their leadership development is somewhat scattered and they need a foundational program for new and emerging leaders. at led to the creation of a foundational leadership program that launched last fall. Rather than a 16-month intensive program, it's an eight-month program, but we still base all the sessions around those aspects of leadership that define exceptional leadership and what those behaviors look like. In eight sessions, we're going to start planting the seeds of what exceptional leadership looks like. Everybody knows they need to develop their skills. It's an investment in time and making the financial investment in their people, and companies know they need to do that, but they get so busy with all the day-to- day stuff. Life gets in the way and it's hard sometimes to make that investment that's required. It's really a value proposition: If your employee takes this time now, they will become a better leader in the future, which can only help the company. There's also a program for nonprofit leaders. Yes, I was approached one-and-a-half to two years ago by a group of Green Bay area nonprofit leaders who told me they were getting together informally, but they didn't feel like they were getting what they needed. ey exhausted what they had been talking about and were looking for a facilitated program model to further their leadership discussions. at led to a nonprofit leadership forum at St. Norbert. We meet nine times per year and talk about what's going well and what may not be going so well. It's a peer advisory group that operates in what we call a holding environment, which is you're coming to a safe space to be able to talk about things and what's said within that space stays within that space. For the second half of the meeting, we'll bring in a thought leader on a different topic they want to really explore a little bit more. We've talked about things like adaptive leadership, confidence, team dynamics, communication … a lot of different areas. We've had so much success that we're starting a second nonprofit forum (this month). Nonprofit leaders know they need development, but their budgets don't always allow it. is is our opportunity to give back to the community in a way that allows us to. If we can help make the nonprofit groups even stronger, that's even better for our community. How has COVID-19 affected the CEL's programs? In March when everything really shut down, we stopped programming for a couple of weeks and pulled our team together, and using a quote from Scott Propp, one of our facilitators, we asked ourselves: What can we do even better in this environment than we did previously? ose words really framed our thinking. It wasn't, what can't we do? It was, what can we do even better? We had 11 cohorts at the time and had to move them all to a virtual environment. We had to train our lead facilitators how to be lead facilitators in a virtual environment. We had to figure out which platforms we had to change over. It wasn't about the content but how the curriculum was delivered since content can look different in a virtual environment. And honestly, I think we have done an outstanding job, because the feedback that we've received from the participants has been, "You guys are knocking it out of the park."