Establishing A Leadership Culture; How hard could that be?

In my 20 years of using teaching to establish leadership cultures, the last three years at Lexipol achieved some great results! What we achieved at Lexipol and how we went about it can be applied at any company, particularly in today’s remote working environment.

Recently, I asked students I've taught remotely if they would write testimonials on how my leadership classes had changed and enhanced their lives. I received very enthusiastic responses from all of the classes. I sat back, waiting for the feedback to come in while imagining praise of my outstanding facilitation skills and how the use of the leadership skills had yielded unimaginable results. What I received instead was praise about how the class had provided a common purpose to get to know others in the company while studying an important challenge; improving their leadership. After swallowing my ego a bit, I realized that this is what creating a leadership culture looked like for a remote work force, and that was the goal of creating the Corporate Leadership Academy in the first place.

Lexipol is a very successful content creation and technology company of 450+ employees, scattered around the nation. While it has always been a remote company, the explosive growth of employees has only come in the past 4 years. When COVID19 hit, we were already in remote mode, but that growth brought the same challenges that many companies experienced during the pandemic; isolation. And with isolation, it is hard to establish a culture, no less a leadership culture.

"Leadership culture" in a company refers to the collective values, beliefs, and behaviors of the organization's leaders and how those values, beliefs, and behaviors are demonstrated and promoted throughout the company. It involves establishing a shared understanding of what it means to be a leader within the organization, and creating an environment where leadership is valued and encouraged at all levels.

In 2020, the executive team at Lexipol observed that the views of leadership among the team had very little commonality. No common language or expectation of how leaders were to behave. So, we started a Mastermind group using John Maxwell’s Becoming a Person of Interest. This group included the CEO, all the C-levels and senior vice presidents. The results were incredibly positive, with the team deciding to make this class the foundation of the company’s leadership culture. This was the beginning of our Corporate Leadership Academy.

A company's leadership culture can have a significant impact on its success, both in terms of achieving business objectives and in creating a positive and fulfilling work environment for employees. A strong leadership culture can help attract and retain top talent, improve employee engagement and motivation, and drive innovation and growth within the organization.

What did we get from this?

• All C-levels, SVPs, VPs, Directors, Managers and high potential employees had voluntarily taken the foundation course and many had taken the advanced topic courses.

• We created common leadership language and values.

• We saw vast improvements in the development scores in the annual employee engagement survey.

• As a recruiting and retention tool the Corporation Leadership Academy has been of great interest by recruits and high potential employees.

The keys to success were:

• The classes were facilitated with a Maxwell Leadership certified trainer.

• Each foundation class was limited to 10 students, to promote an interactive environment.

• The most interactive Mastermind groups were the ones with many company functions represented (we’d have marketing, sales, content and software development in a single class).

• While I facilitated all of the classes, I also had my “day job” as CTO (which alone was a handful). So the number of classes I could teach was limited. This made the class spots more scarce and regarded as “more valuable.” It really meant something to get a spot in one of these classes.

• After a student was selected for an invitation, accepting the invitation was purely voluntary. It was important that this not be a forced class.

This experience was a great success and one that can be reproduced at any company. The value of the Corporate Leadership Academy is both short and long term, with clearly measurable results.

WinningTack is in a position to help you construct a Corporate Leadership Academy for your company. Give us a call, or better yet, schedule a “Free Consultation” with us. We’d love to talk to you about it!

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