Build strategic learning solutions.
Building the Future Leadership Pipeline:
Business Challenge: The organization had no formal leadership development, succession planning, or career development framework. Employees lacked a clear understanding of growth opportunities, leaders had no standardized approach for developing talent, and there was no structured learning path to prepare employees for future roles.
Strategic Solution: Partnered with senior leadership to develop a comprehensive leadership development strategy that aligned employee growth with organizational needs. Together, we defined career stages, established three distinct development pathways, and created a structured learning framework to support employees pursuing Individual Contributor, Management, or Executive career paths.
My Contribution: Working in partnership with senior leaders and my Vice President, I helped transform leadership development from an informal process into a structured talent development strategy. My role focused on translating business goals into scalable learning solutions that supported employee growth, leadership readiness, and succession planning.
Working collaboratively with stakeholders, I:
- Ensured the framework was scalable and aligned with organizational priorities.
- Facilitated discussions to define leadership competencies and career stages.
- Partnered with executive leadership to establish three organizational career pathways.
- Designed a progressive learning framework aligned with each stage of career development.
- Developed competency-based learning journeys for Individual Contributor, Management, and Executive pathways.
- Created structured development plans that supported leadership readiness and long-term talent growth.
Key Deliverables: To support a consistent and scalable leadership development strategy, I developed:
- Individual Contributor learning pathway
- Management learning pathway
- Executive leadership learning pathway
- Competency-based learning journeys
- Development roadmaps
- Succession planning support framework
Business Value: The leadership development framework established a consistent approach to employee growth, leadership readiness, and succession planning across the organization. By providing clearly defined career pathways and progressive learning opportunities, the initiative increased transparency around career development, strengthened internal talent pipelines, and created a scalable strategy for developing future leaders.
Key Takeaways: Leadership development is most effective when it is intentional, structured, and aligned with organizational goals. By partnering with senior leaders to define career pathways and build competency-based learning journeys, we created a sustainable development strategy that supports employees throughout their careers while strengthening the organization’s long-term leadership pipeline
Navigating Resistance and Building Buy-In:
Executive leadership wanted experienced internal leaders to play a meaningful role in developing our new supervisors. The vision was to capitalize on the strong leadership talent already within the organization and give new supervisors access to something traditional training alone could not provide: real-world leadership experience.
The approach would also create a reciprocal development opportunity, allowing existing leaders to strengthen their facilitation, public speaking, storytelling, and knowledge-transfer skills.
However, the initial response included some understandable resistance.
Many leaders were already managing demanding workloads and competing operational priorities. For some, being asked to facilitate a leadership workshop felt like an additional responsibility on an already full plate. There was also a perception that developing and delivering training should primarily sit with the Training team.
Rather than pushing forward without addressing those concerns, I used our leadership development strategy meeting to create clarity around the intent of the program and redefine what we were asking leaders to do.
The message was simple: We were not asking leaders to become trainers. We were asking them to share what only they could bring to the room: their experience as leaders.
I positioned Training as a strategic partner that would do much of the development work. We would provide the structure, learning content, PowerPoint support, activities, scenarios, videos, games, facilitation preparation, and other resources needed to build each workshop.
This allowed leaders to focus on bringing their experiences, lessons learned, practical examples, and authentic perspectives into the conversation.
Together, we discussed workshop assignments, available resources, individual support needs, and how we would partner throughout development and delivery.
That conversation changed the dynamic. As leaders understood that they would be supported rather than handed another project, the initial resistance began to shift toward engagement and ownership.
What followed was a true partnership between Training and organizational leadership.
Leaders brought real-world scenarios and experiences into their sessions, while Training helped translate those experiences into structured, interactive learning. Workshops evolved beyond simply delivering information and became opportunities for discussion, reflection, problem-solving, storytelling, and practical application.
The result extended beyond the development of new supervisors.
The leader-led approach helped:
- Strengthen relationships between new supervisors and experienced leaders
- Encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing across teams
- Provide existing leaders with opportunities to develop their facilitation and knowledge-transfer skills
- Give new supervisors access to authentic leadership experiences and real-world scenarios
- Create greater ownership of leadership development outside of the Training function
- Reinforce the idea that developing future leaders is a shared leadership responsibility
What began as resistance to an additional responsibility became an opportunity for leaders to invest in one another, share their experiences, and collectively shape the leadership culture we wanted to build.
Brent Folio 