The Future Leaders Experience
This is a pilot Leadership and Development program leveraging WeWork’s spaces and expertise in bringing people together with Spencer Stuart's insights into leadership. The Future Leaders Experience is creating a community of 40 future leaders from some of the most admired companies and equipping them to accelerate their career growth and have an out sized impact on their organizations. As a Project Lead, I am in charge of turning this innovation experiment from conceptual ideas into concrete tasks, and delegating these tasks to appropriate Spencer Stuart and WeWork team members, facilitating all meetings, creating deadlines, and leading all design initiatives. I also facilitate the workshops for the event.
Over the course of three sessions, the program delves into three core areas — Growth, Vision, and Culture. The sessions are designed around experiences that put the content by experts into practice. More importantly, we are creating a community of learners with whom participants will create meaningful and sustained relationships to continue the learning journey beyond the three sessions.
See overall website.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Team Lead
Curriculum Design
Workbook design + Facilitator Guides
Marketing + Graphic Design
Event Planning Management
Facilitator for 8 hours (4 hours each) over 2 days
See event website and workbook.
THE INCEPTION
The project stemmed from a desire among six Spencer Stuart associates to increase brand recognition among their peers through a community happy hour. After discussing this vision with a consultant, Jim Citrin, who later became the project sponsor, the team decided to create a Leadership and Development program with WeWork, a brand with high brand recognition. I was enlisted to lead the team and turn these loose conceptual ideas into reality through concrete tasks. Everyone on the project spent several months reaching out to clients and networks to gauge interest and identify needs. After synthesizing feedback and reviewing similar programs, I helped create marketing collateral to outline our program's goals and expectations. From there, we asked clients and networks to nominate one future leader from their organization to join this cohort.
PROCESS
Using my background in design, research, and curriculum development, I bridged between Spencer Stuart and WeWork. I combined a conceptual and systematic approach to create the program. After we defined the vision and goals of our team, I helped define clear roles and responsibilities such as Engagement leads in charge of recruiting the cohort, to Communications leads who are the point of contacts with the selected cohort, and Event Planning leads helping with logistics such as catering. Once specific tasks were defined, I created a framework for the overall curriculum days. Once these were reviewed by leading experts and solidified, I facilitated short sprints for specific portions for the curriculum. Each session was then followed by team debrief and feedback sessions to ensure the Spencer Stuart associates will also continue to grow leadership skills from this project.
When creating the curriculum, I helped push the boundaries from an inclusive community building point of view. In terms of community building, instead of only using traditional trust exercises, I built new activities based on analogous research. For example, I created a Powerful Questioning activity based on Arthur Aron's research to create interpersonal closeness. Aron's research shows that by asking "36 questions" that could lead to love. I used his framework, adapted the questions to a group activity to facilitate with the cohort. When I asked the cohort at the end of the activity how they were feeling, I internally jumped up with joy when two participants exclaimed "WE'RE NEW BEST FRIENDS! WE FELL IN LOVE!" (photo of them can be seen in the last photo)
THE RESULT
We received a 9.36 out of 10 rating from our guests on our content / curriculum and are continuing to test and create more activity-based learning opportunities. Our lowest score came from event planning, with a 7.89 on Food/Drinks/Snacks. To further engage this community, the next event featured food and drinks from the participants, including Kombucha from the Founder of Kombrewcha.