Companies all over the world talk about investing in leadership development on company blogs, newsletters (like this one!) and on websites. Everyone wants to ensure their leaders are the best they can be. But what does that look like? Will the courses engage you and challenge you to do more? Are they aligned with the business needs? Maybe, but maybe not.
Spreetail is one of the unique companies that has always invested big in its leadership development. We’ve built world-class programs to help leaders do more for the business, their teams, and themselves. Our courses are measured by participants rating how relevant their experience is to the work they do. We don’t want fluff; we want to build leadership and life skills that will drive business and personal growth.
Our programs start with a high touch, four-month Leadership Development Program (LDP) run by our Sr. Talent Development Partner, Steph Buck. This program is for new leaders to gain the needed skills and knowledge to lead a team for the first time. In LDP, participants hone their skills on Spreetail’s philosophy of thought, people and business leadership. Our participants are nominated to be a part of the program by anyone in the company, including our CEO — talk about believing in the program at all levels! We are proud to have 95 Spreetailers who have graduated from LDP and even more proud of the double-digit promotion rate from individual contributor to manager for program graduates.
However, leadership development at Spreetail doesn’t stop there. We have ongoing courses for managers at all levels to learn coaching skills, courses for how to build vision, strategy, and goals for a team, and even a “Keeping it Legal” course for managers to ensure they know how to best support each team member through various employee relations issues. Our course catalog continues to evolve and support the business needs based on where we’re going and how we’re going to get there.
This sounds great, right? Well, our managers think it is too. For the manager courses, our current average is a 4.77 relevancy rating on a 5-point scale (4 is relevant and 5 is very relevant). We’re confident our leaders are gaining the right skills, because of the feedback they provide us.
If you’re evaluating potential workplaces, I’d encourage you to dig into their development opportunities to ensure you’ll have avenues to grow professionally and personally beyond onboarding or your first year. Growth for experienced leaders is just as vital as it is for those early in their careers.
We’re proud of the programs we’ve created to date and love the challenge of continually identifying opportunities to further invest in the development of our leaders and help our team pursue the Spreetail mantra “Raise Your Bar.”
Sr. Talent Development Manager
