LEAD Awards 2018: Interview with Jessica Jones, Conductix-Wampfler

Honing Management and Leadership Skills

  Category: Best Social Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing 
  LEAD AWARD RANK: 13
 
  Organization: Conductix-Wampfler
  Program: Foundations for Management and Leadership
  Program Director: Jessica Jones
  Visit: www.conductix.us
   
Our editorial team interviewed Jessica Jones from Conductix-Wampfler at the LEAD2018 Awards this past February. Here are some excerpts from the exclusive interview.
 
What is the overall objective of your program?
The overall objective for Foundations for Management and Leadership is to provide an opportunity for our middle management to increase their skills in management and leadership. The emphasis in this program stresses that if they are a manager in the company, they need to be a leader in order to really guide and inspire their employees. It provides leadership theory and lots of resources on how to improve as a leader. Another huge benefit is the networking opportunity. These managers learn from each other’s experiences and struggles, building better networks and relationships within cross-functional teams.
 

Who do you impact with your program?
This program targets all mid-level management; however, if the program strengthens the managers, in essence it will strengthen all their employees, making the whole company stronger!
 
What are the lessons you’ve learned this year from facilitating your program?
The biggest lesson learned from the program is that we can’t just provide the content in the monthly session and expect them to go do it. Habits are hard to break and forming new habits takes effort and requires being mindful of needing to do it. We had to provide follow-up resources to refer back to the content, keep the messages front and center. Activities putting the knowledge into action was critical. Without the follow-up piece we weren’t getting the behavior change we were looking for. Once we gave very specific tasks, homework, articles to read with coaching as a follow-up the program started to see far more success with behavioral changes.
 
How do you measure the return on investment and success of the program?
We measure the return on the investment and success of the program by evaluating the differences in the manager’s 360 results from their peers and direct reports. We also evaluate our employee engagement survey. We can look at the ratings for specific departments and benchmark against previous year’s survey. The annual engagement survey also gives us topics that tend to score well and score low so we can evaluate that against our curriculum in the program to see if we are touching the right topics and if we are, should we enhance what we are teaching in an area that perhaps we are still scoring low in.
 
What lies ahead for the program and how will it continue to succeed?
The program will continue. We are always promoting from within and continue to have new supervisors. The need to boost those in management and leadership positions is so critical because they are only as strong as the knowledge, tools and resources they have. We will also be offering the program to those we see as high potential employees to assist in succession planning. Taking high potential employees and fueling them with leadership resources, knowledge and practice before taking a formal leadership role will ensure they are much more successful and up to speed faster in a future role.
 

 

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