Corporate Academy

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Great leaders know that it’s not enough to have talented employees, or even motivated teams. You also have to develop a healthy culture. 

“Culture is not just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.” —Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM

• Employees are challenged and fulfilled
• Everyone treats others with respect and collaborates well
• Workers give discretionary effort to help the team and clients win

Leaders who understand the value of a healthy culture often fail to achieve their goal. Here are some typical reasons:

1. Mediocre training: Most corporate training is pretty bad. Pre-packaged lectures, time-consuming data dumps, and ineffective “team bonding” exercises fail to deliver lasting impact. After the fun wears off and the work resumes, the culture returns to its old habits. The most common mistake is relying too much on information and not enough on action learning and real-time coaching.
2. Scattershot approach: Instead of investing consistently over the long haul, some leaders try scattering well-intentioned retreats and town halls on the calendar without any strategic plan for lasting change. Because these activities don’t build toward a solid framework, managers and leaders can’t use them to build a company on solid values and skills.
3. Lack of Executive Involvement: Seeing culture as some else’s job (HR? COO?), the CEO will try to delegate culture development. The message employees receive is that this isn’t the highest priority.

“Great companies don’t hire skilled people and motivate them, they hire motivated people and inspire them.” —Simon Sinek, Start with Why

Every corporate academy we build is customized to your culture and mission. Here are a few of the ingredients: 

• Cultural Audit: We start by listening. You already know something about why your company exists and what makes it tick. We help identify the core behaviors of your culture and the critical leadership capacities for your business. Then we help craft language that can be easily understood, remembered, and modeled by your managers and leaders.   
• Three Pillars of Leadership: Enduring business success is built on three pillars of leadership: a securely centered leader, extreme team engagement, and elite client experience. This model informs our approach to all of our leadership development programs.   
• Assessments: If leaders don’t know their natural abilities, strengths, and personal style, they can get in their own way as they try to move their teams forward. We include assessments in every level of the Academy so that your leaders are not just gaining responsibility over time, they are becoming the best versions of themselves.   
• Interactive Training: When it comes to training leaders, we believe that it’s not what we say that matters, it’s what people hear. And what helps them hear, process, and apply training the best are interactive, multimodal learning experiences. We leverage decades of teaching and training experience to create customized training programs that reinforce the company values and move the bottom line. Some clients even say they are “fun”.   
• Coaching: Most employees already know some ways they can improve. So what’s stopping them? Coaching is the best way to provide the balance of support and encouragement they need to be accountable for results. Our experienced, certified executive coaches bring the firepower to help employees apply what they learn and get results that matter.   
• Iteration: After piloting the initial design of any Academy program, we solicit feedback and debrief. This process helps us improve the program as we roll it out to future cohorts.

“RKE Partners helped us turn our leadership development vision into a reality. We shared our dream, they truly listened. RKE brought data and expertise to the process and helped us deliver an enterprise-wide leadership training and skill building suite that felt homegrown. Our academy has become the talk of our company with stellar Net Promoter Scores and a waiting list. All this has been accomplished in a PE-backed, rapid-growth environment where the increased engagement, productivity, and retention benefits of the investment must be clearly demonstrated. If you’re looking for a partner to uplevel specific leaders or create a bespoke approach to your management pipeline, I highly recommend RKE.”

—Matt Reilly, President and CEO of Randall Reilly 

Every engagement begins with a complimentary consultation. Through this conversation with members of our team, you bring us up to speed on your desired outcomes.