Rethinking Leadership Development: A Personalized Approach
A Case Study

For years, leaders and aspiring leaders have been told that the way to become a better leader is to accumulate a certain amount of “leadership” skills. Unfortunately, that is not how the top academic organizational leadership programs have approached teaching leadership for decades. It is taught as a leadership improvement journey where aspiring leaders discover themselves as they develop their personal leadership philosophy and are provided ongoing mentoring throughout the program. The Healthcare Center of Excellence (HCOE) sought to apply a similar approach using tools to measure leadership improvement over time and produce results.

In an ongoing leadership development training program, the HCOE conducted 3 cohorts of the Professional Leadership Training (PLT) program at Norwegian American Hospital, a 200-bed, acute care facility on the northside of Chicago. The second cohort included leaders who reported directly or indirectly to the organization’s C-Level and other top executives to the leaders, who participated in the first cohort. The second cohort was the largest and the one which yielded the most data to analyze, which is the subject of this case study.

The proprietary Leadership Impact Survey (LIS) was used to quantify and monitor the results of the leadership improvement training, with the survey taken before the course and at 3-month, 6-month and 12-month increments after the course completion. When analyzing results from the pre-course survey to the 3-months post-course survey responses, the cohort realized leadership improvement from 3% to 22% across all 9 dimensions measured, with an average improvement of 10% and median of 8%.

Based on these results, it can be concluded that Professional Leadership Training is an effective program for improving leadership throughout an organization and can provide measurable results for an organization to track leadership improvement.