Kate Kenny, managing director of the DMA tax technology group, recently shared the experiences of her team of senior directors and team managers with the SCI GreatLeader development training program.
At DuCharme, McMillen, & Associates (DMA), we were ready to grow the business, but we were experiencing some personnel changes. We needed to promote several directors into managing director roles. We also had several team leaders ready to move to the next level. In preparation, we decided to offer a leadership skills training course.
Strategic Collisions came to do the training, and it was great. John listened to our needs and honed in on what we wanted to accomplish during the training. He customized a program for our senior leadership cohort with a capstone project which had us dig in and learn more and more. We began to take advantage of each other's strengths and natural abilities. As a group, we gained a common language that enabled us to have better discussions. It was really good because it brought us together as a group and melded us as a team, creating strength as a whole. All of this happened while learning key concepts and leadership strategies to help us move forward.
We got so much out of it that we felt it would be valuable to the larger team, so we followed it up with a second phase. We went back to the drawing board and identified a second cohort of our future leaders. John, at SCI, also customized this phase to serve our future leaders and infused their sessions with fundamental leadership material over eight sessions.
DMA is very entrepreneurial, and we're a young company with many skilled people from various backgrounds. The SCI training brought people together to have conversations about topics that involve our shared work day. One of the outcomes was that our leadership team began to lean in and work together in a new way. It's just something that happened naturally! Even though we've learned a lot of what I would consider 'hard' topics and skill topics, the outcomes are a little softer than the technical skills we learned through the program. That is a good outcome.
One highlight was experiencing the Highlands Ability Battery (HAB). We've done a lot of different tests, but the HAB goes down to your core. So, it's not just about what we've learned in our career or how we react to things, but it is about what abilities come to us naturally and the acceptance of that. Having that time with Dr. Tom to talk about ourselves and better understand ourselves was huge. Dr. Tom is like an oracle! A second highlight was the camaraderie we felt from just being in the same room with our team and learning about them. SCI made all that happen.
John and SCI have opened my eyes to many opportunities within our group. Because he came from outside our organization, he was able to offer the support that we needed. He acted as a sounding board for the things we were trying to do in our organization, which I think is really cool.
Right now, SCI is developing a new curriculum for us. This next training program is for our high-potential folks. So, he clearly listens to us and understands our specific needs, then creates a program that meets them. John and Dr. Tom are amazing! Both of them are easy to work with. They are understanding. They are empathetic. Also, SCI is very diligent about following up and making sure that we got out of the program what we wanted to get out of it. There's not a whole lot of people that do that. I've just loved working with SCI.
