Community-Based Projects Help Develop Leaders and Local Nonprofits

One of the things I love most about leading the Success Labs team is the community involvement that’s built into our Leadership Coaching Series and Management Incubator programs.

About 10 years ago, the Success Labs team set out to create an engaging and interactive strategic leadership development experience for business leaders in the area surrounding Baton Rouge, Louisiana. What we came up with was the Leadership Coaching Series -- a way to develop those leaders while also developing local nonprofit organizations and supporting the community in other ways as well.Now we run one of these five-week programs three times a year for classes of 12 to 14 leaders from a wide range of industries and organizations and have helped develop more than 500 leaders. Here’s how:

Community-Based Projects

While the primary goal of the Leadership Coaching Series is to help business leaders develop critical competencies, the key to making that happen is the community-based projects at the heart of the series. Instead of creating a problem or picking one out of a management book, we partner with real Baton Rouge-area nonprofits such as Kids’ Orchestra and Volunteers of America Greater Baton Rouge, and have our participants tackle one of their real challenges.

In the past, challenges have included addressing questions such as “How do we attract and engage a board of directors?” and “How do we create and launch a flagship fundraiser?” Each session of the Leadership Coaching Series is divided into two groups of six or seven leaders who work together to come up with a solution to the challenge presented to them in person by staff members at the nonprofit they’ll be working for. Then the groups’ final deliverable from the experience is a presentation of their solution to those staff members.

Leadership Coaching

Leaders in the program meet one day each week for five weeks to work on developing their solution and a way to present it. They also receive intensive leadership coaching from the Success Labs team. This includes some 360-degree feedback and coaching for each participant.

Instead of simply describing common leadership scenarios, showing videos or having participants lead role-play experiences, we hire local actors like Celeste Angelle Veillon to come in and work with the group. We love supporting these local artists and the participants get a better experience from engaging in role play scenarios with people who refuse to break character and force them to work through challenges.

Research shows  skills such as creativity, dealing with ambiguity, strategic agility and innovation management are several leadership competencies that are in short supply and high demand in the business world. To help build these in our participants, we engage local artist Kathleen Lemoine to work with the class as the teams create a collaborative piece of art then use the energy and fresh perspectives from the creative process to address new aspects of the community based project that that they are working on in class.

Lemoine describes the process of making a collaborative encaustic painting to a group of leaders as a one which can help them in “recognizing, trusting and encouraging the creative leap in solutions to business challenges.”

Key lessons that we hope participants learn from the experience are that creativity exists in everyone; and that, through the creative process and looking at problems from different angles, you can produce innovative and unexpected results.

Management Incubator

The Leadership Coaching Series was such a success in further developing experienced business leaders that we wanted to create a similar experience to help emerging leaders grow into their first management roles. Like in the Leadership Coaching Series, participants in our twice-a-year Management Incubator program get a lot of intensive coaching, just on more basic skills such as managing former peers and giving feedback in a productive way.

Management Incubator participants also do a hands-on project for a local nonprofit. We give each group $250 to start out and the option to raise more on their own to further fund their efforts. The groups are then responsible creating a project budget and plan, and then for carrying it out before the end of the program. These projects have included creating a vegetable garden and a barbeque area for the VOA Garfield House for Veterans and redoing the therapy and recreation areas for VOA’s Parker House.

With both the Management Incubator and the Leadership Coaching Series, we get the chance to work with amazing business leaders and do something positive for the Baton Rouge community. We also love the positive feedback we get from participants and their employers.

Want to learn more about how your organization's leaders can grow while helping build the community? Contact us about enrolling them in the Leadership Coaching Series or Management Incubator.

Success Labs is a full-service, strategic organizational and leadership development company located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.