Training Industry Magazine - March/April 2020 - 38

BUILDING LEADERSHIP:
SCALING EFFECTIVE DEVELOPMENT ALONGSIDE

By KJ Jenison

Companies grow, and people are
promoted who must develop their
leadership skills. It's a pattern as old as
business itself. Yet for many organizations,
it's become an elusive rainbow they
chase through changing circumstances.
Whether those be changes in revenuedriven priorities or who the key decision
makers are, these circumstances
tend to work against effectively and
sustainably developing leaders.
At Procore Technologies, all of this was
coming fast and all at once. In just a few
short years, Procore, a construction
management
software
company,
saw company and employee growth
accelerate at a rate by which standard
development programs and approaches
could not sustainably keep up.

IN ORDER TO
BE EFFECTIVE,
AGILITY IS
NEEDED.
Two concepts became critical for
success: Utilize an evidence-based
leadership framework that served
as an overarching operating system

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A FRAMEWORK FOR
EFFECTIVENESS

An effective leadership development
framework alongside hypergrowth works
well when rooted in improvisational
practices, as ambiguity is a guaranteed
certainty among organizations. Senior
leadership will always be in some state of
change. Organizational learning leaders
will come and go with model and tool
preferences that vary from one to the
other. To counterbalance this, Procore
learning and development (L&D) used a
singular framework as a stabilizer. One
that would act as an umbrella for any
model, tool or vendor that came along.
This afforded the benefit of housing
learning methodologies into a singular
operating system where every leader
could speak with one voice.

In order to be effective, agility is needed.
This is where organizational development
and the theatrical arts share common
ground. The same construct of agility
is used in the art of improvisational
acting: Your scene partner says or does
something, and you need to react in the
moment. Your instinct will most likely be
to toss whatever they did aside and lean
into something more comfortable for
you. However, in doing so, you miss out
on something truly magical - power of
"Yes and." In taking your partner's action,
agreeing to it and then adding a new
layer on top, the interaction becomes
an agile and inclusive experience for
everyone involved.

However, a unified leadership voice
alone cannot deliver on effectiveness.
Much like a singular framework acting
as an operating system, a 360-degree
assessment is needed to identify the
voices a leader needs to hear and listen
to in order to be an effective leader. Each
organization must decide what will work
best for them in collecting 360-degree
feedback. In a state of hypergrowth,
Procore chose to gather feedback on
frequency of leadership behaviors. By
providing leaders with feedback on
how frequently and effectively they
demonstrate leadership skills, they can
adapt a development plan that allows
them to flex in the uniqueness of their

regardless of vendors, and begin with
frontline leaders. It would have been
quite easy to follow the more traditional
method of starting a leadership
development program with executives
and senior leaders, working it downward
through the ranks. However, in the rapid
environment of a growing software as a
service (SaaS) company, this would have
left leadership relying on the momentum
of the program to keep up in enough
time for the language and frameworks
to reach frontline management. Instead,
a new trend and path was forged.
https://www.trainingindustry.com/glossary/software-as-a-service-saas/ https://www.trainingindustry.com/glossary/software-as-a-service-saas/
Training Industry Magazine - March/April 2020

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