Leadership Elevated
I took a fragmented training system and rebuilt it into a cohesive journey for 250 managers.
Project Overview
Dallas College needed a unified leadership culture, but they were starting with a blank slate. I joined a team to design and launch "Leaders at all Levels," a tiered development program built from the ground up. We did not build a generic management course. We created four distinct paths based on actual career stages.
The curriculum was rooted in Situational Leadership, but heavily tailored to the real friction points our leaders faced every day.
The Challenge
When you promote people without training them, you get high turnover and inconsistent management. Newly promoted leaders were struggling because they had no clear path forward. The business goal was heavy but necessary: build a sustainable program that actually teaches managers how to lead, not just how to approve timesheets. We needed to boost retention and get teams functioning properly.
My Role
As the Lead Learning Experience Designer for the "Leading Others" track, I owned the curriculum strategy, competency modeling, and content development for a cohort of 250 managers.
The launch was a success. Because of that, my scope expanded to designing specialized sessions for senior leaders, and eventually running a college-wide initiative to roll out values-based workshops for all employees.
The Approach & Process
Rebuilding a curriculum requires understanding the actual humans going through it. Here is how I broke down the problem.
Needs Analysis & Discovery
You cannot design a solution if you do not understand the problem. I skipped the standard mass surveys and went straight to the source. I ran focus groups, interviewed managers one-on-one, and dug into performance data. I needed to find the actual skill gaps, not just the perceived ones.
Competency Model Development
The discovery phase proved that a single, generic training track was going to fail. Before we built a single module, my team and I mapped out a targeted competency model specifically for the mid-level management group. We needed a clear, objective benchmark for what good leadership actually looked like in our environment.
Blended & Learner-Centric Design
Managers are busy. Put them in a room for an eight-hour lecture, and they will just answer emails on their laptops. I designed a blended journey instead. We used self-paced eLearning for the foundational concepts, followed by highly interactive, peer-driven workshops. Every single workbook and slide had to pass one strict test: could they apply it on the job the next day?
Gamified & Mission-Driven Onboarding
New leader onboarding used to be a massive, passive PowerPoint deck. I scrapped it and designed a custom board game instead. It covered the dry stuff like college history and divisional roles, but it forced people to interact and negotiate. It proved that institutional onboarding does not have to be boring.