Building a Leadership Development Framework for Two Distinct Groups at Excelitas

Excelitas turned to ExecOnline's Enterprise Experience to provide premium, high-impact leadership development programs for two different groups of leaders.

Excelitas Technologies needed to provide premium, high-impact leadership development programs for two groups under the same L&D umbrella.

Excelitas specializes in innovative technology — and uses that innovative mindset across the entire organization.

With a combination of electronics, optics, light sources, sensors, and detectors, Excelitas emphasizes high-performance, market-driven solutions. As a leading OEM provider, Excelitas is accustomed to working with unique requirements and creating end-to-end strategies and innovations for its wide variety of clients.

How do you build one leadership development strategy that can address the needs of two different groups?

After conducting company-wide talent reviews, Excelitas’ L&D team discovered that while managers’ needs were consistent, each executive had to solve very specific business challenges, which required a plan to build on their unique strengths and enhance certain skills

“The programs that ExecOnline offers are fantastic in supporting our leaders and their individual needs.’ That positive experience helped us decide to expand our offerings.” – Steve Jones, Vice President Talent Management & Organisation Development

ExecOnline developed a plan to develop Excelitas’ leaders at all levels with market-driven learning insights.

ExecOnline’s experts started by better understanding Excelitas’ development needs for both executives and managers, along with the organization’s key priorities. Together, they identified six programs from Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, among others, that would create the biggest business impact:

• Driving Digital Transformation
• Implementing Winning Strategies
• Building & Leading Effective Teams
• Fostering Inclusion & Diversity
• Accelerating Change Readiness & Agility
• Launch Into Leadership

ExecOnline developed a plan to develop Excelitas’ leaders at all levels with market-driven learning insights.

Each program included high-impact, strategically-aligned projects that participants could implement at Excelitas. It didn’t take long for Excelitas’ employees to start sharing positive feedback about their ExecOnline experiences — including the way they connected learning to real-life challenges in a flexible, bite-sized format.  

Being online only amplified the benefits.

With employees spread out across North America, Europe, and Asia, Excelitas did not want any of their busy executives and managers to have to travel to learn in a traditional classroom setting. The combination of asynchronous and synchronous content gave everyone the freedom to learn on their own schedules and get 1:1 coaching, while still connecting for networking opportunities and breakout groups. 

Excelitas even went a step further by creating monthly action learning sets to review the course material, which gave participants a sense of community. As a result of ExecOnline’s programs, Excelitas was able to increase its efficiency and its retention.