Creating Leaders at Scale at Vonage

As a rapidly growing global organization, Vonage needed to show employees its dedication to their individual growth and development.

Two things have always made Vonage stand out — its leadership and its agility.

Throughout nearly two decades of changes and disruption in the technology space, Vonage has stayed ahead of the curve and built the world’s most flexible cloud communications platform. Amidst all of the transformation, the company always placed a high emphasis on being a sought-after place to work and growing its existing talent through leadership development.

How do you meet expectations for your leadership development initiatives in a company that’s constantly growing?

Vonage needed a formalized leadership development program that could scale as quickly as the rest of the company did. It wanted to provide a suite of targeted offerings to leaders at all levels throughout the world, while also making learning flexible and convenient.

Adding to the challenge, the company had gone through nine acquisitions in the four years before it began working with ExecOnline, which meant all of the incoming leaders had different ideas and expectations about how their careers could — and should — grow.

“A number of participants asked ‘Can we get more classes and can we put some of our team members through some of these classes?’ That positive experience helped us decide to expand our offerings.” – Sue Quackenbush, Chief Human Resources Officer

Vonage turned to ExecOnline to provide flexible, transformational leadership development experiences.

Because Vonage is a huge organization with busy professionals spread out across the globe, the company knew its leadership development had to happen online. 

ExecOnline’s experts began by gaining an understanding of Vonage’s biggest business needs and priorities. There were four areas Vonage wanted to focus on:

• Strategy and Innovation
• Leadership
• Execution
• Manager Essentials

From there, Vonage and ExecOnline developed a plan to identify the right programs for the right participants. 

With a combination of programs from Columbia, Yale, MIT and Berkeley, as well as ExecOnline’s own management essentials offerings, employees could log in from anywhere and take part in challenging, relevant experiences that encouraged them to engage, advance their career development, and develop new skills to help them grow at Vonage. 

As the number of participants grew, so did the number of opportunities.

When the programs began creating a buzz among Vonage’s employees, ExecOnline expanded the offering — including accelerated programs, solutions for high-potential emerging leaders, initiatives dedicated to women in leadership, and a special emphasis on developing both first-time and established leaders. As a result, Vonage’s leaders are successfully broadening their networks and collaborating cross-functionally, leading to business impacts that are presented to the C-suite at the completion of each program.