Training APEX Awards Best Practice: Kraft Heinz’ Leadership Masters

Leadership Masters is a multi-modal blended program that leverages live virtual sessions with small group executive coaching and leadership assessments.

Food and beverage company Kraft Heinz offers a nomination-based program called Leadership Masters that is designed for high-potential leaders. This global program targets critical roles at Kraft Heinz. Participants represent all of the Kraft Heinz Zones (United States, Canada, International, and Corporate).

Program Details

The Leadership Masters program develops participants in alignment with the Kraft Heinz Leadership Principles to WIN:

Work as a Team

Inspire Excellence

Navigate Our Future

The year-long, interactive program runs for two semesters with topics such as:

  • Reflections on Learning Through Crisis
  • Values-Based Leadership
  • Leading Through Change
  • Resilient Leadership
  • Leading a Globally Competitive Company
  • Building an Ambidextrous Organization
  • Understanding the KHC Value Chain
  • Fireside Chats with external speakers and Kraft Heinz executives

This multi-modal blended program leverages live virtual sessions with small group executive coaching and leadership assessments. Leadership Masters includes speakers and Leadership Assessments from Harvard Business School Executive Education, Stanford University, WLJ Advisors, Columbia University, and Mentora. Participants must commit to the entire program, including completing pre-work assignments such as listening to podcasts and reading articles. In addition, as part of the program reflection, the cohort completes leadership journals to reflect on what they’ve learned and how they will apply it as leaders.

Results

Each Leadership and Culture Program has a targeted evaluation strategy to measure its impact at Kraft Heinz. For the learning programs, all participants receive a post-event evaluation to gauge the learning experience, effectiveness, business impact, and value. With 42 graduates from the 2019 and 2020 cohorts, the Leadership Masters program has the following results:

  • For Learning Experience: 90 percent agreed the content was relevant to their job.
  • For Effectiveness: 92 percent agreed the learning experience provided key takeaways to apply as a leader.
  • For Value: 94 percent agreed the learning experience was a valuable use of their time.

The teams of the Leadership Masters Cohort participants outperformed all of Kraft Heinz in key leadership engagement measures:

  • For overall engagement index, their teams scored 73, 2 points higher than the score for all of Kraft Heinz at 71.
  • For the category of “would recommend my manager,” their teams scored 87, again 2 points higher than the score for all of Kraft Heinz at 85.
Edited by Lorri Freifeld
Lorri Freifeld is the editor/publisher of Training magazine, owned by Lakewood Media Group. She writes on a number of topics, including talent management, training technology, and leadership development. She spearheads two awards programs: the Training APEX Awards and Emerging Training Leaders. A writer/editor for the last 30 years, she has held editing positions at a variety of publications and holds a Master’s degree in journalism from New York University.