Southern New Hampshire University’s Pinnacle Leadership Program is designed to prepare leaders from every business unit for more senior leadership roles at the organization. The 10-month cohort-based program helps participants grow in their leadership capabilities, explore their personal leadership, collaborate across organizational boundaries, and lead teams through complexity and change.
Program Details
The program consists of three components:
- Instructor-led learning held monthly on critical topics such as learning agility, navigating polarities, change leadership, inclusive leadership, spanning organizational boundaries, and leadership self-awareness.
- Project-based learning where the participants are divided into separate Communities of Learning and given a business challenge to collaboratively learn about and develop proposed actions for the business to take. These Communities of Learning continue to engage with each other, fostering continued social learning as their project outputs are translated into initiatives. Peer-to-peer social learning also continues through topical groups established in MS Teams.
- Formal coaching engagements that help participants process the learnings as they work to integrate their knowledge and skills into their day-to-day work.
In fiscal year 2024, Pinnacle focused deeply on artificial intelligence (AI). Project-based learning groups explored how AI can both improve outcomes as a university and foster a culture of continuous learning and ethical innovation through deploying AI technologies in alignment with the university’s core values. The groups leveraged multiple AI tools through a variety of lenses, including the employee experience; organizational culture; teaming and leadership; the student/customer experience; equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI); and accessibility. This learning required the extensive use of AI in novel ways to move beyond determining “what AI is” and “how to use AI” and into the deeper cultural and ethical questions on how it can integrate with the human experience to benefit the university’s students, employees, and society.
Participants receive a 360-degree assessment aligned to the university’s core competencies and coaching at the commencement of the program and again six months following the completion of Pinnacle. In addition, behavior impact is measured in advance of the post-360 through employee surveys measuring the support leaders provide their direct reports.
Results
In employee surveys, Pinnacle graduates’ direct reports rated them 22.4 percent higher on leadership support following completion of the Pinnacle Program.
In FY’24, Southern New Hampshire University:
- Retained 95.28 percent of leaders
- Achieved an employee engagement score of +89 Net Promoter Score
- Filled 17.24 percent of senior leadership roles internally
