Ascend: Building a Leadership Pipeline That Doubles as a Business Engine

Ascend began with a hard problem hiding inside a decentralized network of 40 operating companies: when a president seat opened, there was often no one ready to fill it from within. Succession lived in individual leaders' heads, leadership development happened unevenly company to company, and the network's deepest expertise sat siloed inside operating companies that rarely learned from one another. A traditional high-potential program, classroom sessions and case studies, would have produced better-read managers, not readier presidents, and would have done nothing to connect a network that operated as 40 separate businesses. The real challenge was to build future presidents and unite the network at the same time, without pulling leaders out of the field for a year of theory.

This sample shows intentional design decisions that solved that dual problem.

  • The program was built around the company's four core values, but each value was made operational rather than aspirational:

    • Commit became authentic, executive-selected business problems instead of case studies;

    • Collaborate became cross-company teams that had to interview operating companies and reconcile competing realities;

    • Coach became a dual-coach model pairing an outside university coach with an industry coach who also served as executive sponsor;

    • and Compete became a graduation showcase where teams presented recommendations directly to the executive team.

  • The four capstone projects were not exercises. They were the network's highest-priority business problems:

    • gain/fade margin erosion,

    • recurring-revenue growth,

    • forecasting accuracy, and

    • employee retention.

The result was a program that developed leaders, surfaced siloed expertise across the network, and returned real business recommendations in a single cycle, and a repeatable model where every future cohort tackles the organization's most important strategic priorities, turning leadership development into a capability engine for the business.