ExecOnline Blog
Get the knowledge and inspiration you need to better develop your leaders — straight to your inbox.
Uncovering the Value of Agility at ExecConnect 2018
Over 200 L&D and business leaders met at ExecConnect in New York City on October 2nd and 3rd to share the leadership strategies that would take their organizations to the next level. Attendees all acknowledged that continuous change is the new normal. While change is...
ExecOnline Secures $18 Million Series C Investment
NEW YORK, N.Y. (October 2, 2018) – ExecOnline (EXO), a leader in delivering certificate-bearing leadership and development (L&D) programs in partnership with elite business schools, today announced it had closed an $18 million Series C funding round led by ABS Capital Partners, a leading late-stage...
ExecConnect Speaker Spotlight: Melanie Tinto, WEX
We’re very excited to welcome Melanie Tinto, Chief Human Resources Officer at WEX, as a featured panelist at ExecConnect 2018! As Chief Human Resources Officer, Melanie leverages her extensive leadership development experience to impact the WEX team. This includes leading, designing and re-engineering Leadership Programs, end-to-end...
ExecConnect Speaker Spotlight: Nurit Kruk-Zilca, Ceragon
We’re very excited to welcome Nurit Kruk-Zilca, Executive Vice President of Human Resources at Ceragon Networks, as a featured panelist at ExecConnect 2018! Tell us a little about yourself. In my 18+ years of experience I’ve had the privilege of leading one of the most talented...
ExecConnect Speaker Spotlight: Karen Atwell, First Command
We’re very excited to welcome Karen Atwell, VP Leadership & Talent Development at First Command, as a featured panelist at ExecConnect 2018! Karen is a dynamic leader with over 35 years of management, consulting and coaching experience. Accomplished in talent development, HR consulting, coaching, training, and facilitating, Karen’s current...
#EXOFam: Ahilya Wallia
Our employees are what truly make ExecOnline a great place to work! We have some pretty amazing people with many different backgrounds who show a real passion for what we do. Get to know us better through the #EXOFam series, where we’ll spotlight real ExecOnline...
ExecConnect Speaker Spotlight: Christine Geissler, Kerry North America
We’re very excited to welcome Christine Geissler, Chief Human Resources Officer/Regional VP HR at Kerry North America, as a featured panelist at ExecConnect 2018! With 30 years of progressive Human Resource experience, Christine has supported all of the product lifecycles in the Food Industry from Retail...
#EXOFam: Adam Shapiro
Our employees are what truly make ExecOnline a great place to work! We have some pretty amazing people with many different backgrounds who show a real passion for what we do. Get to know us better through the #EXOFam series, where we’ll spotlight real ExecOnline...
ExecConnect Speaker Spotlight: Adrian Stevens, HPE
Very excited to welcome back Adrian Stevens, VP Learning & Professional Development Talent Enablement at HPE, as a featured panelist at ExecConnect 2018! This is Adrian’s second year attending ExecConnect and we’re thrilled to have him back. Tell us a little about yourself. As Vice President...
Is it Time to Eliminate Your HIPO Program? Part II
It is the best of times for HIPO programs. It is the worst of time for HIPO programs. On the one hand, they are extremely popular with HR, and ExecOnline’s clients. Our certificate programs are included in dozens of HIPO programs at our client companies....
ExecConnect Speaker Spotlight: Mary Beth Schroeder, Broadridge
We’re very excited to welcome Mary Beth Schroeder, Senior Director, Leadership Development at Broadridge Financial Solutions, as a featured panelist at ExecConnect 2018! We sat down with Mary Beth to learn a bit more about her (personally and professionally), her role at Broadridge, and her thoughts...
#EXOFam: Sarah Mclemore
Our employees are what truly make ExecOnline a great place to work! We have some pretty amazing people with many different backgrounds who show a real passion for what we do. Get to know us better through the #EXOFam series, where we’ll spotlight real ExecOnline...
Top 3 Reasons to Attend ExecConnect
ExecOnline is hosting our annual leadership development conference, ExecConnect, to bring together the best business educators and industry-leading HR executives. We’re meeting in New York City on October 2nd and 3rd to help you learn how to better maximize your business agility. Today’s executives must...
ExecOnline’s April 2018 Program Run [Infographic]
ExecOnline’s April 2018 program run is a wrap! This was our largest spring session yet, with more than 1,400 participants from over fifty different countries. All ten of our corporate programs ran during this session, and participant feedback was something we continue to stand by...
4 Steps L&D Can Take To Be Agile
Agile isn’t a new concept in the business world, but in the last several years, it has made its way into L&D. A growing number of L&D leaders have recognized the benefits of Agile principles, which include, among others, collaboration, flexibility, transparency, and speed to...
3 Ways to Upscale Online Leadership Development When Budget Is Tight
L&D professionals are being asked to do more with smaller budgets. The most effective way to make your budget dollars go further is by investing in online leadership development. ExecOnline has found that online programs not only save organization’s money, but also increase the quality...
Maximize Your Business Agility at ExecConnect 2018
In today’s fast-paced business world, organizations need to stay one step ahead of their competition. Is your organization prepared for rapid change? Join fellow L&D professionals at ExecConnect 2018 to unpack one of the most important issues facing businesses today—how to maximize business agility. ExecConnect...
How to Convince Your Boss to Invest in Online Leadership Development
To make a convincing argument to your boss, you’ll need to build a business case for why it’s imperative to invest in online leadership development. This means arming yourself with knowledge and data to show why an online experience is right for your organization’s unique...
Comparison: Online Leadership Development v. In-Person Leadership Development
As online leadership development programs grow in popularity, L&D executives are tasked with comparing differing kinds of online programs with traditional, in-person experiences such as business school and company sponsored programs. To help you select the perfect solution for your organization’s strategic business needs,...
How Your Leadership Development Partner Can Prove ROI
A shift is underway: Leadership development professionals are being asked to prove their learning initiative’s business and financial impact. This leaves little room for leadership development companies that don’t deliver proven value. Below are five steps every leadership development company needs to take to ensure...
12 Questions to Ask Your Next Leadership Development Provider
Finding the best leadership development provder is difficult. There are hundreds of companies, not all of which will help you achieve your organization’s goals. Below are common questions you should ask to ensure maximum return on your investment. 1) What programs do you provide? The...
What L&D Leaders Need to Know About Strategy in 2018
Columbia’s Willie Pietersen Breaks Down Everything You Need to Succeed L&D is undergoing a dramatic shift. Today’s leaders are asked to play a larger role in their organization’s strategic planning. To help you succeed, we sat down with Willie Pietersen, Columbia Business School professor and...
Why Corporations Should Invest Their Tax Cut in Leadership Development
The passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is a boon for corporations, which—among other changes—slashes the top corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Forbes states that over the next decade the tax plan will save corporations $600 billion, with an additional $350...
8 Myths About Online Leadership Development
Myth 1: Online Leadership Development Programs Are Low Quality Fact: Many online leadership development programs are university-certified and go through a rigorous design and review process that could take months, if not several years to complete. When evaluating an online program ask your vendor about how their...
Post-Hire Talent Assessment Best Practices to Make HR Leaders More Effective
Post-hire talent assessments, also known as simply talent assessments, empower organizations with the data necessary to ensure employees’ skills and behaviors align with critical business strategies. Below ExecOnline outlines best practices for leaders who are implementing talent assessments. 1) Aggregate Your Knowledge Talent assessments provide...
ExecOnline’s 2017 Year in Review [Infographic]
In 2017, ExecOnline generated $594,495,000 in realized financial impact for our corporate partners. In short, it was an extraordinary year. In the infographic below, we’ve highlighted some of our most significant achievements during the past 12 months, along with exciting data about our leadership development...
ExecOnline Secures $16 Million Series B Investment
New York, NY – July 27 – ExecOnline announced today that it secured a $16 million Series B investment round. The round was led by NewSpring Growth Capital, NewSpring Capital’s dedicated growth and expansion stage fund. Existing investors Osage Venture Partners, New Atlantic Ventures, Kaplan,...
Are You Investing in Wasted Learning? To Maximize Learning Impact, Focus on Scale, not Choice
When done right, digital learning offers significant advantages to in-person learning in terms of scale, speed, and learner engagement. However, CLOs need to carefully consider the right deployment strategy to get the most benefit from their investment. In our last two posts, we outlined two...
Going Digital with Your Learning? Focus Less on Tech Savvy, More on Reflection
In today’s business environment, progressive CLOs are likely to also be digital CLOs. In last week’s post, we explored the importance of being thoughtful and strategic in setting the course for digitizing learning and development — and avoiding common pitfalls. However, not all digital learning...
To Succeed as a Digital CLO, Craft a Vision for Digital Learning
There’s no denying that a digital focus is the key to success in today’s fast-changing business world. Indeed, research suggests that companies rated highly in digital leadership boast both stronger revenue growth and greater profit margins than their peers, and another study found that their...
Using Technology to Close the Gender Gap
Despite the wealth of evidence that gender diversity makes good business sense, a significant gap persists. A 2016 study of almost 22,000 firms across the globe found that while having a 30% share of women in the C-suite was linked to 15% more profitability, more...
Struggling with Organizational Complexity? Creativity, Not Just Discipline, Is Key to Success
Today’s business leaders grapple with unprecedented levels of complexity. Thanks to rapid advancement in information technology over the past few decades, systems and organizations have become more interconnected, interdependent, and nuanced than ever. Complexity makes virtually every process — from basic decision making to advanced...
Avoid the Top 5 Blind Spots that Could Derail Your Strategy
For most leaders, change is on the horizon in 2017. According to ExecOnline’s recent Trump and Leadership survey, 78% of business leaders across top companies expect to make at least one big strategy change as a result of the 2016 US Presidential election. Yet, most...
Lead Strategic Change by Aligning Your Business
Leaders often suffer from blind spots when it comes to identifying their biggest execution challenges. In fact, almost half of executives tell us that senior leaders at their firms are not aware of critical execution challenges. In our last post, we explored the strategy execution...
Developing Agile Leaders
The 2016 US Presidential Election brought heightened uncertainty about the Trump administration’s policies and political impact on the business world, and business leaders face a widened range of potential scenarios – both positive and negative – that could result. Unfortunately, few organizations are prepared for...
How Leading Organizations Are Preparing for L&D’s Future
In today’s competitive market, talent is the top priority for many organizations around the world. L&D professionals must unlock the full potential of their leaders in order to drive business outcomes and reach strategic goals. In its 2017 Workplace Learning Report, LinkedIn surveyed 500...
Intelligent Risk-Taking in the Trump Era
Despite the rocky start to the Trump presidency and growing concerns about business risk, post-election confidence is holding up. To succeed in an environment characterized by both more confidence and more uncertainty, leaders must focus on intelligent risk taking. Growing Confidence and Uncertainty US stock...
Employee Conflict More Concerning than Geopolitical Conflict
The 2016 US Presidential Election has thrown political and social divides into sharp relief, perhaps more so than any in the country’s history. Effective leadership in 2017 will require navigating the aftershock, and companies across industries are evaluating how to best move forward in an...
The Essence of Business Strategy: Changing Times and Changing Approaches
Effective business strategy is, in its own way, a living, breathing entity. It evolves to suit the times, with conventional wisdom giving way to disruptive innovation and new strategies forged from repeated success. Two topical articles, featuring insight by ExecOnline’s Leading Strategic Growth faculty and top Columbia professors Rita...
From Above and Below: Overcoming A Culture of Change Resistance
“Change” can become a dirty word. For some, it can come to represent the failure of existing efforts and processes, unexpected challenges or simply a deviation from what is operationally comfortable and familiar. This distaste for rethinking old assumptions runs deep and manifests in the form of change resistance...
Digital Learning: Executives Report Higher Motivation to Complete Digital Development Courses
For HR professionals looking to foster the development of leaders, the reach and scale of digital learning is appealing. However, many question whether online learning can work for an executive population that is accustomed to in-person development. ExecOnline research clearly suggests that, in many ways,...
A Look into the Future of Corporate Learning Departments
With budget planning season in full swing, most L&D executives are reflecting on the past year while also looking ahead to create plans that will maximize learning impact in 2017. Having just wrapped up our inaugural ExecConnect16 conference on Oct. 18-19 which brought together CLOs...
Playing the Hand You’re Dealt: Reshaping an Inherited Team into an Effective Team
Building an effective team from the ground up is a feat all by itself – yet in many ways, reshaping an inherited team is even more daunting. Understanding the existing power dynamics in a group of people you may have just met is a challenge. Strong leadership can act quickly to optimize the...
Lack of Operational Creativity, Not Discipline, is Slowing Down Business
Earlier this year, a top consultant outlined in Fortune what he saw as the slowing down of business decision-making as organizations become larger and more complex. He discussed the opportunity and the challenge involved: “It would be foolish to suggest that the root causes of our current...
Is it Time to Ditch Email?
As a busy executive, what is the first thing you do in the morning when you wake up? Before even getting out of bed, you are likely checking your emails to get a head start. Once you finally arrive at work, another dozen emails are...
Engagement Does Not Equal Application
CEB just released some new data showing how engagement and application are diverging: “While 78% of employees say they are satisfied with L&D products, only 37 percent of learning is applied on the job. As the study referenced here indicates, there is definitely a big...
How Can You Influence Without Formal Authority?
Your success as a leader is increasingly dependent on your ability to influence peers and employees outside of your direct reporting lines. While this has always been an important leadership skill, it’s more important than ever as organizations become increasingly matrixed, and decisions increasingly decentralized....
Get Ready for Change: What’s Your Adaptive DNA?
Do you struggle to overcome resistance to change in your organization? Whether it’s shifting strategic objectives, changing organizational leadership or new roles and responsibilities, chances are your organization has experienced significant change in the past year. Unfortunately, tried-and-true, top-down approaches to driving change are proving...
Successfully Managing Remote Teams
A large – and ever growing – number of employees are working remotely, whether full time or a few days a month. A 2015 Gallup poll found that 37 percent of the American workforce has telecommuted at some point during their career. This figure has increased dramatically since...
Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect
When successful, action learning is a powerful tool to help leaders apply and retain what they learn in development programs. Unfortunately, in practice, clients tell us that many leadership programs fail to successfully incorporate action learning or drive measurable impact. Our work with leading organizations...