Impact

In the hyper-completive setup, every organization strives to achieve the top position in their respective verticals. As a leader can look into the organization’s needs and create or expand its capacity to learn, adapt, and grow, leadership remains a key defining factor to achieve that position. Alongside this, it becomes invariable to understand that individuals are not born as leaders, rather groomed as one, and for that need, leadership development programs come into play. These programs develop and hone professionals’ ability to handle critical responsibilities in an organization. Thus, every firm is on a constant lookout for a learning and development supplier. Whereas, most such talent development suppliers take advantage of the situation and provide off-the-shelf products and programs. These have several significant constraints with tailoring and adaptation to the clients’ needs.

At this concurrence, Impact, a global leadership and key talent development firm with over 40 years of experience, marked a change in the market scenario through its customer-centric approach to creating custom leadership development programs. Ted Gemmell, SVP Global Client Services of Impact, remarks, “The starting point for Impact is always getting grounded in the client’s business context. We seek to understand the environment they are currently operating within and design a development program specific to their current and emerging strategic context. This knowledge benefits the learners not just in case of building skills, but also helps them close the gap between their current capabilities and where the organization needs them to stretch and grow.” In addition, the company realizes a business impact by leveraging a business-relevant experiential learning approach. In this process, Impact initially identifies the strategic challenges confronting the client organization. It then builds the program content and experiential elements of the program. Hence, the learners collaborate with their peers during the program to address and solve the organization’s real world issues. Impact works with its clients to design and facilitate development programs across the full spectrum of the leadership and talent pipeline. With this customized approach, today, the company has grown to be a global leader with 17 offices worldwide and 250 consultants in addition to 150 key associates for the program delivery. Impact has also been recognized by Training Industry as a Top 20 Leadership Training Company for ten years running.

Having its core services as leadership and key talent development, organizational change and transformation, and sustainable innovation, Impact has also responded to the challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic by partnering with clients to create virtual solutions. During most of 2020, from a development perspective, face-to-face and blended learning have been replaced by 100 percent virtual solutions. With this situation, Gemmell recollects the delivery of a custom-designed global leadership development program for over 5000 mid-level leaders. This learning journey is spread over a period of nine months, originally designed to include several face-to-face modules focused on finding solutions to current strategic priorities. Due to the current global pandemic, Impact re-imagined the whole program and transformed it as a 100 percent virtual experiential learning solution. He adds, “Taking a learner-centered approach, Impact has partnered with the client to create this virtual solution following the principle of learning in the flow of work, infused with technology and rich social learning elements.”

We are able to preserve all the power of an immersive, engaging, interactive, highly collaborative, and peer-to-peer social learning approach in the virtual realm through both synchronous and asynchronous virtual facilitation

Being an advanced player in the virtual learning arena for the past ten years, Impact has been able to quickly pivot to adapt to the pandemic. With the understanding that the traditional approach to virtual learning doesn’t engage learners, the company delivers custom-designed programs on Microsoft Teams and any other virtual platform utilized by the client. Learners are able to access content that retains all of the immersive and engaging elements of a face-to-face experience, such as high levels of interactivity, peer collaboration, and peer-to-peer learning, versus a static eLearning approach. Expert live virtual facilitation overcomes ‘Zoom Fatigue,’ where employees grow tired of sitting in front of a screen all day long. Gemmell remarks on Impact’s expertise in experiential learning and its ability to deliver in a COVID world through a “virtual experiential” approach as, “We are able to preserve all the power of an immersive, engaging, interactive, highly collaborative, and peer-to-peer social learning approach in the virtual realm through both synchronous and asynchronous virtual facilitation.” Thus, Impact has overcome the challenges posed by COVID to help clients develop leadership agility to respond and adapt to change in their business, as the old ways of leading pre-COVID don’t work anymore.

While focusing on the programs’ engaging aspect, Impact lends equal importance to the content it leverages. Gemmell notes on the uniqueness of the content as, “We leverage a custom and tailored approach to creating the right content specific to the client’s need. In cases where the client has requested a content element from a third party subject matter expert, we weave it into the overall design of the program so that it integrates seamlessly.” He adds, “We often partner with the client to create a hybrid approach consisting of fully custom-designed elements as well as tailored content Impact has developed that has become quite relevant to organizations across all sectors.”

In program delivery, whether face to face or virtual, Impact takes a personalized facilitation approach to bolster learning and behavioral development. While many training vendors staff programs with a single instructor at the podium pushing content to a cohort of 32 people, Impact would staff that program with four facilitators working with a smaller group of eight learners in breakout elements from the full cohort of learners. Impact leverages a “pull behavioral” style of facilitation, rich in feedback and coaching in-the-moment. This approach gives learners real-time and immediate self-awareness of their strengths as well as the personal leadership gaps they need to invest themselves in closing through further development. Impact leverages this highly personalized facilitation approach in the virtual realm as well.

Today, after combating the challenge of recognition in the marketplace, Impact has become widely recognized as a premier leadership development firm. Gemmell recollects on the growth of the firm as, “Right from the early stages of struggling for visibility, Impact has grown to work with major Global 500 and Fortune 500 brands.” Looking ahead, Impact vision is to become equally recognized as the best virtual experiential learning company in the world. The best learning organizations will continue to seek partners that can deliver leadership development solutions that create new mindsets, skills, and behaviors in key talent that pull through to the job and increase leadership effectiveness in a sustainable way. They will look for solutions that produce these results in both the face-to-face and virtual realms even after the pandemic passes. To respond to this challenge, Impact is continuing to innovate by developing new immersive experiential methodologies while also taking its signature behavioral development methodologies into the virtual space.