How Cohort-based Learning Impacts Culture, Leaders and Creativity

As shoppers, the environment sets the tone for the entire experience — good, bad or ugly.

What if the music is bad? The lights are too bright or dim? Of if it’s too difficulty to find what you’re looking for?

You’ll leave and take your hard-earned dollars with you.

It’s a lose-lose. You, as the customer, don’t get what you’re looking for and the retailer missed its shot.

That’s where Array Marketing saves the day. Array is a creative powerhouse, serving clients such as Gucci, Adidas, Kiehl’s, Maybelline, Sephora and many others.

Much of their work focuses on engineering creative retail experiences that draw in and delight customers. The team designs elegant product showcases, live experiences, unique displays and more for top-of-the-line brands.

What this means is that employees must also work at the top of their game — from designers to engineers, project managers, and customer support. These employees, collectively, are responsible for their clients’ campaigns, which may come with strict deadlines, complicated logistics, and feats of engineering.

If they drop the ball, it could cost them their reputation and their clients.

That’s why Array started investing more in ongoing professional development. Doing so would ensure their employees have every opportunity to close skill gaps and stay sharp.

However, the learning and development team was essentially looking at a blank canvas. Nothing on paper. They needed to get creative.

When Array’s Director of Organizational Development and Learning Jessica Steed-Brown started at the company, Skillsoft had just been brought on as a vendor. At the time, there were few learning programs in place and it hadn’t been widely communicated that employees would have access to learning resources.

“That affected the way we were rolling out these things,” she said. “I had to fight that notion that this was a selective thing and not everybody had access to learning.”

For Steed-Brown, the challenge was primarily putting a structured program in place and getting the word out.

To start, she consulted with Array’s senior leadership team to understand the business’ strategic priorities and which skill areas must improve.

“You always have to tie it back to the business need and the business outcomes,” she said. “I picked the programs I picked because the business needs them and they will actually impact the person’s day-to-day work.”

Having gathered feedback from senior leaders, she decided to prioritize newly appointed managers of designers and engineers.

Managers play a vital role in ensuring that every employee at Array can do their best work. They serve as leaders, mentors, and coaches to their reports, who rely on them to support their careers.

“Our managers will be our accelerators,” she said. They need the skills to empower, set expectations, provide feedback, manage performance, develop their reports, and improve the quality of work. “Without strong leaders, training individual contributors wouldn’t be as impactful.”

However, these managers also faced another layer of complexity. Newly appointed, they faced the challenge of starting a new role and building a new skill set.

But Array had recently gone through an internal restructuring – which means these managers also had to navigate entirely new departments and ways of working with other areas of the business.

Knowing this, the next step for Steed-Brown was to develop a curriculum that would meet this cohort of managers where they are in a way that supported the changing business.

The leadership team at Array saw the greatest potential return on investment from their new managers — ambitious individuals who’ve taken on the responsibility and privilege to lead others.

These professionals would, as Steed-Brown said, accelerate their journey to their desired outcomes. They play an important role in working with clients, coaching staff, and encouraging ongoing development.

Seeing their potential, Steed-Brown launched a 12-week pilot program focused on developing new leaders. The purpose was to help this cohort get a jumpstart after being promoted, teaching them the fundamentals of leading others.

How it was organized:

• On-demand learning — Steed-Brown customized Skillsoft’s leadership development curriculum. She organized the material by relevance and importance, adding and subtracting material carefully. 
• Weekly workshops — Every week, the entire cohort would meet for a 75-minute workshop, in which they discussed their triumphs, their challenges, and their development goals.
• Ongoing assessments — Throughout the program, managers were assessed on their development to demonstrate and track progress.

Steed-Brown gave program participants access to the tools and material they would use throughout the 12 weeks. She facilitated the weekly workshops and distributed the assessments.

These managers progressed through a carefully curated learning journey, which was used to ground discussions and activities during their weekly workshops.

“That really helps apply the learning and understand what it means for them in their jobs,” she said. “And you also hear from your peers what they found most useful.”

Through these workshops, they bonded as a group, which increased trust, collaboration and problem-solving. For everyone, it also fostered more empathy as they learned about one another’s challenges, their remit within the organization, and their goals.

The group also documented their discussions and progress in a singular, digital whiteboard. (For this, they used Microsoft Whiteboard.) The whiteboard detailed how far they’ve come as a group and visually showed how their development tied back to business goals. Zooming out, the entire 12-week program became a mural of what they all accomplished together.

As the pilot wrapped up, it was bittersweet. This group had become tight-knit and didn’t want the program to end.

And in some ways, it didn’t.

Since the pilot was a success, Steed-Brown now had a blueprint for what an effective learning program looks like at Array.

Steed-Brown went onto launch another 12-week program in fall 2023. Another in spring 2024. Another in summer 2024. And then in the fall, launched 12 more programs.

In less than two years, Steed-Brown took a nascent learning and development program and scaled it exponentially by doubling down on what works.

Enrollment is up. Employees are talking. The programs are taking off.

Steed-Brown has seen in her relatively short tenure at Array a marked impact on the organization’s culture. Employees share their experiences with their co-workers, which prompts others to sign up. It cascades, and more people seek out these opportunities. The appetite for training is growing.

Moving forward, Steed-Brown plans to continue facilitating and launching these programs to target strategic, in-demand skill areas. She plans to focus on presentation and public speaking skills, the ability to influence and persuade, and work more effectively as a team.

Along the way, she also hopes to double down on data.

Assessments, for one, will be integrated at more stages of the learning journey to closely track how employees improve over time. This will help demonstrate the efficacy of the programs.

Having this data will help inform how to optimize programs in the future and integrate training into employees’ development. For example, Steed-Brown says that the leadership development program may become mandatory for newly minted managers.

Ultimately, the goal is to make more time and space for learning, for connection.

“I'm proudest of the relationships that are being built throughout the organization as a result of the programs,” she said. “It’s the humanity side of it. There's something about that classroom environment, digital or otherwise, where you build connection and community that I think is really important.”