Scope of Work:

In the mid 1990’s, the City of Columbus issued a Request for Proposal seeking curriculum development and training that "promotes powerful and relevant executive, management and employee development" for approximately 1500 management and supervisory personnel.  The City was seeking courses that encourage skill transfer and have measurable results.  In addition, it was seeking to change the culture in the City workforce, to breakdown barriers within and across department lines, and to build a customer focus among all employees.

Sterling Institute developed a series of six programs, three each for the executive and management levels, that are integrated both across and within departments.  All executives, managers and front line supervisors are participating in the three appropriate for their level. 

Each program has an application "exercise" that requires participants to apply the learnings from the classroom to their workplace.  These exercises are integrated to promote communication and understanding at all levels, and to maximize the impact of the learning.

Columbus wanted to build internal capacity for the management courses and included Facilitator Development Programs as part of the initiative.

Accomplishments:

All of the City's approximately 90 executives participated in each of the three executive courses:  Participation and Executive Leadership, Managing Departmental Issues and Developing Employees and Employee Teams.  Columbus Facilitators were developed and are still delivering the three management programs. Additionally, a Master Facilitator was developed for each program to ensure the ability to continue to deliver the three management programs.  Over 300 employees have participated in each of the management courses, Building Customer Focused Teams, Developing People and Managing Organizational Issues.  This is an on-going project.  Feedback and evaluations have been extremely positive.  Behavior changes have been cited.  One Department said our programs gave them the impetus to move forward in their organizational change initiative.