By: Susan Ruhl

I love to cook. I love putting all the ingredients of a dish together to create something fantastic. When I have time. During the work week, though, I am a lazy cook and need the ingredients put together for me. So, imagine my surprise when I went to the grocery store near my new home in Mexico, and they didn’t have a packet of taco seasoning. “What the?" I said to my daughter as I called her to tell her of my plight.  

Yes, yes, I know that Mexico’s tacos are amazing, and McCormick’s Taco Seasoning is an American thing, but it’s a staple at our house! So as my daughter is quickly googling all of the ingredients for taco seasoning, I head over to the spice aisle. I thought, “Hey, how hard can this be? Spices are spices, so tell me what I need." Guess what? It’s less apparent than you might think.

As my daughter said, paprika, pepper, salt, red pepper flakes, etc. I stared at a sea of spices where neither the words nor the label pictures made sense…and I had taken some Spanish, albeit in high school. How can it be this hard? As I was fumbling my way through trying to figure out the word for pepper, I thought, “These tacos are going to cost me a fortune, and I am supposed to do this regularly? I think not." I left the store overwhelmed, frustrated and without a good solution. Hey, I know! These things are everywhere, better than what I make at home and less expensive regardless. So, we walked down to the street taco stand and had someone else prepare our amazing tacos for a beautiful dinner.

As I reflected on this experience, I realized that putting all the right ingredients together to make leadership development easy is what we do for our clients. For development, we are the better version of taco seasoning! We call it threading. Effectively combining the components of the best leadership development program available today. Could you go out and put together your leadership development program that would be effective? Yes, you could.

As the person in charge of your leadership development programs, are you piecemealing the components together, trying to create a practical solution? A DiSC assessment mixed with a LinkedIn course combined with a simulation? It’s true; there are many excellent resources in the marketplace that can be put

together in a nice development solution. Is this the best use of your time and money? And, more importantly, does it lead to the desired behavior change?

Knowing so many leadership development professionals, you likely have a full plate already. Creating a quality threaded solution with microlearning, applied practice, group coaching, and manager involvement is not as easy as it may seem. What intervals are effective for knowledge transfer? When and for how long should you incorporate applied practice? How often should the group come together for peer-to-peer coaching and feedback? Let’s remember the most challenging question of all. How do you involve the participant’s manager to create accountability and achieve that learning environment companies constantly strive to achieve?

The Accelerator™ program threads all those pieces together in a vetted process to achieve a 96% completion rate and a guaranteed improvement in soft skills. We even have a real-time dashboard to track the engagement and progress of your participants and their managers. So don’t decide that an expensive, homemade taco mix is better than the expertly crafted solution. Give us a call to learn more about the Accelerator™ program. 

If you want to learn more about ICC’s outplacement services, online leadership development and management training, contact us at [email protected] or 865-855-4400.