Center for Leadership
Studies

In her time as Director of Organizational Effectiveness at Lifescan Incorporated, Anne Griswold was responsible for all of the knowledge and learning transfer related to training and leadership development. Fittingly, her MAOL breakthrough initiative was to build a process for creating leadership capability within her organization and making it into a sustainable process. As she worked toward her degree, Griswold used the tools she learned from the MAOL in order to engage the conversations for commitment and agreement with the right people within her company.

“Often what happens is you have great ideas, but you don’t know how to get the buy-in on those ideas and get the commitment you need to achieve them. The MAOL gave me a place to discover how to say what I needed to say to do this more effectively,” Griswold notes. “By the end of it, I was able to articulate very clearly for the business what it needed to be and how an approach could serve them, in their own language.”

Throughout her eighteen months in MAOL and beyond, Griswold helped Lifescan nurture leadership capability and increase savings. In year one, the company saved over a million dollars. In year two, it saved 1.5 million dollars; moving into year three, there is solid evidence that the trend will continue. Griswold points to heightened organizational leadership capabilities as the crux of this success. Griswold explains that sustainability of leadership and improving the business through leadership was built into the people in the organization, which means that Lifescan will continue to see growth.

The most significant change that Griswold experienced as an MAOL student is an increase in the confidence in and clarity of her own contributions. Having been in leadership training and advancement roles for more than 25 years, Griswold was already certain about that to which she is called to do. The MAOL provided her with the means to bring what she has to offer into an organization in a way that it can be received, valued and sustained.

Since graduating, Griswold serves on faculty, imparting lessons on leadership sustainability. In her profession, Griswold has seen many leadership training programs, but none with the impact of MAOL. She explains that customarily, training programs cost a certain amount of money and are designed to get a certain result, but when the person receiving training finishes with the course, the learning ends, too. MAOL is sustainable in that it creates change in individual leaders that allow them to continually redefine, challenge, question, and nurture new leaders. Having experienced firsthand the impact of an MAOL degree and having watched cohorts go through their own shifts, Griswold decided to sponsor her own candidate, Sonya Moore-Wells, through the program.

“There is a particular spark and passion that some people have about their lives and they bring that to work, whether it’s intentional or not,” Griswold says. “Typically the measure that I use to set if somebody is a particularly good candidate for this program is their own curiosity and interest.”

Griswold has watched her candidate’s communication, clarity and drive flourish as she works toward her degree, and explains that this program is the right one for individuals seeking such personal leadership transformation.

“Folks that go through more traditional MBA programs get a lot of good intellectual, rigorous, managerial skills. They sometimes also get some strategic work and a little more rigor and management skill. When you talk about the concept of a leader as a teacher and learner, though, the MBA can’t begin to cover it,” she says. “What you get in this program is the opportunity to do and be both—a teacher and a learner, and most of all a skilled leader.”