Center for Leadership
Studies

Rod Brandvold understands the value of leaders who are comfortable with uncertainty, who adapt to new roles and who not only accept change, but incite it. Having sponsored three of Canadian Blood Services’ employees through the MAOL and seen through one other, Brandvold is keen at sensing the moment at which a talented manager is ready to become an organizational leader. What he has seen in all of the candidates ready to work toward their MAOL degrees is business moxie, a high level of professional competence, and desire for an intangible “more.”

“You want that person who’s at a point where they’ve stopped thinking of their professional progress as one more model to learn, or one more book to read,” Brandvold says. “It’s the person who’s already got that stuff, but has more potential than they are currently bringing—that’s the time that you want to send them for the MAOL, to really stretch and really challenge them.“

At his previous organization, Brandvold witnessed Nick Falkingham earning his MAOL, and clearly saw Nick evidencing all of these traits. Having previous experience with some of the MAOL tools and principles, Brandvold saw that MAOL was the catalyst for Falkingham’s transformation. The changes that unfolded in Falkingham, Brandvold explains, were subtle at first but changed the fundamental ways in which he related to other employees and in the way he conducted himself. One of the things he noticed, he explains, was a greater comfort with uncertainty and an unwillingness to accept prescribed answers—a trait that Brandvold says is key in innovation and breakthrough organizational change.

“There’s a tendency for people to think that they know what leadership is and that they know what needs to be done, and that tends to be that the leader needs to simply get up on a higher rock and yell louder,” Brandvold explains. “This sense of certainty gets in the way of leaders’ ability to draw on all the capability and resources around them. MAOL graduates are rid of this limiting certainty, and instead left with possibilities.”

Brandvold has sponsored candidates during his time at Cognos and from his current place at Canadian Blood Services and says that the possibilities that MAOL candidates and graduates are able to see can revolutionize business from a leadership and organizational standpoint. MAOL graduates Falkingham, Perfetti, Martin and Shaw all show more initiative in the workplace, taking on sweeping projects and volunteering themselves for groundbreaking organizational work. They are also deft at building and working with teams, drawing out potential and gathering individuals around projects and causes.

“Dave Perfetti took on a new role during his MAOL studies, inheriting a number of IT projects,” Brandvold says. “His challenge was not so much to get these projects going, but to establish himself as a new, credible leader in an already-established, highly successful group. In a reasonably short amount of time, he did this and did it well.”

Brandvold also sees the MAOL as an opportunity for candidates to really discover who they are as leaders and what it is that they have to bring to their organizations. The candidates have to be ready, he says, and they have to be open to making change within themselves.

“MAOL candidates go through a forming and reforming process, if you will, getting out from under their existing paradigms whether they like it or not. They reform with new paradigms, new ways of seeing leadership, new focus. It turns people’s minds completely around from what they assumed leadership was and how they’re supposed to be as a leader.”