Full Sail Leadership Academy - Flight School
In 2016, I was selected to co-lead a task force to design a leadership development program. The task force consisted of 10 exemplarily leaders from key departments at Full Sail University. A people-centric design approach was used to create this program. Months of internal and external research was conducted to find the best practice for leadership development. Our team also met with senior leadership to discover essential leadership capacities desired for future leaders within the organization. The program itself was built in-house with a total of seven build teams (Coaching, Communications, Curriculum, Data collection, Course Design, Development/Logistics, and Event Planning). Below is a brief description of the program and an overview of the course structure.
Flight School is Full Sail Leadership Academy’s third-tier leadership development program after Ground School and Navigator School. Its focus is to vertically-develop “ready-now” leaders who employ people-centric design to generate innovative solutions to organizational opportunities.
Program Length
Six Months (June 2017 to November 2017)
Program Design
Six (6) monthly all-day sessions (includes offsite events the same day) Intensive intersession work (4 to 5 x hours per week on average) Involves formative, meta, reflective, and experiential learning
Monthly coaching (project and individual)
People-centric design project (project included in intersession work) 8 small project teams of 3-4 Flight School Pilots each
In March of 2018, we celebrated the graduation of 19 Full Sail leaders who completed the Flight School program. The graduates were joined by members of our executive leadership who sponsored six real-world projects completed during the program.