In-depth learning
More companies want customized programs tied to specific issues

by Heather B. Hayes
for Virginia Business
July 2007

Competition for entry into LandAmerica’s Leadership Academy at the University of Richmond’s Robins School of Business may not be quite as arduous as getting into a top MBA program, but it’s pretty tough. Candidates for the two-week customized executive education program must perform extremely well on annual performance and talent assessments, and they must be nominated by their supervisors.

For the program’s first class in May 2006, the Richmond-based real estate transaction services firm had more than 70 applicants for just 25 slots. Why so popular? The coursework, developed by LandAmerica in partnership with UR’s Robins School of Business, tailors business-school theory and industry best practices to the unique issues of LandAmerica. “Literally, every hour of every day is designed to meet a specific need of the firm,” says Richard Coughlan, associate dean for the school’s graduate and executive education programs.

Carol Anderson, LandAmerica’s senior vice president and director of talent and learning resources, says the program is so customized that it winds up being much more than business-school instruction. The program is a critical step for unit managers looking to advance in the company, which has doubled in size since 2002 to 1,100 offices and 13,000 employees. “It’s really like a company retreat, but at a university,” she says.

Anderson notes that LandAmerica’s CEO, Theodore L. Chandler Jr., and several executives spend a day discussing initiatives and taking questions from participants. In addition, CFO G. William Evans co-teaches a course on finance. “It gives us an opportunity for some significant internal corporate dialogue, which is important as we’ve just recently changed from a kind of holding company with franchise-like operations to more of a unified operating company,” she says.

Increasingly, large, complex companies such as LandAmerica are partnering with business schools to adapt traditional subjects such as communications, finance and change management to their corporate culture and management style. “This is an area of high-growth for us,” says Coughlan.

Rosanna Koppelmann, director of the executive education program at the College of William & Mary, is also seeing more interest from companies. The school has provided a customized program for Landmark Communications for the past 11 years. About 50 managers with a variety of backgrounds go through twice-a-year finance and management courses. “As companies and industries become more specialized, they’re finding that the one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work,” Koppelmann says. “They’re finding that customized coursework is a way to get more bang for their education buck, as opposed to sending different employees off to different open-enrollment courses.”

As with open-enrollment executive education programs, companies gain access to outside expertise that enables workers to upgrade their skills and knowledge of industry practices. A customized program, however, adds an in-depth conversation about day-to-day issues that managers face. “During a discussion about a particular topic, you’re getting 20 different perspectives on that issue and how it affects the company, as opposed to a regular course where you have to listen to 19 other stories from 19 other companies in a variety of industries,” says Coughlan. “The connection isn’t necessarily apparent, and sometimes, quite frankly, the conversation can become irrelevant for some students.”

This ability to offer company-specific learning was a big reason why AES Corp., a global power company based in Arlington, started a customized education program in 2004 with the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business Administration. Darden’s professors each year teach 10 to 15 classes of varying length and subject matter and for different management levels. The courses involve case study work and peer-to-peer learning, which covers company-specific issues such as working in emerging markets and non-recourse financing for large infrastructure projects. “It creates an internal network of our people from around the world,” says Jay Kloosterboer, AES’s executive vice president for business excellence. AES collaborated on the program with George Shaffer, a senior director in Darden’s executive education program. “We work with the faculty to create a shared learning environment for our employees, such that we build a common knowledge and a common language within the company, and people learn to work together as teams as they address different issues,” says Kloosterboer.

At AES, half of the participants in the first class have been promoted, according to Kloosterboer. When participants from LandAmerica’s first class in May 2006 arrived at UR for the second phase of the program in March, nearly all of them reported enough revenue increases or cost savings in their operating units to more than pay for the program, says Anderson.

Another manager, she notes, had to deal with a major structural reorganization in her unit that could have hurt employee retention. “But she used the ‘leading change’ module that she had learned about in the first session, and just followed the steps, one through eight,” Anderson explains. “And it worked perfectly.”

Getting a customized executive education program under way takes time and commitment, according to university and company officials. Robins Business School faculty at UR, for example, spent dozens of hours talking with LandAmerica executives to understand the company’s visions and needs. The faculty then worked with human resources personnel for several months to design the courses.

The effort is well worth it, though, says Kloosterboer. “The courses have evolved over the years to be even more valuable to us,” he explains. “The faculty at Darden have learned more about us and our business, and we’ve learned more about their capabilities, and that’s all combined to make a much better, more valuable product today than it was when we started three years ago.”