Discover how the NAWDP Leadership Academy is shaping workforce leaders through practical learning, collaboration, and skill-building. This session highlights how participants develop emotional intelligence, foster trust, and drive innovation—offering insights you can apply to your own leadership journey.
Podcast Transcript
Alexis Franks
Good morning, good afternoon and good evening all you workforce warriors across the country. My name is Alexis Franks, and I am your Director of Membership with the National Association of Workforce Development Professionals. In today’s podcast, we will highlight the NAWDP initiative, our Leadership Academy. Now more than ever strong, adaptable leadership is essential, and as workforce professionals navigate economic shifts, federal policy changes, and generational transition, and an increased demand for inclusive and innovative services. We really need leaders who can rise to the challenge, who can think strategically, lead with empathy, and drive sustainable impact in their communities. And that’s exactly what the NAWDP Leadership Academy is all about. Today, we’ll hear directly from some of the minds behind the Academy and those who have helped shape the curriculum, supported our first inaugural cohort, and understand what it takes to grow strong, effective leaders in workforce development. We have with us two of the facilitators of our leadership Academy, Jason Estep and Brendan Lahey. So welcome to you both.
Jason Estep and Brendan Lahey
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Alexis Franks
Yes. So Jason, Brendan, today what we’ll do is what we call passing the mic. So we’ll pass the mic over to you both. And Jason, if you’ll kick us off, if you can just share briefly, introduce yourself and then just share your background and work for us and your connection to the Leadership Academy.
Jason Estep
Certainly. Hi everyone. It’s a pleasure to be here with you all today. My name is Jason Estep and I am with the JW Fanning Institute for Leadership Development at the University of Georgia. We are part of the university’s public service and outreach mission and basically that means that I get the enjoyable job of going all over the state of Georgia, and in fact all over the country even, helping different organizations, communities and youth-I do a good bit of work with youth-build their leadership capacity and learn new skills to help them in every aspect of life. And so that’s really my passion. I, I found my way here after first trying a, a few other things. My career began as a practicing attorney, mostly in Washington, DC. And somehow, while in that role, I ended up working with large groups of project attorneys on really large cases. And I sort of found that the part of my job that I enjoyed the most was being a sort of defacto technology trader. And I would also help prep attorneys on the, the different subject matter content of each case, and eventually I was like, you know what, what I’m really doing here is facilitation and leadership and figured out that that was really more of my passion area. And I basically found my way back down to Georgia, where I’m originally from, and started working for the Georgia 4H program, which is a youth leadership program, one of the largest in the nation. And I got to be their statewide civic engagement and leadership specialist. And that was really where I started to focus a little bit more on career readiness and workforce development, because I was working so much with youth and it was, it’s such a critical component of their education. And I got to do some really cool kind of innovative things. We created a group to, to foster ambassadors called Ready for Life ambassadors, who we specifically taught a lot of different, you know, enduring life skills, office etiquette, public speaking, how to work well with others, and we train them to go back to their communities and help teach other young people those same things. And that was just one of the different ways that I got really to start knowing the workforce development world a little bit. And eventually, after five years with the Georgia 4H program, found my way over to the Fanning Institute and thatat just let me do more of the stuff I like the most. And I get to work with all kinds of group, groups, all ages. We say, you know, we go from like pre-K to grade. And I enjoy working with, with people from all walks of life wherever they are. And yeah, I’m-I was one of the people that our Fanning director Director Beverly Johnson invited to help work on creating the curriculum and design program design for the NAWDP Leadership Academy along with Brandon, who you’ll hear from in just a minute that it’s been such a-a true pleasure to do that. And particularly just because everyone that we have so far had the chance to encounter has been really wonderful, amazing, and so enthusiastic about bettering themselves and-and contributing more to the workforce development as-as a profession.
Alexis Franks
Great. Thank you, Jason, Brendan.
Brendan Lahey
Alright, so again, my name is Brendan Lahey. I’m on faculty here at the Fanning Institute. I’m in my second stint. I started my second stint here at Fanning in 2012. I did some other work in education, primarily looking at folks with invisible disabilities, so a lot of learning disabilities, Dyslexia, Attention deficit types of stuff. Now that I’m here at Fanning, I work in the adult community practice group, so we work primarily with adults. We focus on the state of Georgia, but we do the the, the region and-and the nation as well. We look at individuals and we’ll work with organizations. We also look at communities as a unit of analysis as well. Like I said, my background is in adult education, so I primarily work with our adult population. My background also is in around facilitation, so I get really excited about things like leadership development, whether it’s an individual, it’s a team, it’s an organization, it’s the community. I, I really enjoy personality and leadership trait characteristic assessments, and then we do a lot of that. We we don’t just focus on individual development, but we’ll help leaders to work on strategic planning initiatives so that they can help to move their organizations or their communities forward. We’ve had, I’ve had quite a bit of experience around not laser focused on workforce development, but there’s a nexus of leadership development and workforce development. I find our curriculum intersects really well, especially when you start talking about the soft skills. That there’s obviously the technical skills of being a good employee, but a lot of the soft skills, it’s in terms of, do you understand yourself? Can you work, do you do you know your strengths? You know your growth areas? Are you addressing some of your growth areas? Are you capitalizing on your strengths? Can you work effectively with other people? And then ultimately, are you effective, can you implement things? Can you get things done, can you show up on time? Can you, can you, can you check things off of lists and be a productive team member? It’s a part of being an effective leader but also part of being a good employee, so I’ve been around a number of initiatives where the outcome is not just leadership development, but hopefully an improved workforce that’s ready to go in a particular community.
Alexis Franks
That is awesome. That is awesome, and I appreciate the unique perspective that you both have and have brought to the table, especially with designing a curriculum to prepare workforce leaders. That’s really key, that education piece, the facilitation, that leadership development experience, definitely brought some unique things to the table. We’ve already heard some great feedback from this first cohort. So, we definitely appreciate that. And I think, Brandon, you brought it up a little bit just in your comments. Where the focus was when designing the the curriculum for the Academy, can you go with a little bit more detail about how that?
Brendan Lahey
Yeah. Yeah.
One thing that I’m really proud of about the work that we do at Fanning is we don’t do canned programs where people come and we say “Ohh, we have this, this, this executive elite package for this particular audience” that no, what we really do is we sit down and and when Kim reached out to us, we just kind of sat down initially with blank paper in terms of “Talk to us a little bit about this audience. What are some of your goals and your objectives?” And we heard from her, as Jason said, our director, Beverly Johnson, has had quite a bit of experience in this realm. So, talking to them kind of getting a sense for it. Well, the other thing is we’re also an institute at a university. So of course we did a little digging and we did a literature review looking at the characteristics, traits, of effective workforce development professionals, and so we took the discussions that we had, we did our literature review, and then we have obviously have our body of work, our, our, our leadership literature. And we kind of put it all together and we kind of and we customized it based on two bodies of literature and kind of what you guys were talking about what you needed as an organization. So, we kind of settled on three areas. I alluded to it in the beginning, but to be effective and this is kind of just a universal whether you’re a leader or you’re a workforce development professional, which you are, that that is a leadership role, that there’s three primary areas that we developed, the curriculum around. The first one was master over self, self-understanding, and awareness. That’s tricky. It sounds really it sounds really simple. Do you do you know yourself? We find that with our audiences. People miss the mark a little bit. That the reality is some people walk around the world and they think they’re amazing. And the reality is that they might not be. And so we, we helped kind of close the gap there. Providing folks with feedback saying no other folks may they say you’re a lovely person, but there’s some things you might need to work on. So, we want to close that gap. But then we also conversely, we find that there’s a lot of people who miss the mark in terms of they doubt themselves a lot. And they tend to score themselves low in a variety of areas and through our work we provide them feedback that says no, you, you, you rated yourself low in, let’s say, effective communication, but we got feedback from a variety of folks that know you and know you well. And they say you’re very good at that. So that’s kind of a hidden strength. So master of yourself, so: areas like improving emotional intelligence, enhanced decision making, increased authenticity, promoting a growth mindset, kind of understanding yourself. Second one. Is no matter how good you are as an individual, you can’t really be effective by yourself. You can’t be a leader by yourself. You really can’t be an effective workforce development professional if you’re just in a vacuum working by yourself. So how do you work with through, for, and on behalf of other people, it’s about how, how do you work with other folks so positive and effective relationships. So that looking at enhancing trust and respect, improving communication, managing conflict and looking for more positive outcomes through-through conflict and then fostering a collaborative culture. There are a lot of programs that we’ll talk about mastery over self and mastery over relationships, and you can come and you can wax poetically about being an effective leader. But the reality is what are you going to do with this knowledge? And so the third area that we talked about is: getting the job done through action that we can define, things we can wax poetically about all this stuff. But ultimately, what are what are the action verbs that are associated with being effective? So the final leg of this is turning vision into reality. There’s a lot of leaders that have lovely visions, but they don’t have the practical skill set to get things done. Fostering accountability for yourself as a leader, but also for some other folks around you driving innovation and change and then ultimately, adapting and responding to challenges as-as they emerge, so those are the three kind of programmatic thrusts: looking at the individual, looking at how that person relates to other people and then looking at how that individual gets things done to be an effective leader.
Alexis Franks
Wow. So you’ve said, Uh, definitely a mouthful, but I appreciate those pieces of the curriculum and how that design really came together, especially that call to action part. That’s huge I think because it-even with leadership trainings that I’ve completed before, there’s a lot of theory of how to be an effective leader, but until we put that theory into practice, what have we accomplished? So, I really appreciate and hopefully our cohort is taking away how they can really change their communities after this Academy is complete.
Brendan Lahey
OK, good.
Jason Estep
And Alexis, that idea of putting things into action that also sort of informs our design of the program. This is a lot of the sort of theoretical framework that-that informs the program design. But we certainly don’t love just getting in front of a group and lecturing and presenting. You know, we want to be having fun and doing stuff and learning from each other together. And so, we-that’s what we really, really strive to accomplish every time that we have a session together is let’s talk about, you know, a little bit of knowledge that and then process that by actually doing things together. Fun activities. Sometimes they may seem silly. We sometimes play what seems like games, but then at the end we, you know, we-we pause for a minute and say “So what have what have we learned from this process, from doing this together?” You know, what did you learn from seeing how other people behaved in this situation? And so, the-the actual taking it from the theoretical to real life understanding, I think comes best from the act of doing, and so we try and make sure that that is first and foremost in in all of our facilitation.
Alexis Franks
Wow. Well, I don’t want to give away too many secrets to top secret information, but that’s definitely giving us a great framework for how the Leadership Academy actually is structured and how it works in the classroom or virtually as you all are working together as a group. And Jason, I’m glad you brought that up. What has stood out to you about this inaugural cohort so far?
Jason Estep
I’ve just been so impressed. As I said before. By the level of enthusiasm, sincere enthusiasm and-and how much the cohort enjoys being around each other and the-the process of learning. And whenever you get grouped together, who’s eager to learn and is willing to share their experiences with others, that is just, that’s when the magic happens. You know, so much of the program is actually what the participants bring to it. And so that’s what we always say. If you’re, if you’re, someone interested in an Academy like this, if you’re willing to-to jump in and open up and share and not only to share, but be open to you know hearing and understanding where other people come from, amazing learning can happen, and it and it’s so interesting and we’ve just been blown away by how very nice and diverse this group is. So we, we started out with 25, a couple of folks have had to leave the program for various reasons, but it’s still a very eclectic group. We’ve got folks from all sorts of experience levels and organization types, from local governments and nonprofits, to workforce development boards, institutes of learning like community colleges and stuff, academic health systems. So, good representation of the workforce development professional community and yeah, they’ve all been willing to share. It’s amazing to see how there are, you know, so many differences that you wouldn’t have thought about. Different challenges that people encounter, but also so many common themes that you can see emerge. And and that’s what’s really stood out to me is just this cohort has been amazing in terms of their willingness to get in there and do the work, and they really have fun being around each other. And that makes it so wonderful for us as facilitators.
Alexis Franks
That’s great. I can tell. I think our at our, your most recent session during the opening part of our Annual Conference, you could hear that they were literally enjoying themselves, but also taking something away that they could use in their day-to-day roles. And no matter what industry they came from or what type of service they were providing in workforce, everyone took something away that they could use. Uh, I think that was a common theme just in our interactions after that session, so we really appreciate these cohorts and we’re hoping that momentum continues. And just as a plug, if you’re interested in participating in our Leadership Academy, those applications will open October 1st, 2025. So if you’re interested in learning more or participating in a cohort, feel free to check out our website for that application information. So Jason, Brenden, I don’t want to keep you all for too long, just a couple more questions for you specifically with future cohorts and what that looks like. Is there any advice that you might have for a workforce professional that may be considering participation in the Leadership Academy?
Brendan Lahey
Yeah, I would say that, you know, sometimes there’ll, there’ll be folks that the thought of doing an Academy like this could be a little bit of an insult to them-Who, don’t they know who I am, I’m established, I’ve done very well. Well, this is not kind of a leadership 101 program. What we’re really doing is we’re we’re looking for everyone has a chance to kind of take where they are and take it to the next level. So, this is an opportunity for them to kind of come and what we do is facilitate-we want to create a space in which it’s conducive for learning and having discussions. But it’s very important that folks come with that wealth of experience and-and we take great pride in as adult educators, we honor that. So, we don’t come in and just give lectures and things, we want people to come and recognize that we acknowledge the fact that you are established, high potential, and very successful leaders that we want. We want you to step into that space and actively participate. We will offer frameworks, theories, models and assessments we need wou folks to help us apply it to your very specific environments, and that’s what we’ve been doing so far and the group has really proven outstanding at doing that, recognizing they’re part of this learning environment. We’r- we’re facilitators. We’re-we’re not the fountain of all knowledge. So we we-we-we need engaged participants in the program. So that would be my advice. Don’t come thinking that you’re just gonna eat popcorn and watch something happen. We need you to kind of roll your sleeves up and get involved in the activities and and really contribute to the discussion.
Alexis Franks
That is a great way of putting it. I appreciate that. OK, be ready to work. Jason anything that you’d like to add?
Jason Estep
Yeah, just so be ready to work and be curious. Interested in finding out about the challenges that others face, the solutions that they have devised already, that might work for you as well. To-to find out what others see as important and essential in this profession, but also it-it is also realizing that you too have something to share. I know. You know, people come to these because they’re wanting to land and they’re wanting to try and and better themselves, but you know you are already subject matter experts. This, this is what you do for a living. And so, yeah, we, we’ve got to have. People who are willing. To share and talk about that, it was really great that the current cohort, we we told him like his here’s where we’re wanting to head this is based on the you know discussions we’ve already had with professionals and our literary review. But you know, can you confirm is this-is this-do you think that this is the right stuff that you want to be learning about is there anything that we’re missing? And we gave them the chance to provide that feedback and input that will help inform our future sessions and it’s really cool. Maybe Brenden might want to talk about this at our, at the kickoff session, at the NAWDP annual conference, just a month or so ago. I was not able to attend unfortunately due to a death in my family, but Brandon was there, and he actually I think got the group to contribute some ideas about leadership that I think he’s building into an assessment, maybe. He that, umm, he’ll use at, we’ll use at an upcoming session together. So that kind of stuff is-is incredible and it really does come from just that. People being curious and willing to share.
Alexis Franks
Yeah, Brendan, feel feel free to to. Share with us.
Brendan Lahey
OK, sure. So honestly, like one of the discussions really was around we were talking theoretically about leadership. We were talking theoretically and loosely about being a workforce development professional. So then ultimately, we started to have a pointed discussion of like, alright, let’s get this out of theory. Like what are these tangible characteristics and attributes? And we-we asked the group to kind of develop the kind of a David Letterman top ten list and kind of talk through. Well then, as we were kind of doing this, we were like this, this is actually a very rich meaningful discussion. And So what we’re trying to do, what we’re starting to toy with the idea is, is actually taking that collective wisdom, that knowledge that the group generated, and we’re going to try to create an assessment, and we’ll start to build on that. And that kind of just came out of the, just how high the high level that the group was functioning at. And so we’re-we’re-we’re gonna try to implement something for a follow up where we’re gonna, we’re gonna create some kind of an instrument that’s crude and rudimentary where people can kind of experiment with their lists and kind of again rate themselves, maybe get some feedback from some other folks. But now we’re starting to really toy with the idea of, like, maybe each following cohort can contribute. As well and so. So. They, whether they knew it or not, that you’re not coming and you’re not going to be soaking up knowledge, but you might actually be creating knowledge, and-and contributing to the body of knowledge around leadership and-and successful workforce development professionals. So we’re kind of excited about that. We’re-we’re building things and it’s based on the knowledge and expertise and wisdom of of the participants in themselves.
Alexis Franks
That is exciting. That is very exciting and I think it gives a unique kind of twist for each new cohort coming in as well to build on each other to learn from each other, even if they’re not in the sessions together, there’s still something that they can take or some type of legacy that that first, hole cohort will even leave behind, so that’s great. That is very exciting. Well, Jason, Brendan, we appreciate the work that you’re doing, the facilitation that you’re having with our cohort and we’ll look forward to continuous cohorts and the work that you do with them as well. Here on Workforce on the Mic, we have what are called “mic drop moments” in each episode. So you’ve given us some great mic drop moments for today. So, to be curious and to be ready to work if you’re participating in a leadership Academy, if you are a leader, which so many workforce warriors are, to really be curious and be ready to work. And then just to participate in in the Leadership Academy leadership development in some way, shape or form. We always encourage that continuous improvement and growth mindset. So, we appreciate the way that you all are supporting NAWDP in that endeavor as well. Again, Brendan, Jason, if anyone would like to get in touch with you or follow up with you, what is the best way for our listeners to do?
Jason Estep
All right. Well, first, if you want to find out more about the Leadership Academy, if you just head on over to nawdp.org, they have a very handy link there. They’ll give you lots of information. And I think that there’s even, We have our bios on that page that have our phone numbers and E-mail addresses and that’s a great way to get in contact with us. And so that’s probably the-the easiest thing to do. And you can also just find us, google us on the web. You can find our Fanning website. It has that same information.
Alexis Franks
Thank you, great. Thank you. Thank you both so much. We appreciate you for joining us on our episode today and look forward to our continued work with you.
Brendan Lahey
Likewise, thank you very much.
Jason Estep
Thanks, Alexis.
