Catapult, LLC V1.1 Contacts: Adam Goodman
[email protected] 847-323-6107
Alan Wolff
[email protected] 847-502-1680
Project Description: Catapult is a unique SaaS Leadership Portal that measures learning gain for leadership development. The Portal has five integrated modules: • A 360° Leadership Assessment with configurable competencies and an Action Planning tool to help learners set goals and assess progress after the 360° is complete. • Two Teamwork Assessments for intact project teams that help members improve their individual and collective teamwork from project inception through conclusion. Learners can build their insights across multiple project teams so that development is continuous over time. • A Coaching Module that structures leadership coaching between the coachee and coach, including optional exercises and an application and selection process for potential coachees. • A Leadership Journal that provides individual leadership development exercises (strengths, gaps, values, mission, vision, crucible, etc.) and other methods for individual learners to think critically about their leadership experiences. • A Leadership Portfolio that captures and displays information from across the Portal. For example, learners are able to learn from action plans, progress, and key insights by looking at their own data from the other four modules. The first three of are used today and the final two are under development.
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Since inception, learners have conducted over 2,500 Teamwork Assessments, overe 1,000 360° Leadership Assessments, and over 400 people have received leadership coaching. The software is developed by Adam Goodman, Director of Northwestern University’s Center for Leadership, and Alan Wolff, Director of Information Resources for the University’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. Problem To Be Solved: Fortune 500 companies and other large organizations commonly use 360° Leadership Assessments to help a leader understand her/his own leadership and how that compares with the perceptions of others. These assessments are offered as stand alone information and often lack follow-through action plans to help a person improve her/his leadership. Teamwork Assessments are far less common as is software for leadership coaching. The Leadership Portal offers two unique solutions. • Higher education has made minimal use of these assessments and Catapult provides a novel model and rationale for enterprise-level adoption. The software was developed and is used at a top-ranked major research university and at other higher education institutions to complement commonly found leadership programming on college campuses. Also, licensee campuses access consented, anonymized data from all schools for program improvement, research and similar uses. • We are not aware of any software that gathers information from across these types of assessments so that leaders can understand their learning gains over time. The Portal also provides decision makers (e.g., executive leadership, industry human resources) with information about the leadership strengths and gaps of populations (e.g., a particular management level or division). In addition, we believe that there is a substantial advantage by offering leadership development software simultaneously to higher education, industry and other organizations. Licensing Opportunity: To date, four universities use the Leadership Portal and we expect to add an additional 10 universities in the next 12-18 months. There are 4,000+ higher education institutions in the United States alone. Nearly all of these institutions claim to develop leaders yet the technology has not existed for them to document these claims for accreditors and other audiences. The Leadership Portal is one of only two entities that can meet this need. The other is the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL), which surveys students about their leadership perspectives but does not offer tools for individual leader development or classroom use. We also built the software so that it can be used by industry and other large organizations. For example, Forbes estimates that American companies spend $60 billion annually on leadership development programs. While most large companies have branded programs and Fortune 50 companies often have leadership development centers, our
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conversations have revealed that almost none use software beyond 360° Assessments and other one-off talent inventories (e.g., Disc, StrengthFinder). Interest in big data provides four opportunities for the Portal – • Organizations can use multiple instruments to assess a leader’s development, and do so over a long period of time • Senior executives can look within and across management levels to identify strengths and gaps • Information from currently invisible areas – teamwork and coaching – becomes available • The ability to structure and brand leadership education (internal HR and external consultants) using the Portal. Alternative Sources: As noted above, common alternatives are single use assessments that are available through a variety of vendors. Three major sources are Gallup’s StrengthsFinder, Kouzes and Posner’s Leadership Practices Inventory, and the Center for Creative Leadership’s 360° Assessment. There are dozens of other smaller vendors that provide customizable 360° assessments. As noted above, MSL conducts leadership surveys in higher education and shares that data with participating campuses. Intellectual Property and License: Northwestern University owns the software code and Adam Goodman owns the language copyright. Catapult is the sole licensee of the Leadership Portal software and also has rights for the copyrighted language through Goodman’s role as a Catapult founder.
