Case Study: How a Fortune 100 Tech Firm’s Leadership Investment Is Still Producing Leaders, Seven Years Later

How a Fortune 100 Tech Firm’s Leadership Investment Is Still Producing Leaders, Seven Years Later

The Challenge: High Performers, Quiet Doubt

The Sales and Marketing Business Unit at a Fortune 100 technology company was moving through sustained change, and its managers were feeling it in ways the org chart couldn’t measure.

These were high performers by every external metric. But underneath the résumé, many carried a question they’d never said out loud: did I actually earn this seat, or did I just get lucky? Left unnamed, that doubt (aka imposter syndrome) showed up as hesitation in the moments that mattered most: the exec meeting, the stretch assignment, the promotion conversation. In a business unit that couldn’t afford to lose its best people, it was a retention risk hiding in plain sight.

The managers didn’t need another offsite. They needed to name what was happening, and tools they’d still reach for years later.

The Action: A Program Built to Outlive Itself

The company’s CMO partnered with Desa Global Leadership to sponsor a customized six-month leadership development program for a global cohort of Sales and Marketing managers, built in three phases: networking and personal branding, storytelling and sponsorship, and a capstone where cross-functional teams solved a real business problem and presented it directly to senior leaders.

Five coaches supported the cohort, most of whom were alumni of the program’s pilot group, teaching from lived experience instead of theory. That single decision turned a cohort into a community. Every participant leveraged a Mentorship Moment subscription with the templates and tools to pay skills forward as mentors and team leaders, engineered to keep the development compounding long after the program ended.

“The program is a must for any talent the senior leaders want to inspire… I now feel completely comfortable expressing this level of thinking with execs” — Lynda Richardson, US Consumer Media Manager

The Result: Confidence That Moved Fast

Within the first day of training, confidence articulating a professional value proposition rose from 46% to 75%. Comfort initiating conversations with C-suite and SVP-level executives rose from 40% to 89%. Four participants progressed into new roles during the program itself, putting what they’d just learned into practice before the cohort even graduated.

Compounding Return: The System Still Runs, Seven Years Later

One participant, now a senior leader with nearly three decades at the company, still uses one of DGL’s tools before high-stakes conversations, seven years post program. She’s since been chosen to moderate the company’s global town hall.

Her turning point wasn’t a framework. It was permission: naming the imposter feelings she’d carried quietly, and realizing they were the predictable cost of working alongside relentlessly high performers, not a flaw in her. What made it stick was community: peers across geographies and functions facing the same uncertainties, in a room built for psychological safety instead of performance.

She’s still doing that work today, leading a monthly cohort inside the company’s community, role modeling openly, including job uncertainty and new leadership transitions, to normalize the struggle for the next generation.

“DGL gave me a practice I still reach for seven years later, as a leader and colleague.” — Val Fox, Director of Employee Communications

One cohort is still producing sponsors, mentors, and trusted internal voices, years after the program ended. That’s not a training outcome. That’s infrastructure.

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