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byline: Gary Robertson

Keeping top talent

One of the first questions Stephanie Wesolowski was asked when she reported for work at Lynchburg-based Scott Insurance sent her head spinning.

‘They said, ‘What time do you want to come to work?’ I couldn’t believe it,” Wesolowski recalls, marveling at the flexibility she was given.

Scott lets its employees manage the start and end of their workdays to best meet their personal schedules.

That flexibility is part of Scott’s culture that promotes a healthy work-life balance — a philosophy that Wesolowski now preaches as a health risk management specialist in the company’s Richmond office.

Work-life balance has become a major concern among a growing number of employees. The concept is especially strong among members of the Milliennial Generation — those born between 1981 and 2000 — who are exerting an increasing influence in the workplace.

Numerous surveys, including those by Ernst & Young Global Generations Research, indicate that what millennials want most is flexibility in where, when and how they work.

That seems to be borne out by the 2014 survey of 355 organizations’ compensation packages by Mercer, a major human resources and financial services consulting firm based in New York.

In 2008, about 50 percent of organizations included initiatives emphasizing work-life balance as part of their total compensation. Today, the number has climbed to 67 percent.

The surge in the popularity and capabilities of mobile technology, as well as the mass entrance into the workplace of digitally inclined millennials, are part of the explanation, Mercer says.

“A lot of companies, especially those with a younger workforce, are fielding questions about the creation of work-life balance programs,” Wesolowski says. “The younger population is interested in looking at flexibility and time off and working remotely. It’s at the top of their radar.”

Drawing on her 25 years of experience in health and wellness programs, as well as her own life experiences, Wesolowski believes millennials are focused on leading balanced lives partly because of their childhood experiences.

“Both their parents worked. They went to daycare. There was this back and forth, and they didn’t see much balance,” Wesolowski says. “Now, with the introduction of technology, [workers] can go watch a T-ball game and then return to work [remotely].

“Once you see that balance, you see how valuable it is,” Wesolowski says.

Initially trained as a dietitian, Wesolowski places a premium on healthy eating in all its aspects, which to her includes family meals.

“When my kids were very little, my husband commuted to Chicago an hour and a half each way [from their home in the suburbs]. But we had a family meal. We ate together late at night when he came in.

“From a dietitian’s standpoint, family dinner — no matter what — is huge. We view it as sacred,” she said, citing the relationships it can build between children and parents.

She adds that companies seeking a healthy culture build more than just good rapport with employees. A flexible work environment is becoming a key tool to attract top talent and retain employees.

8-to-5 alternatives
Jenni Lee Crocker, head of Marsh’s Virginia office in Richmond, understands the issue, too, from both a personal and professional standpoint.

She says work-life balance is a frequent topic of conversation among her colleagues at Marsh, a major insurance broker and risk management firm.

“People for varied reasons can’t work the standard 8-to-5 days. Crocker says.

At the other end of the spectrum, some employees have aging parents who need extra help.

“For us, the question is, ‘What is the quality of your work product? Did you make a difference today?’ We don’t want to lose an employee over an 8-to-5 day,” Crocker says.

Research indicates an increasing number of companies are offering schedule flexibility.

A recent CareerBuilder survey of 1,000 workers in information technology, financial services, sales, and professional and business services found that 40 percent of the respondents work outside of traditional office hours.

Moreover, one in four employees will check on work during activities with family and friends.

Crocker says that using technology to find flexibility in  your work life is an exercise in bargaining with yourself.

“There are days when I feel absolutely tethered by every device,” she says.

But she adds that being technologically tethered is something she can accept if it means she will be able to run her child to a doctor’s appointment.

“I am willing to accept the trade-off,” Crocker says.

However, she says workplace flexibility doesn’t mean working fewer hours than required: “You can’t trade off and say you don’t want to work as many hours,” she says.

A flexible workplace
The Virginia Society of CPAs in Richmond has made work-life balance a key benefit for its employees.

To this end, the society has three initiatives, says David Bass, the society’s director of public relations and communications.

VSCPA offers flexible schedules, the option to telecommute one day a week and a 35-hour workweek.  That compressed schedule allows employees to take a three-day weekend if they work 70 hours in nine days instead of 10.

“It’s one of my favorite perks of working here,” Bass says.

Most employees are offered the telecommuting option, but they are expected to participate in meetings through Internet programs that allow them to be seen or heard from home just as if they were sitting in the office.

Bass says the flexible arrangements allow employees to enjoy their personal lives while being employed full time.

Bass says he  is able to participate in volunteer efforts to improve the community. “For me, that’s as important as employment and salary,” he says.

At 38, Bass is part of the “X” generation that came just ahead of the millennials, who he says are on the minds of many members of the society.

A recent CPA roundtable discussion revealed that some Virginia firms are looking at ways to offer more flexible schedules for their employees.

“It’s a cultural, generational shift,” Bass says, and the CPA profession is going through an adjustment period as it strives to attract young talent to the profession.

High-growth quandary
Can a work-life balance be achieved at a hard-driving management and digital consulting firm that’s growing 15 to 20 percent annually?

Some of the top executives at Richmond-based CapTech, which has more than 500 employees, say it’s working for them.

In fact, two executives — CEO Kevin McQueen and Joanna Bergeron, the chief talent officer — say that’s why they joined the company.

McQueen says he sought a better balance after his previous job at a national consulting firm. The 70- to 80-hour workweeks and travel meant he saw his wife only two weekends a month. “It wasn’t sustainable,” he says.

By focusing more on a balanced life, McQueen says, he was able to participate in the Big Brothers Big Sisters youth mentoring program and hang out with friends and family, while still helping to build a fast-growing company.

Bergeron also piled up hours working for a large national firm, but she changed her priorities after she had children.

She needed to be a mom sometimes. “I had to pick up kids,” she says.

And that meant leaving work earlier sometimes to be home, then catching up on work at night if the project needed her. 

“We hire people who can manage their time,” Bergeron says.

Bergeron and McQueen tell their work-life balance stories to prospective employees who want to work hard but also seek balance in their lives.

Bergeron says CapTech’s flexible work environment is reflected in its 12 to 15 percent employee turnover rate, which, she says, is about half of what many other companies in their industry experience. 

In 2014,  Consulting Magazine’s “Best Firms to Work For” list ranked CapTech sixth overall for large firms while also taking the top spots in meeting client needs and in career development.

McQueen says the part of work-life balance he’s working on now is being able to “turn off my brain” when he’s away from work.

A moment on the world stage

“Welcome, World.” 

That is the message on the website of Richmond 2015 as it counts down the days, hours and seconds to Sept. 19.

That is the day the Road World Cycling Championships begin in the capital city. Preparation for the nine-day event (Sept. 19-27) has prompted activities ranging from widespread street repaving to the training of a small army of volunteers to guide visitors around Richmond.

The “Worlds,” as the championships are called, represent a pinnacle event for cycling. Richmond aggressively sought the races — it will be the first U.S. host of the event since 1986. The competition is supervised by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the world governing body for cycling.

Nearly half a million spectators are expected to watch the event in person, along with a worldwide TV audience estimated to number in the hundreds of millions.
Their eyes will be trained on 1,000 superbly chiseled athletes with lightning in their legs as they zip along city streets and other roads throughout the region in a series of 12 races.

Predicted impact
Richmond 2015, the umbrella organization pulling together the various pieces of the race event, has projected a rosy economic impact: $129 million in visitor spending in the region, along with $3.8 million in local tax revenue.

The rush is on to tie the bow on race-related projects before the crowds start arriving. A safe ride for the contestants is critical.  City paving projects were expected to be completed by mid-August.

Once the races are complete, local residents will have not only better streets but legacy reminders, such as the restoration of cobblestone streets in various parts of the city, says Allen Rothert, Richmond’s special events coordinator.

“They are artists,” Rothert said of the workers who have preserved the old skills of laying cobblestones. He adds that Richmond has been collecting cobblestones over decades of street work and putting them aside in a warehouse for times when they are needed for restoration projects.

Rothert says the World Championships will be the biggest event the city has ever staged.

If plans unfold in the way they’re supposed to, Richmond will be one of the few cities in the country to have successfully hosted an international competition of this scale. “For me, it’s all about reputation,” says Rothert, who has been employed by the city for 45 years. “This will be our crowning achievement.”

Mixed emotions
Businesses along the path of the various races have mixed emotions about what to expect, according to Greg Johnson, owner of Citizen Restaurant in downtown Richmond and a spokesman for the group. “Some are looking forward to it,” he says. “Some are closing for the week.”

The ones who are temporarily closing, he says, are those who either think their products don’t lend themselves to an international sports crowd or they are concerned that their employees might not be able to get to work because of the crowds and street closures.

Johnson, on the other hand, believes that restaurant owners like him stand to benefit. “I hope we’ll be so incredibly busy, we’ll be able to take the next week off,” he says.

Johnson says some downtown businesses have expressed doubt whether adequate transportation plans would be in place, not only to deliver employees to the workplace but also to provide needed services.

But Johnson credits officials at Richmond 2015 with trying to work with downtown merchants to explain the full scope of the races and what to expect as events began. “They told us what 450,000 people really means,” he says, and it means crowds.

Ed Jones, owner of Cycles Ed in Ashland, says many small bike shop owners like him will not benefit from the races, as they initially hoped they would.  “Most of the local shops will not be involved. The teams will be bringing their own mechanics and their own equipment,” Jones says.

But he believes that the attention brought to cycling by the World Championships will add momentum to a cycling resurgence that is already underway. “We’ll be affected residually,” Jones says.
Officials organizing the races say that at every turn, they’re trying to involve local businesses and merchants as partners, and they have tried to be sure that small, women-owned and minority businesses have an opportunity to participate.   

Army of volunteers
Katherine O’Donnell, vice president of community relations for Richmond Region Tourism, says the organization has revved up its “I Am Tourism Ambassador Training” program.

“We are overseeing the Ambassador volunteers that are a part of the 3,000-plus volunteer shifts being organized by Richmond 2015,” O’Donnell says. “These will be volunteers stationed at visitor info desks as well as roamers in high-traffic areas such as the FanFest in the Greater Richmond Convention Center.”

FanFest, only a few steps from the start and finish lines for races at Fifth and East Broad streets, will be the hub for fans to gather autographs and photos of their favorite riders.

More than vendors and exhibitors also will be there. Richmond-based CarMax, the largest used-car retailer in the country, is sponsoring a “Kid Zone” for young cycling fans.

Richmond also has a who’s who of corporate and regional partners to help shoulder some of the fundraising responsibilities. Among the corporate sponsors are Genworth, WestRock (formerly MeadWestvaco), Altria Group, Hunton & Williams and Dominion Resources.

Richmond 2015 officials set a goal of raising $21 million to put on the races. “We’re very much on track,” says Lee Kallman, vice president of marketing and business development.

In addition, Virginia Tourism Corp. (VTC) is planning to air at least 500 commercials across the country during the championships.

The 30-second commercials will be aired on Universal Sports, NBC Sports Network, CNBC, and NBC. The spots will feature Virginia travel experiences, such as outdoor recreation, beaches, mountains and culinary scenes before a large audience tuning in to see the bike race.

The commercials are part of a $2 million partnership between the VTC and Richmond 2015.

Fees from television broadcasts of the races, royalties from the official travel program, as well as concession and merchandise sales also will help bolster the bottom line.

Kallman says that in Europe the World Championships are regarded almost strictly as a big race. “For us it’s more of an international festival, an international party,” he says. “It provides a stage to showcase the region to the world.”

International interest
The Richmond area is getting that international exposure at a time when an increasing number of foreign companies are showing an interest in the region.

“About 74 percent of the projects we’re working on are international,” says Barry Matherly, the CEO of the Greater Richmond Partnership, a regional economic development marketing group. “Over the past three years, it’s been climbing steadily.”

Last year, for example, Tranlin Inc., a subsidiary of a Chinese pulp and paper company, announced it would spend $2 billion during the next five years to build its first advanced manufacturing facility in the U.S., which will be located on an 850-acre site in Chesterfield County.

Perhaps one of the reasons for increased international attention in the region was a change in the partnership’s strategy two years ago.

Matherly says the organization closed its international offices and focused on a rapid-response effort to send representatives to emerging markets or to any country where prospect activity was hot. “It made us much more flexible,” Matherly says. “We ramped up internationally.”

Downtown population rising
The cycling event will spotlight Richmond at a pivotal time in its history. Downtown apartment development in the city continues at a blistering pace, as millennials, empty nesters and others flow into the city.

The advocacy group Venture Richmond reports that about 20,000 people now live in downtown Richmond, nearly double the 10,244 residents counted in 2010. That means that the number of downtown residents is nearly equivalent to the population of Waynesboro.

Integra Realty Resources, Richmond, a real estate consulting and valuation firm in Henrico County, says that 2,250 apartments were completed in downtown Richmond from the second half of 2012 through the second half of 2014, and an additional 2,400 units were in the pipeline.

Developers have been adapting old office buildings and former corporate headquarters buildings as multifamily dwellings.

Among recent examples of the trend have been conversions of the 23-story former Central Fidelity Bank headquarters on East Broad Street (an ongoing project) and the 14-story (with a seven-story annex) former Virginia Power headquarters at Seventh and East Franklin streets.

Scott’s Addition blossoms
The newest hotspot in Richmond’s housing scene is Scott’s Addition, a former gritty industrial area that has been the focus of intense development activity during the past few years.

The Scott’s Addition Boulevard Association has reported that 1,200 apartments either have opened in the past year or are expected to open this year.

The neighborhood is bounded on the south by Broad Street, on the east by The Boulevard, on the north by the railroad tracks and on the west by Interstate 195.

It was declared a historic district in 2005, making it eligible for historic tax credits and real estate abatements from the city.

Louis Salomonsky, a 76-year-old developer who has been building housing in Richmond for half a century, says Scott’s Addition is on fire. “We built 134 apartments, and they rented overnight,” says Salomonsky, a principal in Historic Housing.

He added that the median income of those who are renting from his company has gone up significantly during the past few years.

“There is increasing affluence,” Salomonsky says, but he adds that increased development in the area has gone hand-in-hand with increased gentrification, as households with lower incomes have moved out.

‘Reversal of fortune’
Gentrification in Richmond’s historic areas and other forces, such as increased immigration from Mexico and Central America, has produced what urban planner John Moeser calls “a reversal of fortunes” in the Richmond region.

Pockets of poverty have shifted from the city into suburban counties, as low-income residents seek less expensive housing.

Moeser, who taught urban planning at Virginia Commonwealth University, now is a senior fellow at Bonner Center for Community Engagement at the University of Richmond. He says that for the first time in American history the majority of poor now live in the suburbs, and the Richmond region is no exception.

In a recent report, Moeser notes that, from 2000 to 2012, the number of people living below the poverty line rose 70 percent in Henrico County and increased 41 percent in Chesterfield County, Richmond’s two biggest suburban neighbors.  By contrast, Richmond’s increase was 25 percent.

“The reversal of fortune between the city and county is becoming the new normal,” Moeser recently wrote.

In an interview, he observes that gentrification in various sections of Richmond undergoing rapid development will continue.

“I don’t see that stopping anytime soon,” he says. “My prediction is that the counties are going to have a much more serious time with poverty as time goes on, concentrated, high density poverty.”

The endless at-bat over ballpark

While Richmond’s foray as host of the Road World Cycling Championships seems to be on track, the direction of its effort to replace a 30-year-old baseball stadium — The Diamond, home of the Flying Squirrels, a Double-A affiliate of the San Francisco Giants — remains unclear. 

Richmond Mayor Dwight Jones proposed a plan to build a new baseball stadium in Shockoe Bottom, a historic area near a slave burial ground. That idea drew the ire of critics who described the site as “sacred ground.”
Under the Shockoe Bottom plan, which was paired with commercial development at the site of the city’s current baseball stadium on the Boulevard, Richmond would be on the hook for $79.6 million, including infrastructure upgrades and a slavery memorial.

The mayor withdrew his proposal from council consideration last year when it appeared the measure would be voted down. After that, little movement on the stadium issue took place.

For many observers, the standoff recalled the situation faced by the Richmond Braves, the city’s Triple-A team for 42 years. The Braves departed for Gwinnett County, Ga., in 2009 after repeated pleas for a new ballpark went unmet.

Finally in June Lou DiBella, the Squirrels’ president and managing general partner, revealed his frustration in an open letter to the community.  “Not only is our future uncertain, but efforts toward consensus have been replaced by political paralysis by analysis,” DiBella says in the letter.

In July, Jones made a new pitch.  After consulting leaders in Chesterfield and Henrico counties, he invited the Squirrels to look at potential sites for a new home throughout the Richmond area. While setting a December deadline for finding a stadium site, he offered to extend the team’s lease at The Diamond through 2017. 

The only place that Jones does not want considered is the Boulevard property where the current stadium now sits. The mayor believes the land has great potential for tax-generating development.

One possibility for the 60-acre property is a standalone children’s hospital, a cause championed by many area physicians. Richmond philanthropist William H. Goodwin Jr. and his wife, Alice, have offered to contribute $150 million toward the construction of the hospital. However, two early partners in the project, the Bon Secours and VCU health systems, have dropped out for financial reasons.

Improving the pipeline

Virginia spends about $78 million a year on students who must repeat a year between kindergarten and the third grade because they simply weren’t ready for school.

That statistic, however, reveals only part of the problem when children aren’t prepared to enter kindergarten. In its efforts to recruit and maintain a skilled workforce, Virginia’s business community has identified early childhood education as an important issue.  The Virginia Chamber of Commerce, in fact, has made early childhood education a key element of its Blueprint Virginia, a comprehensive economic development plan for the state.

“We have an educational system that is broken in preparing a worker for our manufacturing companies,” says Ben Davenport, a Chatham businessman who is a former chairman of the Virginia Chamber. “While we’re beginning to address it, it will take a considerable matter of time for a result.”

Davenport owns three businesses in Southern Virginia, including a waste and recycling company, First Piedmont Corp., as well as energy and communication companies.

He is finding it increasingly difficult to hire the skilled workers he needs. “We have seen a real decline in the quality of education in new hires,” Davenport says.

Employment in Davenport’s region once came primarily from textile and furniture industries, which required only a ninth-grade education. Now the region is reaping a bitter harvest. Those industries largely have moved production overseas, leaving behind former employees and their children.

“In the Danville area, 30 percent of the population was entering kindergarten unprepared” for school, Davenport says. The slow start could put children behind for the rest of their lives, he says.

About five years ago, the Danville Regional Foundation, established in 2005 to invest $200 million from the sale of Danville Regional Medical Center, began investing $5 million in pre-K education in the region.

The foundation works with Smart Beginnings, a group that connects private and public resources, including business, higher education and the faith community for the benefit of young children.

“We made an aggressive effort to turn around [the preparation of children entering school in the Danville area], and it worked,” Davenport says.

Today, he says less than 15 percent of the children showing up for kindergarten in the region are unprepared, as measured by testing and other methodologies. “So we know that the right kind of interaction with children has a profound effect,” Davenport says.

Removing politics
Kathy Glazer, president of the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation, which provides funding and technical assistance for the Smart Beginnings network, says the beginning of the organization a decade ago was a business-led initiative. “It showed early-on recognition by the business community that this was not a partisan issue, but a workforce investment.”

Support from the business community has helped wring the politics out of early childhood education, she says.

“To me, that has been really a sea change, and a very significant help to overcoming some of the barriers or some of the challenges that we face.”

Glazer adds that Smart Beginnings works in communities with federal programs such as Head Start, as well as state programs such as the Virginia Preschool Initiative that serves at-risk 4-year-olds who are not served by existing preschool programs.

Private efforts, such as programs operated by faith-based and community groups, also are part of the mix.

The Early Childhood Foundation receives $1.5 million annually in state funding for its operations and also raises money from corporations and other private sources in support of an annual budget of $3 million to $4 million.

Glazer says the group also recently helped the state secure a federal grant that will bring the state about $70 million during the next four years. The grant is administered by the Virginia Department of Education.

WHRO push
In another effort, the Hampton Roads public broadcasting outlet WHRO last year gave “teachable moment” training workshops to more than 2,000 parents and 435 teachers.

Summer reading camps and other activities were provided for 5,150 children. Campers showed gains in all of the literacy skills presented in the program, including an 84 percent gain in phonics skills and a 139 percent gain in word recognition skills.

WHRO’s Raising Readers Reading Van also toured the region visiting 57 preschools, elementary schools and daycare centers, distributing over 6,380 books to children most in need.

WHRO is owned by 19 Southeastern Virginia school divisions. Under contract with the Virginia Department of Education, it also delivers statewide online and digital educational services to 286,000 students and 25,000 educators per month.

Manassas efforts
One of Virginia’s boldest efforts to improve early childhood education is occurring in Manassas City Schools.

School Superintendent Catherine Magouyrk  wants to develop a network of parents — working with the business community and others — focused on helping young children learn in the pre-K environment.

One-third of Manassas students are classified as English-language learners, the highest proportion of any school system in the state.

“In elementary school, 60 to 90 percent [of students] could be a second-language learner. We have challenging, but wonderful, schools,” Magouyrk says.

Like many school divisions in Virginia, Manassas doesn’t have enough classrooms for all the pupils who need  pre-K instruction. In the 2014-15 school year, there were 140 children on the waiting list.

This year, Manassas schools will implement a program to provide pre-school to every qualifying 4-year-old. There will be three models employed, ranging from a traditional in-school, full-day pre-K program to an accelerated learning program connecting home and school through mobile technology. That model includes four hours of direct parent training every other week in the school with a certified teacher.

The heart of the program will be a software program called Footsteps2-   Brilliance, which can be used on a variety of devices, including computers and smart phones. The program features a library of interactive children’s books offered in English and Spanish.

Officials hope the software program will help parents, as well as their children, learn English. Also, English speakers can learn Spanish through the program.

To participate, parents must sign contracts pledging to work with their children.  Teachers will be available to assist families along the way and help them learn how to use the software. If they can’t afford a device to use the software, businesses have agreed to help out.

“The first year, we’re leaving the pavement and hitting the dirt road,” Magouyrk says, referring to the experimental nature of the effort. “All I’ve thought about is doing this right. I don’t want to let the families and children down.”

Adapting to change

Life has changed for many Virginia chief financial officers since the Great Recession.

Roles have been altered, jobs have been lost, new duties have been assumed, and few things are like they were.

Virginia Business asked five nominees in the 10th Annual Virginia CFO Awards to recount how their jobs have changed since the financial turmoil of 2007-09.

Sponsored by the magazine, the awards were presented June 23 at The Jefferson Hotel in Richmond. The judges were four previous winners: Joseph Cheely, formerly with LeClairRyan; Clyde Cornett of Virginia Community Capital; Farrell Hanzaker of Virginia Beach City Public Schools; and Robin Ransom of Commonwealth Commercial Partners.

For C. Harril Whitehurst, chief financial officer of Village Bank in Chesterfield County, the onset of the recession is a dark memory.

The bank had been rapidly growing, from $80 million in assets in 2003 to $600 million by the time of the recession.  Chesterfield was a hotbed for residential development, and Village Bank rode the wave. Then, the real estate market tanked, and property values plunged.

Whitehurst says the bank had concentrated too much on Chesterfield real estate and learned a hard lesson.

“We had a lot of good people who couldn’t handle their debt,” he says with sadness in his voice. “They just turned over their keys to us.”

Whitehurst says his job became harder, as the bank struggled to contend with tens of millions of dollars in bad loans and foreclosures.

Then, Village Bank came under regulatory review. In 2012, the bank entered an agreement with regulators to improve its capital levels and asset quality as part of its participation in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). The program offered a way for banks and other financial institutions to raise capital levels after the meltdown in financial markets.

“To get us into compliance with regulatory requirements, we raised $14.6 million in capital,” Whitehurst says.

The bank now is capital compliant and is poised to begin growing again, he says. But the journey back has, at times, been emotionally and physically difficult.

“This bank means a lot to me,” Whitehurst says. “There have been many nights I have gone and prayed, ‘Please, help us get through this.’”

During the next five years, Whitehurst says, he will be working to build shareholder value, instead of dealing with regulatory pressures.

“I’m as excited as I’ve been in a long time,” he says. “We’re headed in the right direction.”

Seeing growth potential 
For Sue Wood, CFO of HighRoad Solution in Ashburn, the recession was a speed bump that slowed things down, even as sales kept climbing year over year.

HighRoad is a digital marketing company that provides automated and integrated solutions to nonprofits and associations.

Wood says some of her company’s customers, still stinging from the effects of the recession, have been slow to invest in technology and change their systems.

“But we’re poised when [the market] comes back around,” she says. “We see tremendous growth potential.”

Being a CFO in a small startup company (with 17 employees as of June) means that Wood has her hand in a lot of different departments.

For example, she has established all of the company’s human resources procedures, policies and benefit programs and also manages all payroll and invoicing responsibilities.

Wood has traveled a varied career path during her work life. At one time, she was president of Town & Country Mortgage and Investment Corp., controlling an investment portfolio of more than $300 million and managing a 50-plus-person staff.

Later, she started a consulting firm, WestWood Consulting. She was raising three children but still wanted to work. Having her own company made this arrangement possible, because she could manage her time.

Wood says she counseled her daughters that it is possible to raise a family and have a good career.

“If you don’t go after things, you’re not going to get them,” Wood says.

Working two jobs
Jeanne Colvin, director of finance for the city of Staunton since 1992, is also the CFO of the city schools.

“I don’t know of anybody else who does this,” she says.

The arrangement began about five years ago when the school superintendent and the school system’s finance director left in the same year.

The school system asked Colvin if she, on an emergency basis, could help put together the school budget. She agreed. Since then, with some restructuring in the city’s finance office, she has kept both jobs.

Colvin says that the move was not directly caused by the recession, which depressed property values and municipal revenues, but there was a link.

Every year since the recession hit, the city annually has looked for ways to trim the payroll when someone retires or leaves. “We eliminated 26 positions [citywide] between 2009 and 2013. We’re slowly recovering,” Colvin says.

When she’s not balancing the budgets of the city and the schools, Colvin and her husband are busy raising their grandchildren, following the death of their son a decade ago.

Colvin says she tried to balance her life the way she balances budgets. “I tell my boss I’ll retire when I stop having fun. As long as I can laugh, I’m OK,” she says.

A varied career
Kathy Davis, controller of New Ravenna Inc. in Exmore, has worked in finance and bookkeeping throughout Virginia’s Eastern Shore following the ebbs and flows of the economy and the job market.

“I have worked in construction, petroleum services, a country club and the school system,” she says, noting that the list doesn’t stop with those jobs.

She joined New Ravenna, a manufacturer of handcrafted mosaic tiles, in 2013 and quickly rose from the staff accountant to controller.

Last year, the company, founded in 1991, was recognized as Virginia Exporter of the Year. It has 110 employees and an expanding market for its products.

Among the many improvements she has put in place has been a system to have the company’s invoices paid 14 days faster than before.

She also has implemented accounting practices that have enabled the company to increase its line of credit by 42 percent. The time for a company to ask for an increase in its line of credit is when it’s doing well and can prove it, she says.
 
New revenue streams
Nadia Anderson, CFO of the Girl Scouts of the Commonwealth of Virginia, lost the CFO job she had at a large church soon after the recession struck. Donations declined, and the church budget was cut sharply.

But she learned a valuable lesson from the experience. “Nonprofit entities have to have different revenue sources,” Anderson says.

When she took her current job about three years ago, she soon realized that the biggest source of revenue for the Girl Scouts is selling cookies.

Since then, she and other Girl Scout leaders have been reaching out to corporate and industry groups that might be interested in the Girl Scouts’ mission of helping girls ages 5-17 develop courage, confidence and life skills.

Anderson, who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Virginia, was herself a Girl Scout.

“The Girl Scout leaders I had were models in the community. They were great women, and the training I received helped me get to this point,” she says.

2015 Virginia CFO Awards

SMALL NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS
George P. Kite III
Call Federal Credit Union
Richmond


LARGE NONPROFIT ORGANIZATIONS
Steven G. McAllister
Washington and Lee University
Lexington

 

SMALL PRIVATE COMPANIES
Lori J. Overholt, CPA
VSA Resorts
Virginia Beach


LARGE PRIVATE COMPANIES
Charles R. “Chip” Bowman
T. Parker Host and Host Terminals Inc.
Norfolk


PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANIES
James F. Woodward
Media General Inc.
Richmond

Educator or workforce creator?

What does business want from higher education, and what are colleges and universities delivering?

If you haven’t considered those questions, you could have learned a lot from “Quality and Value in Virginia’s System of Higher Education,” a conference held in June in Richmond.

The goal of the conference, sponsored by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV), was to develop a unified vision of the role that colleges and universities play — in educating citizens and creating a skilled workforce.

But at the end of the day, there still were a lot of questions.

The sometimes uneasy partnership between business and higher education is reflected in a study released last year as part of an annual poll by the consulting firm Gallup and the Lumina Foundation.

The poll found that 96 percent of college and university chief academic officers nationally were confident in their institutions’ ability to prepare graduates for the workforce.

By sharp contrast, just 11 percent of business leaders strongly agreed that today’s college graduates have the skills their companies need.

How are colleges measured?
Edna Baehre-Kolovani, president of the 42,000-student Tidewater Community College, expressed her concern about one focus of the conference: the return on investment sought by various stakeholders that colleges and universities serve, including students, the business community and the legislature.

“We serve everybody. We don’t carve out one niche of the population and say that’s the only population we’re going to serve,” Baehre-Kolovani said.

“How do we identify what the value proposition is that we want to communicate?” she asked. “How do we know we’re delivering what we promise, when we’re trying to come to grips with what this value proposition is.  And, does it vary from sector to sector, from college to college?”

She also mentioned one of the major issues in the relationship between business and higher education: how the performances of colleges are measured.

“We are not measured on the long-term effects of our graduates in the workplace,” Baehre-Kolovani said. “Our accreditation is based on times to completion and how many students we get through the pipeline.”

Linda Cabe Halpern, vice provost for programs at James Madison University, said every institution of higher education in Virginia needs to be involved with businesses in their regions and to know what those companies’ needs are.

Yet, she suggested, the path to a career and a happy, productive life — on the job and off — is not a narrow one for students. Their overall college experiences — including exposure to ideas outside the classroom and beyond their majors — also are vital.

“It is important for us, I believe, to make the case over and over again and to audience after audience after audience that, ‘Yes, we get it: Employability is important,’ ” Halpern said. “But we have to do all these other things to get [graduates] there.”

Low-income students
Anne Holton, Virginia’s secretary of education, pointed to the issue of rising college costs. She said higher education is not adequately serving students from low-income families.

“That is the moral challenge of our time. [Higher education] is the key way out of poverty, yet we’re failing miserably,” she warned.

Ithaka S+R, a New York-based consulting and research firm, presented a report to SCHEV earlier this year showing that fewer than 25 percent of the lowest-income Virginia students enrolled in a public institution of higher education were attending four-year institutions, compared with 90 percent of high-income students.

“This is particularly troubling since only 5 percent of students who enroll full time in a two-year college earn an associate degree within two years and only 2 percent earn a bachelor’s degree (through transferring to a four-year institution) within four years,” the study said.

Seeking soft skills, too
Several speakers pointed out that, besides technical knowledge and skills, employers are looking for workers with soft skills, such as the ability to communicate or to solve problems in diverse settings.

Debra Humphreys, a vice president with the Association of American Colleges and Universities, relayed a comment made by recruiters at several engineering companies.

“They all said they need good engineers, but they need engineers who can write,” Humphreys said, as laughter rumbled through the room.

Filling the gap
Barry DuVal, president and CEO of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, praised the relationship between business and higher education in Virginia, but he left no doubt as to what companies in the commonwealth need.

Asked in a survey about their biggest priorities, the response of chamber members was resounding. “What they wanted the governor and General Assembly to focus on was creating a ready workforce,” DuVal says, adding that higher education is a huge part of that effort.

He says if Virginia’s economy grows only 2 percent a year, the state will need 2 million new workers by 2025. Forty percent of those workers will require four-year degrees. The rest will not.

Business leaders, however, stress that an increasing number of jobs require intensive training and education beyond high school to compete in an expanding, global knowledge economy.

The big problem: Virginia doesn’t have enough skilled workers to fill many of the jobs needed to keep its economy humming. “We have a workforce gap, and your institutions play an important role in filling those gaps,” DuVal told educators.

Frightened parents
Teresa Sullivan, the president of the University of Virginia and a labor force demography scholar, said that today’s college students still face the ripple effects of the Great Recession, which officially ended six years ago.

She recently taught a freshman seminar in which students read a book titled, “The Coming Jobs War.”

“I asked them, ‘Would you give this book to your parents to read?’ The entire class, as one, shook their heads,” Sullivan recalled.

The book would only add to their parents’ anxiety about the students’ job prospects, they said. “One student told me her mother called her every night and cried on the phone,” Sullivan said.

Influential experiences
Despite such worries, one study discussed at the conference, the “Gallup-Purdue [University] Index of Great Jobs and Great Lives,” suggests that certain college experiences can have a great influence on graduates’ lives and their careers.

The 2014 study posited that there is a significant association between six influential experiences and the “engagement” of graduates in the workplace.

“Engagement is more than job satisfaction,” the study said. “It involves employees being intellectually and emotionally connected with their organizations and work teams because they are able to do what they’re best at, they like what they do at work, and they have someone who cares about their development at work.”

Those influential college experiences include:

  • a professor or mentor who cared about students as persons;
  • a teacher who made them excited about learning;
  • a professor or mentor who urged them to pursue their dreams;
  • an internship or job that helped students apply what they had learned;
  • an active and meaningful engagement in an organization or extracurricular activity; and
  • participation in a project that took a semester or longer to complete.

In essence, the proposition is that supportive teachers and learning gained from experience can help graduates be more engaged in their work and carry with them a lifelong sense of well-being.

Timothy Sands, the president of Virginia Tech, cautioned that the relationship between college experiences and engagement in the workplace is still being explored, but he suggested that the implications could be profound. “This is the kind of thing that could really change higher education,” he said.

In the meantime, Leanna Blevins, acting executive director of the New College Institute in Martinsville, urged her higher-education colleagues not to get caught up in theories in discussing their work with businesspeople.
She recalled the blunt comment of one economic development director about college graduates: “He said, ‘I want to know whether they can work and whether they can think — that’s all I want to know.’”

Comparison shopping

Although he didn’t speak at SCHEV’s  “Quality and Value” summit, Sen. Mark Warner says he is keenly focused on the value of a college education: what it costs, and what comes afterward in terms of job opportunities.

With Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, and Marco Rubio, R-Florida, Warner has introduced legislation — the Student Right to Know Before You Go Act — that would post online relevant data about colleges that already has been collected.

“This will allow students and families to access comparative information on which colleges and which majors will help them find a good job after graduation,” Warner says.

The senator says he also is concerned about student debt and finding ways to bring down the cost of higher education.

In Virginia, 59 percent of the students of private or public four-year colleges graduated with debt last year. The average debt load was $25,780, according to the Institute for College Access & Success.

“I know as someone who was the first in my family to graduate from college, I wouldn’t have had the business or political success I’ve had without being able to access a student loan program and being able to earn some money so I didn’t come out hobbled with huge amounts of student debt,” Warner says.

Among other initiatives, Warner has proposed legislation to cap student loan repayments at 15 percent of income, so graduates pay less when they’re just getting started and gradually repay more as their income increases.

To help low-income students, such as those mentioned at the Richmond conference by Anne Holton, Virginia’s secretary of education, Warner would allow low-income students to earn early college credits in high school through the Pell grant program.

Warner says those who complete college courses before they finish high school are more likely to graduate from college than their peers who do not.

“Nobody needs to be told just how hard it is for low-income students to afford a college education,” Warner says.

Innovative research

Virginia’s engineering schools are involved in research projects ranging from measuring the safety of football helmets to creating thinner, more efficient solar panels to fuel the world’s increasing appetite for renewable energy.

The diversity of the research makes you wonder: What’s next? For inquiring minds, every aspect of human endeavor seems to be fair game.

For example, Virginia Tech’s School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences has become widely influential for groundbreaking efforts to rank football helmets on their ability to reduce concussion risks.

The school’s STAR (Summation of Tests for the Analysis of Risk) rating system grades helmets based on how well they absorb impacts. Five stars protect the best, one star the least.

The system has become the gold standard for companies making football helmets, as well as for an untold number of fans and families who want players protected from head injuries.

“Five or six years ago, nobody was talking about this stuff,” says Stefan Duma, the school’s director.  Now, he says, organizations ranging from the National Football League to organized youth football teams — basically any group in which someone straps on a helmet — have become interested in protecting players from concussions.

Virginia Tech’s efforts to gather head-impact data began more than a decade ago.  Duma and his team were working on an automobile safety project and compiling head impact data using sensors placed in the helmets of Virginia Tech’s football squads.

During that period, a university equipment manager asked Duma if he could recommend the best helmet for players on the team.

That question helped put Duma on a journey that has brought Virginia Tech widespread acclaim and attention in the area of helmet safety.

In the testing program, helmets are dropped from various heights ranging from a few inches to several feet. The results have often been startling.

Among the findings: “Moving from a 1-star to a 4-star can reduce risk by 50 percent,” Duma says.

He says a helmet’s star rating now is the first question most coaches and parents ask before making a purchase.

Tech also recently completed testing of a variety of hockey helmets. “We’re going on to lacrosse, baseball, bicycling, all kinds of helmeting sports,” Duma says.

Transferring knowledge
When Peter Beling starts talking about the Microsoft Kinect, you might be tempted to think he is explaining a new video game. Kinect, after all, is a motion-sensing device used in video games.

But Beling, an associate professor of systems and information engineering at the University of Virginia, has a much more serious intent. He’s using the Kinect to track workers’ movements, especially in manufacturing, in an effort to correlate specific actions with performance and quality.

As part of a project sponsored by the Prince George-based Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing (CCAM), Beling’s efforts are focused on a nagging industry problem: “How do you transfer knowledge to a new generation from an old generation before you lose them to retirement?” Beling explains.

The difference between how really good workers do a job and how average workers do the same job can be determined only by observation, he says.  “You can only understand what’s happening if you’re prepared to watch all the time,” Beling says. “And you can only watch all the time with a sensor and a computer.”

If his project yields the data he is hoping for, Beling says, it will bring companies one step closer to understanding how to improve the quality of their products and processes, as well as how to pass on those skills to a new generation.

Better health through big data
Why do some people heal faster than others? That may not sound like the job for a computer scientist, but it is at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Engineering.

Tomasz Arodz, a computer scientist with a background in biotechnology, is using computational models and algorithms in the pursuit of better medical treatments.

“I have ongoing collaboration [at the VCU Medical Center that includes Dr. Robert Diegelmann in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology] that is focused on healing of wounds. Some heal very quickly.

Some take longer to heal. What are the molecular differences?” Arodz asks.

That’s what he’s trying to find out by collecting huge amounts of data and then analyzing that information with the aid of computers.

Arodz’s work with the wound specialist is part of an expanding collaboration between VCU’s engineering and medical schools.

Arodz uses big data not only to find sets of genes altered by disease but also to discover pathways to help biologists understand what underlies various pathologies.

He adds that computer scientists increasingly collaborate in the biological and medical fields because of the incredible increase in the amount of information becoming available in those areas. “If you want to know what is going on, you have to have algorithmic methods,” he says.

Sunny outlook for solar
Sylvain X. Marsillac, director of the Virginia Institute for Photovoltaics at Old Dominion University, believes he is in the right field at the right time.

“The solar market has had continuous growth by more than 40 percent for the last 20 years, even during the recession,” says Marsillac, who has a 5-kilowatt array of solar panels on his house.
He believes that solar energy has helped change the landscape of renewable energy worldwide. And now, he says, the cost per watt of solar has fallen enough to compete with several forms of fossil fuels.

“The price of solar has dramatically decreased, with modules going from more than five dollars 20 years go to less than one dollar today,” Marsillac says.

His particular focus is the creation of ultra-thin-film solar cells, the ones that can provide portable solar power to military units, or for satellites whose solar cells must be as light and flexible as possible.

Marsillac notes that the efficiency of solar cells has increased even as their cost has dropped.  “These two main parameters, cost and efficiency, are the ones we focus our research on,” he says.

On a scale of 100 percent, efficiency has jumped on average from 13 percent when he entered the field to 21 percent today. Some solar panels provide even higher efficiencies, in the 40-plus percent range, but they tend to be complicated and too costly for residential installation.

“Another potential paradigm is the rise of cheaper storage systems, via Tesla’s new battery plant [being built near Reno, Nev.], for example, which will then allow for the solar energy to be stored during the day and used at night,” Marsillac adds.

Tesla, a company best known for its electric vehicles, recently introduced a line of stackable batteries for home and industry. Its new Powerwall, a wall-mounted storage unit, can hold 10 kilowatt hours of electric energy.

Solar panels can’t produce energy at night, and that has been one of their drawbacks, Marsillac says. But as more effective ways of storing the energy of sunlight come to the market, solar energy could gain momentum. “It’s an exciting time to be in solar energy research,” Marsillac says.

Determining Sweet Briar’s fate

In early March, officials of Sweet Briar College in Amherst County stunned alumnae, students and faculty by announcing that, after 114 years, the private women’s college would close.

The college’s president and the chair of its board of directors cited “insurmountable financial challenges” brought on by a dwindling enrollment, with no upturn in sight.

Unless court action or a mediated settlement reverses its present course, Sweet Briar’s final day of academic operations will be Aug. 25. Sweet Briar had only about 530 full-time students on campus this year with another 170 studying abroad.

Plans to close Sweet Briar unleashed a flurry of lawsuits, including one from Amherst’s county attorney, while raising questions about the fate of the school’s endowment and donations.

The Virginia Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments for June 4 on a motion by Amherst County Attorney Ellen Bowyer. She is seeking an injunction to stop the college from shutting down. With more than 300 employees, Sweet Briar is a major employer in Amherst.

At the invitation of Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, college representatives  and the plaintiffs scheduled three meetings in May with a mediator in an effort to settle the dispute. At press time in mid-May, no resolution had been announced. (See updates on vabusiness.wpengine.com.)

The tension in the tug of war over Sweet Briar’s future prompted its president, James F. Jones Jr., not to attend an emotional graduation ceremony on May 16, possibly its final commencement exercises. Jones said in an email that faculty members and alumnae had threatened to disrupt the ceremony if he participated.

A shrinking number
If Sweet Briar were to close, it would join a growing list of women’s colleges that have shut their doors or become coeducational during the past half-century. The Women’s College Coalition says that there were 230 women’s colleges in 1960. By last year that number had shrunk to 47 in the U.S. and Canada.

In 2007, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg changed its name to Randolph College and enrolled men for the first time. 

Despite their falling numbers, women’s colleges say they can offer female students a better education, a more supportive environment and increased opportunities for leadership than they would find at a coed school.

Virginia’s two other women’s colleges, Mary Baldwin College and Hollins University, report that they have seen no untoward repercussions from Sweet Briar’s closing announcement in March nor any decline in giving from alumnae.

In a March 11 letter, Hollins President Nancy Gray assured alumnae and friends of the university that it is growing stronger as it approaches its 175th anniversary in 2017. Roanoke-based Hollins has about 750 graduate and undergraduate students

She says Hollins has operated with no debt for the past nine years, its endowment has reached a record $180 million, and its most recent fundraising campaign, completed in 2010, raised $162 million and remains the largest conducted by any Southern women’s college.

At Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, President Pamela Fox says it is in the midst of an $80 million capital campaign, and there’s been no slowdown in giving, with about $70 million raised so far.

Mary Baldwin, which will become a university next year, has approximately 1,750 students enrolled on its Staunton campus and in adult degree and graduate programs across the state.

Fox says that although Mary Baldwin has a small endowment, about $35 million, it has a strong base of support, and a variety of tuition revenue streams.

Opponents raise money
Groups seeking to stop Sweet Briar’s closure have questioned the severity of the school’s financial situation and oppose the use of donations to wind down its operations.

Saving Sweet Briar, a nonprofit alumnae group, has collected $13 million in pledges for the school over the next five years. The group hopes to keep Sweet Briar open through at least the 2015-16 academic year so that its finances can be straightened out and a plan is created to make sure that the college is a on sustainable path. The college has about $25 million in debt.   

It is unclear how much money the college has on hand. Sweet Briar’s endowment stood at $84 million in 2014, down from $96 million in 2011.
In recent court testimony, an attorney for the college said Sweet Briar is spending about $3 million a month from its endowment for continuing operations. 

Perhaps because of the uncertainty of the road ahead, Sweet Briar did not respond to questions about how its endowment and other assets, including its 3,250-acre campus, would be dispersed if the college closed.

Herring’s brief
Before arranging mediation between the parties in the Sweet Briar dispute, Herring filed a brief in Amherst Circuit Court in connection with Bowyer’s suit. In the brief, the attorney general said that Sweet Briar is a corporation and, as such, any decision about whether it closes or remains open rests exclusively with its board of directors.

The attorney general laid out a possible future if Sweet Briar cannot remain an educational institution. Herring says the General Assembly anticipated that there would be a time when an institution might properly use funds for a purpose other than that for which they were donated and enacted the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA).

“A thorough evaluation of UPMIFA modification requests requires a review of each gift instrument to determine whether the restriction in question is ‘unlawful, impracticable, impossible to achieve or wasteful,’ ” Herring said, quoting a portion of the act.

Only the attorney general and the judiciary have the authority to make that determination, Herring added. He noted that Sweet Briar already had submitted requests to the attorney general’s office to modify the restrictions that were attached to gifts made to the college.

Blocked from asset sales
In response to a lawsuit brought by Sweet Briar parents, students and alumnae, Bedford County Circuit Judge James Updike on April 29 refused to stop Sweet Briar from closing but blocked the school from selling its assets for six months.

On the same day, Bowyer, the county attorney, filed her Supreme Court appeal. She is trying to overturn an earlier Updike ruling on a separate lawsuit, which seeks to halt any steps toward closing the college.

A third lawsuit, filed in April by a group of Sweet Briar faculty members, accuses the college of breach of contract.

One interested observer of these court battles is Mike Goldstein, co-chair of the higher education practice for the law firm Cooley LLP in Washington, D.C. He says that, when an institution such as Sweet

Briar closes, the nonprofit corporation establishing it remains. “It owns all the assets … including the land and buildings,” Goldstein says.
In his opinion, the attorney says there are usually only two courses of action left open for a college if it closes. “It can change the purpose of the corporation,” perhaps offering scholarships for deserving students, “or it can dissolve,” he says.

Goldstein emphasizes that individual state statutes and a variety of other circumstances dictate any final action. He added that giving money back to living donors could be problematic in that it might create tax issues for those donors, who may already have taken charitable deductions.

Virginia Intermont
Virginia Intermont College in Bristol, a coeducational liberal arts school, closed in May 2014. It was founded in 1882 as a women’s college. A management consulting group from Nashville, Tenn., Compass Executives, was hired to handle closing arrangements and to deal with the college’s debt, which is about $10 million, says Compass official Art Rebrovick.

Rebrovick, who also is the interim president of Virginia Intermont, says the ideal situation would be to repurpose the campus as an educational institution. But it’s not clear whether that will be possible.

Virginia Intermont continues to operate as a nonprofit entity. Rebrovick says that, although the college has closed, it still receives donations from alumnae and others.

Whatever the final disposition of Virginia Intermont’s assets, Rebrovick hopes it will benefit both the college and the community.

Wilson College case
There is only one known instance — involving Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa. — in which officials of an educational institution decided to close, but the move was overturned through court action.

On May 25, 1979, just two days before what would have been the college’s final graduation, a local judge said the college — like Sweet Briar, a private women’s institution — could not close without his approval.

Judge John Keller, an elected judge of Pennsylvania’s 39th Judicial District, ordered the removal of the college president, citing “a gross abuse of discretion and authority.”

Keller said college officials had “panicked” because of budget deficits, a small incoming freshman class and the need to transfer money from unrestricted endowment funds to support the institution.

“It was a singular case in higher education history,” says former Wilson President Mary-Linda Merriam Armacost, who came into office shortly after the judge’s decision.

In Pennsylvania, she says, the law requires a school to go to court to change the terms of its restrictive endowment. She says Wilson’s trustees didn’t do that, deciding instead to close the college. “The alumnae saw their opportunity, and they grabbed it,” Armacost says.

Wilson, which now has about 800 students, determined it could not be financially sustainable as a women’s college. After a long study, the college’s board of trustees voted in 2013 to make the college coeducational beginning in the 2013-14 academic year. The first male residential students enrolled last fall.

Current Wilson President Barbara Mistick says that the college had its largest entering class in 40 years last year. “We are on an improving streak,” she says.

CHARTS:
Total corporate donations
Donations by companies and corporate foundations

‘The leader as learner’

Like other American mythologies, the idea of an all-knowing heroic executive  single-handedly leading a company to greatness is fading.

“I think the jury is back on that,” says Scott Snell, senior associate dean of executive education at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.  He says organizations are too complex and too dynamic to believe that any single individual could know everything.

At Darden, Snell says, “We think a lot more about developing collaborative leaders.” He adds that collaboration also extends to training leaders, with the professor facilitating the learning process among the participants in the classroom, rather than only lecturing. “The era of the ‘sage on the stage’ is kind of limited these days,” Snell says.

A white paper issued recently by the Center for Creative Leadership in Colorado Springs, Colo., says the concept of becoming a good leader and developing leadership in others is being debated, as the complexity of challenges facing organizations continues to escalate.

Meanwhile, the looming exodus of a generation of baby boomers from leadership ranks has accelerated the need to train members of upcoming generations to replace them.

Snell says one of the shifts in thinking focuses on the value of what leaders know. The world is changing so fast that certain knowledge and experience that might have been critical to an organization a few years ago is now obsolete. “Today, it’s not so much about what you know, but how fast you learn,” Snell says.

“The leader as learner” has become a byword in many aspects of executive education, Snell says. He emphasizes that learning doesn’t occur just in the classroom.

Snell cited a familiar axiom that 70 percent of learning occurs on the job, 20 percent comes from learning from others and only 10 percent occurs in a classroom setting.

To broaden their instruction outside the classroom, Darden professors often employ experiential learning techniques such as visiting a famous battlefield like Gettysburg or Normandy to give leadership participants a first-hand look at the conditions that historical figures faced during a time of crisis.

Another technique involves a form of “action learning,” in which instructors help participants or teams of participants develop a plan and then send them back to work to implement it, with follow-up coaching to reflect on what has been accomplished.

“It’s more about learning in a practical way, not in a theoretical way,” Snell says.

Leadership or crisis?
William Judge, professor of strategic leadership at the Strome College of Business at Old Dominion University, says learning through experience is critical to the development of leaders, especially in an environment in which they constantly have to adapt to change.

“There are two ways that organizations change,” Judge says. “One is through leadership, and the other is through a crisis. Unfortunately, most organizations change due to crisis.”

Enlightened and informed leadership sometimes can avert a crisis or mitigate its effects by anticipating or responding appropriately to changes as they arise, Judge suggests.

The rise and fall of organizations often depends on a leader’s strategy, but following through on a strategy is just as important as the big ideas, Judge says. “Executives tell me that they spend 10 percent of their time deciding on a strategy and 90 percent implementing that strategy. A strategy can be brilliant, but if poorly executed it’s a failure,” he says.

To help leaders or aspiring leaders test their ability to respond to change and forge effective strategies, Judge developed simulations marketed through Harvard Business Publishing. These simulations involve game-playing that place participants in a variety of circumstances in which they must lead change.

As they play the game, they also are put into different roles in an organization.

In the hardest simulation, Judge says, only 40 percent of participants are typically successful, meaning they have more work to do, more to learn and more experience to gain before they can move on.

Roy Hinton, associate dean of executive programs at George Mason University’s School of Business, says one of the expanding areas in leadership training is the study of personal practices — helping leaders gain a better idea of how they view the world and how colleagues view them.

This field of study dovetails, Hinton says, with the higher value that companies put on relationship building. He says many manufacturing and industry managers have warmed to relationship building — not for “touchy, feely” reasons — but for the practical ones.  “They see the benefits of an engaged team,” Hinton says.

He points to a recent Fortune magazine article about the nation’s best companies. It emphasizes that, more than ever, corporations are looking at workplace culture as a competitive tool.

Today’s leaders, Hinton says, have to listen to people’s concerns. “Millennials have much higher expectations around relationships, and they’re concerned about the purpose and mission of organizations,” he explains.

Recession’s lessons
Steve Terrell, an independent leadership and executive consultant in Chesapeake, says challenging experiences help shape the judgment of leaders. The recession, he says, revealed the critical importance of good leadership, especially when things aren’t going well.

Terrell helps companies determine where they have leadership gaps, and some of those gaps are in the line of succession. “A lot of organizations are not finding the right kinds of people coming up the pipeline,” he says.

To help with that problem, employees’ capabilities must be measured early on, with an eye toward giving them the time and training to develop into able candidates for leadership.

Paul Wilson, head of the federal practice of the San Diego-based Ken Blanchard Cos., a leadership training firm, works in the Washington, D.C., area with government agencies.  “You want to develop an environment where it’s okay to ask questions,” Wilson says.

One of the biggest problems facing the federal government, Wilson says, is replacing a cadre of leadership that is retiring. To do that, he says, training and communication practices must keep pace with the digital culture of the millennials. They rely on mobile devices to get their information and embrace gaming as a learning tool. “Old training modalities are a waste of time and money with a new generation,” Wilson says.

Surveys indicate that millennials prefer to work in teams rather than as individuals, and Wilson says that emerging leaders must be able to coordinate teams to succeed. He says these leaders will draw information from team members in making decisions.

You might need a heroic leader for a specific task as in the military, he says, but overall leadership will be much more about collaborating than charging ahead.

One of the problems in helping develop leaders, Wilson says, is that organizations sometimes will underfund the process by not providing enough money for coaching and tracking an individual’s progress long-term. “Our best practice is to meet and work with them [over time],” he says.

More than creativity
A 2009 IBM study of more than 1,500 chief executive officers found that CEOs named creativity as the most important skill for future leaders.

But the Darden School’s Snell views creativity as just one part of a larger model of innovation and transformation.

For example, when a leader declares that people need to “think out of the box,” Snell immediately thinks: “What is the box?”

For the individual, it may be his or her assumptions around a particular issue. At the group level, it might mean focusing on what biases people might have about one another.

Uncovering those assumptions and biases, Snell says, is important in understanding how individuals and organizations view the world.

And that, he suggests, helps drive a decision-making process with better outcomes.