Understanding employees' experiences of leadership-training programs within a community college

The behaviors of an organization's leaders create a clarity and unity of purpose within the organization to create a more cohesive organization (Davies, Hides & Casey, 2001, p. 1028). The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of employees in leadership-training programs and how a community college can invest in leadership training to create a sustainable leadership model. To understand leadership training better, the researcher employed a qualitative approach. The researcher used demographic data and content from an employee engagement survey to create open-ended questions for the interviews. The researcher investigated how a community college develops a collaborative leadership model that is sustainable after investing in leadership-training programs for its employees. Two research sub-questions were investigated to address the main question: what experiences do community college employees have related to leadership-training programs provided by the institution? In order to go deeper into this question about their experiences, the following two sub-questions were explored: (1) How did the employees' experiences influence their perception of success at the institution? (2) Did the leadership-training programs increase the employees' abilities to collaborate within the institution? These interviews provided the researcher with insight into the shared experiences of the participants and their feelings on employees' success and collaboration within a community college. The themes of follow-up training, relevancy, promotion within, fear of retribution, valuing employees, conflict resolution, collaboration, and civility were common throughout the interviews. These are important themes that will help a community college with professional and leadership development.Ed.D., Educational Leadership and Management -- Drexel University, 201