The Cohort Experiment Part 7: Full-time vs incremental

I have to start this blog with a quick pitch for the Acumen Fund Fellows Program: Applications for our next class are open.  Please check out our website for details!  Now onto the real post . . .

In our last post, Nicole and I talked about the value-add of a cohort.  Now I’d like to talk about how the program design affects the relationships within the cohort and the development of an individual leader.

During the interviews, we found that leadership development programs fell into two buckets: full time or incremental. “Full time” refers to a program that asks the participant to leave their current job and participate in the program full time. “Incremental” is when a program is run as a complimentary development track to the individual’s current job. While both of these approaches are valuable ways of building leaders, we found a few interesting insights:

In incremental programs like the Henry Crown Fellows Program and Ashoka, it is extremely important to find Fellows who are at a similar stage in their career. For example, Beth Galante, a Henry Crown Fellow, told us that she was able to learn from her cohort because they were going through very similar professional and personal challenges of being a leader at the same stage in their career. This similarity deepened their connection even though they were not together on a full-time basis.

In full-time programs like the Acumen Fund Fellows Program, we found that the success of the program in building the cohort bond was highly dependent on the shared vision of the group. Many programs with this structure have leaders at different stages in their career. However, this did not affect the cohesion of the group if the leaders saw how they could work together to achieve their common mission. For example, at Acumen Fund, we have seen former Fellows who are now senior social investors make investments in other Fellows who are start-up entrepreneurs.

In one of our interviews, a participant of a full time program discussed the lack of common mission which led to increased competition among the leadership cohort and left the leaders unclear about how or why to stay connected post-program.

In our next blog, Nicole is going to discuss some the critical variables to consider in the programmatic design. Stay tuned!