Built the Leaders & Kept the Team
Sylvan Road Capital | VP, Resident Experience & Shared Services
The Situation
Growing companies promote their best people into leadership roles and then leave them there without support. The result is predictable:
Inconsistent execution
Team friction
Single points of failure
Leadership bench that wasn’t sustainable
At Sylvan Road, the leadership layer was a mix of high-potential individual contributors, managers and directors operating without a shared framework for how to lead, make decisions or develop their teams.
The company was also navigating significant structural change. In an environment like that, voluntary turnover is not a risk, it’s an expectation. People leave when they feel uncertain, unsupported or invisible. The question was whether the organization had built enough trust and capability in its leaders to hold the team together when the pressure came.
The Action
A structured annual leadership development program was designed and deployed from scratch. The Center of Excellence brought together cohorts of 12 to 16 participants across levels: high-potential individual contributors, managers and directors in the same room, working through the same curriculum with role-specific depth built in at each stage.
The program ran across six segments, each with a defined learning objective, differentiated self-study by role, cohort meetings and a structured leader one-on-one for ongoing accountability:
Segment 1: Team Culture. Building psychological safety and shared accountability from the ground up.
Segment 2: Performance Management. Practical application using a real-world case study. People leaders built and presented their own 9-box talent matrices to the cohort.
Segment 3: Executive Presence. Every participant prepared and delivered a timed presentation to the cohort, then reviewed their own recording before their leader 1:1.
Segment 4: Shared Goal and Vision. Connecting individual work to organizational direction. Leaders at every level built team mission statements and SMART goal frameworks they took back to their teams.
Segment 5: Conflict Resolution. Difficult conversations, communication styles and de-escalation. Role-specific tracks for individual contributors and people leaders.
Segment 6: Critical Thinking and Solutioning. The capstone: cross-functional teams built and pitched business solutions in a Shark Tank-style presentation to company leadership.
The Result
Through a period of major organizational restructuring, Sylvan Road had zero voluntary turnover across the company. At ~200 employees, the expected voluntary departure rate during a restructuring of that scale is at least 5% (10 people). At approximately $9,000 per head in replacement costs, zero voluntary departures represented $90,000 in avoided turnover cost and more importantly, a team that held together when the pressure was highest.
