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Sabrina Outlaw is a troubleshooter among troubleshooters. As the IT support team lead on the 11-person U.S. team, she always has the back of her colleagues when they are stymied by a help desk ticket or otherwise have difficulty helping a Wipfli associate resolve a tech issue. Her colleagues know they can count on her to help get to the bottom of any workplace challenge and keep the flow of work moving efficiently.

However, Sabrina wanted a better way to measure their progress and track any ongoing hurdles that the team was facing. Last year, she found a way to strategically address those challenges. Sabrina joined Wipfli’s Lead4Success program, a five-month leadership development course that helped her think differently about the team’s issues and devise a system for improvement.

“What I’ve changed the most is my mindset,” said the six-year Wipfli associate. “It helped me gain a long-term perspective about what we want to accomplish on our team.”

From last October through February, she and 16 other associates from across the firm gathered virtually a dozen times and came together in person from around the country for their capstone presentations in March. They delved into foundational leadership principles and worked in small groups on a key leadership challenge of their own, with experienced Wipfli brand ambassadors providing additional support. Their broader learnings covered topics like self-awareness, influence and communication.

Developing a more strategic KPI vision

Sabrina’s focus was on how to improve the key performance indicators (KPIs) for the team. “Our KPIs have been focused on how quickly we answer the phone or resolve the ticket. I pull those reports and share them with the team on a monthly and quarterly basis,” she said. “But I felt I had put myself in a little box. I was so closely focused on the metrics. Talking to other people in my Lead4Success group — people from different parts of the organization — opened me up to a whole new path. They gave me advice on creating a timeline and a road map to what I was trying to accomplish. I began looking at the bigger picture and networking with other people at Wipfli to help me with my key leadership challenge.”

Sabrina’s participation in the rigorous program and the value she gained are a testament to the firm’s ongoing commitment to making leadership development opportunities widely available. Whether the concentration is leading self, leading others or leading the business, Wipfli offers an array of programs that seek to be transformative.

“It starts with promoting curiosity and love of learning,” said Aditi Patil, a manager in Wipfli’s talent and organizational department who facilitates many of the firm’s flagship leadership development courses. “Investing in our associates’ development journey helps them as individuals and has a ripple effect that benefits other associates and our clients. When we’re learning to be better leaders, we also become better as trusted advisors to clients,” she said. “Leadership development is baked into our culture here.”

To celebrate the end of their leadership experience, the whole group convened in person at the Wipfli office in the Twin Cities and presented their capstone project to their small group in person, applying their learnings to their actual work.

“Talking with people from different parts of the organization was valuable in gathering advice and motivated me to broaden my perspective,” she said. “It helped me set clearer expectations for the team and to understand what we needed to add to begin offering more knowledge resources so that people on our team would have better direction and could resolve issues more quickly.”

Capping things off: Sabrina, second row-third from the left, joins her Lead4Success colleagues for the final meeting of the course in Minnesota.

Applying her learnings

To this end, she has been exploring how to do more with Microsoft Copilot and AI automation and how to create knowledge articles with natural language. I’m also presenting more information about our performance as a team so people can see how their own performance matches up against the whole team’s.

Aditi said that bringing the group together at the end of the course is especially gratifying. “It really impacts their engagement and sense of teamwork,” she said. She recalls two program participants who made plans to introduce each other to their respective clients, which would not have happened if they hadn’t met through this program. “Those kinds of connections are like ‘wow, this is amazing,’”

“It’s very fulfilling as a facilitator to see the impact people have created through their leadership challenge or capstones,” Aditi said.

For her part, Sabrina feels grateful to Wipfli for encouraging her to take a deep dive into her professional growth. “It is invaluable to gain knowledge about what others are doing outside of our team and get their feedback on my goals,” she said. “People were so willing to lean in and help however they can.”