At the Doerr Institute, we talk a lot about “evidence-based practice.” And it’s true, research and evaluation are at the heart of everything we do; if we can’t measure it and test it, we won’t claim that it works. However, no amount of impact assessment matters without well-designed and engaging programs for us to assess, and that’s where Stephanie Taylor, our Associate Director of Leader Engagement, comes in.
For this week’s Leadership Lab, I sat down with Stephanie to talk about one of our newest programs, our Leading as a First-Year Cohort. This program, which just started its second year, invites first year students to begin the leader development journey right at the start of their time at Rice. Unlike many of our students, who often first engage with the Doerr Institute through our one-on-one coaching program, students in the first-year cohort spend their first semester in peer groups, where they focus on self-reflection, goal-setting, and identifying their aspirations for and vision of leadership. It is only at the end of this process that they begin the individual coaching process, during their Spring semester.
Why a first-year Cohort?
As previously mentioned, most students first engage with the Doerr Institute through Activation, our one-on-one coaching program, so I asked Stephanie why the Institute created the cohort program rather than just recruiting first-year students into Activation.
Stephanie explained that while first-years certainly benefitted from coaching, many of them felt they weren’t as ready for that opportunity as they could have been. “They were telling the coaches, ‘I don’t think I’m really ready for this,’ or ‘I don’t really know what to work on,’ or even, ‘I don’t know what it means to lead where I am right now.’ A lot of students also said they loved the coaching experience but wished they could have saved their time in Activation for when they were farther along in their journey,” Stephanie noted.
So, while we knew Activation was effective for first years, we hypothesized that slowing the process down might make the experience even more impactful for students beginning their time at Rice. The Leading as a First-Year Cohort was designed to give students the best of both worlds: a structured first-year program and the opportunity to engage in one-on-one coaching later in their college careers.
In the fall semester, cohort students work in groups through leader development plans, telling their own leadership story, defining what leadership means to them, creating a vision for their development, and identifying areas for growth. By the time they begin coaching in the spring, they already have a foundation to build on, making individual sessions more impactful.
The cohort also introduces a social dimension. “In Activation, it’s just you and your coach,” Stephanie told me. “But in a cohort, you build a peer network to challenge your thinking and support your growth. As first-years, they’re already going through a highly transitional period as they figure out what it means to be a college student. The cohort gives them a safe place to make that transition while also developing as leaders together with their peers.”
What Students Believe About Leadership
To Stephanie, one of the most striking parts of the program is the application stage. When applying to the cohort, students are asked to describe their experiences with leadership, their impressions and definitions of what leadership means, and what they hope to gain by participating in the program. Stephanie told me how struck she is by students’ answers.
“They’re literally asking us to hold them more accountable and to have higher expectations of them,” Stephanie says. “They want to be challenged. They want to become more authentic, empathetic, to learn to listen better, to be more humble.”
What’s more, many of these students already recognize that leadership isn’t just about formal roles or positional power. Even when they’ve held previous leadership positions, “they believe leadership and leader development is for everyone,” Stephanie says. “They just want help figuring out what that looks like for them.”
At the same time, Stephanie says, the application process also highlights a lot of the difficulties that these students face when it comes to the topic of leadership. From COVID to political corruption, many students come to Rice with a less-than-stellar notion of how leaders behave. But even there, Stephanie emphasizes, “they want to do better. They articulate this desire to be the better leaders they know society needs, and to be held accountable and challenged in that pursuit.” When I ask her about how this blends with the ever-present stereotypes and negative perceptions of Gen Z in the public discourse, Stephanie dismisses the idea that there’s anything inherently “wrong” with these students. “They have difficulties, sure,” she says, “they are going to face unique challenges in their ability to meet the current demands of the context in which they're leading. But to say that they’re somehow ‘lesser’ or that there’s something ‘wrong’ with them just doesn’t reflect what we’re seeing in the students who come to this program.
What Leader Developers Can Learn
I ended our conversation by asking Stephanie what advice she’d give to others working with college students or young adults navigating the transition out of adolescence. Her answer was surprisingly simple: don’t lower the bar. “
The content of our coaching sessions is the same content C-suite executives are getting,” she said. “We don’t need to water anything down. Gen Z can handle it. In fact, they’re asking for it. So, hold a high bar of rigor, and keep tracking whether interventions actually work. That’s how we move beyond lip-service leadership training to true development.”
As with everything at Doerr, our efforts don’t stop with good intentions. Last year’s Leading as a First-Year Cohort was something of a “beta test,” while this year’s program is larger, giving us the chance to run the kind of rigorous impact assessment that our first principles demand. We’ll let the data tell us whether the program is achieving its intended effects.
But even before those results are finalized, there’s already something very important to learn here. The Leading as a First-Year Cohort reminds us how important it is to meet students where they are and engage them developmentally. It also shows the value of designing systems that consider students’ needs and aspirations. While the goals and practices of “good” leadership are relatively timeless, the methods we use to develop such leaders must meet the needs of the time.
If the Leading as a First-Year Cohort shows anything, it’s that evidence-based leadership development doesn’t mean clinging to tradition. It means being willing to adapt, experiment, and create new approaches for preparing people to lead well.