Transforming senior leadership development for strategic growth with Oshkosh Corporation
About
Oshkosh Corporation makes innovative, purpose-built vehicles and equipment to help everyday heroes advance communities around the world. Headquartered in Wisconsin, USA, Oshkosh Corporation employs over 18,000 team members united behind a common purpose: to make a difference in people’s lives. Building on this commitment, Lens of Leadership is a highly focused, unique development experience for their top 400 directors and executives. Core to the talent strategy, it aligns with business needs and culture, equipping leaders to navigate change and strengthen capability, engagement, and strategic alignment with organizational goals.
Oshkosh Corporation first engaged Impact in 2017. Together we designed a program in response to an evolving business landscape, where traditional leadership approaches were no longer sufficient. Over 350 senior leaders benefited from this award-winning program, helping move the organization from a culture of ‘tell and execute’ to ‘people first’.
Five years on – with a new CEO, evolving market conditions, and a restructured organization, Oshkosh Corporation knew it was time to reevaluate their leadership needs and re-create Lens of Leadership. They wanted a program that would:
- Equip senior leaders to navigate change and lead with agility
- Integrate their newly defined Leadership Traits, increasing adoption at the highest level
- Strengthen their ‘People First’ culture through a unified leadership language
- Foster innovation, inclusion, and strategic thinking.
Impact were re-engaged to redesign Lens of Leadership. Using their solution mapping process, the program was rebuilt from the ground up to meet current business needs. Key features included:
‘People First’ at the heart: Impact’s powerful alternative to conventional leadership models frames leadership as an action, not a role. This aligns to the Oshkosh Corporation People First culture, and goal to provide leaders with the skills to lead the organization through change, engage their teams, and communicate purpose.
Leadership Traits integration: Learning objectives were identified to address business conditions; these were listed against the Oshkosh Corporation six Leadership Traits so that participant learning needs were clearly identifiable.
What this looked like in practice:
The solution was custom-designed to be highly experiential, real issues-based, and anchored to the Oshkosh Corporation People First culture and Leadership Traits. To ensure seamless implementation and maximum scalability, Impact re-designed Lens of Leadership to be a shorter, more focused journey that included 1:1 coaching, 360 assessment and a face-to-face leadership event. Learning strategies built deep personal awareness and core people skills; they also shared institutional and context-based knowledge and application of work-based practices and behaviors to combine and drive performance. With real-world business scenarios throughout, this condensed format enabled faster upskilling of a broader leadership cohort.
Oshkosh Corporation used qualitative and quantitative evaluation data to understand employee engagement.
Engagement
Lens of Leadership has a Net Promoter Score of 87 and 100% of participants found the experience valuable and applicable. Participants also reported increased confidence, stronger networks, and readiness to lead through change.
Multi-award winning
In 2024, Oshkosh were awarded silver from Chief Learning Officer in the Excellence in Content category of the Learning in Practice Awards and silver for Best Advance in Leadership Development from Brandon Hall Group.
“Created new cross-function relationships, which is fantastic. Great to see a new approach to leading and learning, very much worth the time spent – most challenging/exhilarating career training event I have ever attended in my 32-year career.”
Lens of Leadership program participant