How personalized coaching is helping Dropboxers grow their careers
This post was originally part of The Josh Bersin Company case study, Dropbox Scaled Personalized Coaching for Human-Centered Leadership
Propelled by advances in technology and the meteoric rise of a remote workforce, Dropbox products have been growing rapidly in the last couple of years. But in order for our company to grow successfully, investing in the personal career growth of every Dropboxer has always been a top priority for us too. The way we operate and add value to our customers is also reflected in our approach to leadership development: a drive for simplicity, relentless focus on the recipient, and a goal to create equity and inclusion.
When Reese Haydon, Senior Manager Executive Development, joined our team in 2019, he was tasked with developing our top 200 leaders and their teams. Partnering closely with our People Team and others across the company, he embarked on a journey to define a path for leaders to develop the skills and capabilities needed to lead us into our future. “Executive development here includes everything from coaching to executive assessments, team development, and organizational consulting, thinking about how we're supporting not only individual leaders, but also the teams of leaders around them, and how they're achieving our business goals and bringing our strategy to life,” explained Reese.
Throughout our history, we’ve had various growth programs and solutions in place for Dropboxers, including online content, workshops, classroom-based training, and collaborative learning. “Coaching really underlies all of these areas: development, interventions, and team effectiveness,” said Karlee Pierce, Executive and Team Development Lead. Reese elaborated,
“Coaching for us is a transformational lever. It can serve as the catalyst to accelerate learning and growth.”
For the purpose of executive development, our team casts the net well beyond our executive population (VP and above), going down to senior managers as the pipeline for future leaders of the company. “We believe in finding the right coach for every person and their situation. It’s a really high-touch matching process that we do internally, so we don’t outsource this to a vendor or technology,” Reese continued.
“As we are close to the leaders we support, and understand their style, their development areas and strengths, and their preferences, we can help make a much more effective match.”
Reese’s team hand selects each coach specifically for the executive they will support, taking into account coaching capabilities, specific needs of the executive, availability, and more. The results are meaningful for the executives and coaches alike. Our leaders have told us that they’re getting incredible value out of coaching to help them grow personally, professionally, and lead their teams better—so much so that we plan to scale coaching even further into Dropbox.
“For us, everybody is a leader. How coaching can support all in leading the Dropbox way is always top of mind,” said Karlee.
Right now, their team is experimenting with a program called “Coaches Corner,” which uses our internal HR team members who are also certified coaches to provide coaching further into Dropbox—and early career coaching for entry-level Dropboxers and anybody who needs coaching on demand is coming up, too. “Custom, personalized coaching has been a game changer for us—and over time we hope to make it available for everybody in the company,” said Reese.
Interested in learning more about all the opportunities Dropbox has to offer right now? You can check out our jobs page.