Some companies develop promising employees for leadership roles by offering coaching, mentorship, or educational opportunities. For a select group at HR software company Justworks, workers are sent to fend for themselves in the wilderness.
In partnership with the NYU Stern School of Business, Justworks launched the 13-person, two-year-long leadership fellowship in 2022. Fellows attend monthly lectures at the school and travel for a week-long summer excursion each of the three summers in the program.
The first year of the program focuses on business operations, negotiation skills, intentional listening, and how to wield different types of power in a corporate environment. For intentional listening training, for example, employees are asked to wordlessly listen to a partner speak for three, five, and seven minutes to witness the power of letting others talk uninterrupted. The second year places a heavier emphasis on accounting and finance, teaching fellows what drives the growth of a business.
The fellowship also pushes participants out of their comfort zone, going off the grid in an effort to build camaraderie, trust, and teamwork. For a week, the cohort heads to the wilderness to backpack through the woods. The excursion is in partnership with the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) and takes place in the North Cascades National Park in northern Washington. The cohort is split into two groups, each with a NOLS guide to ensure their safety. Each fellow leads the group for a day and calls the shots.
The group hikes for nine hours each day with 50-pound backpacks and must work together to get from point A to point B before the sun goes down without an internet connection, meaning no GPS. One of the many challenges throughout the week is not getting lost and coping with it if they do. Fellows learn to make decisions quickly and must reorient how they respond in times of crisis. The week in the woods also allows them to bond outside the confines of their office as they navigate a stressful environment and comfort one another when the trek gets difficult.
The fellowship is the brainchild of Isaac Oates, the founder and former CEO of Justworks, who’s now board chair but still heavily involved with the program. “You’re creating this environment where people learn more about what they’re capable of, but also learn about themselves and their self-awareness—a key aspect of being an effective leader,” he says.
Maria Mucci, a senior manager of strategy operations, recently completed the fellowship program. She says she’s already applied classroom learnings to her job, such as how to effectively negotiate and applications from the finance lectures.
During the fellows’ first summer in the program, they travel to Minneapolis to attend lectures at the University of Minnesota and tour factories alongside executives at companies like Target, Best Buy, Boston Scientific, Mall of America, and Land O’Lakes. The program also takes them abroad. This year, they traveled to Ghana, visiting local businesses such as a cocoa factory, a food processing company, and a medical center.
Justworks says the benefits to the 1,500-person company are myriad. The fellowship brings together employees from various parts of the company, helping foster a connection over two years that otherwise might not have happened organically. Oates says that the program’s real benefit will become apparent in a couple of years as Justworks scales and needs leaders to tap for its expansion plans, and it invested $1 million in the program. Fellows retain their full-time positions while completing the program.
Now halfway through its second fellowship class, Justworks estimates that about 60% of participants have been promoted during and post fellowship. The company anticipates this number growing as the program does, with its third cohort starting this fall.