MDA Leadership Wins Silver Award for Excellence

MDA Leadership won a coveted Brandon Hall Group Silver Award for Excellence in the Best Advance in Leadership Development category for Otter Tail Corporation’s Leading the Enterprise program.

MDA took a collaborative, tailored approach with Otter Tail Corporation to develop the curriculum for their 12- to 15-month-long Leading the Enterprise program, designed for senior leaders showing potential for executive leadership roles. The program was intentionally designed to emphasize multi-directional impact, with senior leaders acting as teachers, and participants’ site leaders and personnel serving as subject matter experts and co-sponsors.

The goal of Leading the Enterprise at Otter Tail is to help establish leaders who can lead the “Otter Tail Way.” Participants achieved that goal by applying assessment-based development insights; leveraging learnings from real-life business problems; connecting to development insights via virtual, live, and micro-learning sessions; and participating in a variety of developmental exercises and applications grounded in Otter Tail’s four critical leadership roles.

MDA CEO Scott Nelson said, “We are incredibly proud of this award as it recognizes the ground-breaking leadership development work we did with Otter Tail to strengthen their leadership pipeline. We believe this represents a revolutionary approach to measuring the true impact of leadership development programs.”

“Excellence Award winners are shown to be organizations that truly value their employees and invest in them through their human capital management programs. These HCM programs have been validated as best in class for business value and the impact on the employees themselves,” said Brandon Hall Group Chief Operating Officer Rachel Cooke, HCM Excellence Awards program leader.

Entries were evaluated by a panel of veteran, independent senior industry experts, Brandon Hall Group analysts, and executives based on these criteria:

  • Alignment to their business need and environment
  • Program design, functionality, and delivery
  • Adoption, integration, user experience, innovation, and creativity
  • Overall effectiveness, impact, and measurable benefits

Excellence Award winners will continue to be honored at Brandon Hall Group’s HCM Excellence Conference, February 13-15, 2024, at the Hilton West Palm Beach, Florida. Select winners also will serve as presenters in breakout sessions, sharing their leading practices during the conference.

“Our award winners are relentless in their pursuit of excellence,” said Brandon Hall Group Chief Executive Officer Mike Cooke. “We have received some of the most innovative use of HCM strategy that we have seen in the last 30 years, and in most cases, technology and collaboration across departments have helped them achieve amazing business results.”

About MDA Leadership

Founded in 1981 on the belief that leadership matters, MDA Leadership helps organizations identify the right talent to drive results, accelerate development at all levels of the leadership pipeline, and sharpen alignment between talent and strategy.

Our client teams work with mid-size to large organizations to strengthen leadership performance. We provide consulting services in CEO & Board Services, Talent Strategy, Assessment, Leadership Development, Coaching, and Succession Management.

About Otter Tail Corporation

With offices in Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and Fargo, North Dakota, Otter Tail Corporation is a growing company with over $1.2 billion in revenues and more than 4,000 employees across many industries. Our diversified operations include an electric utility, manufacturing, health services, food ingredient processing, plastics, construction, and transportation. The Otter Tail companies collectively serve customers within the United States and in Canada.

About Brandon Hall Group™

Brandon Hall Group is the only professional development company that offers data, research, insights, and certification to Learning and Talent executives and organizations. The best minds in Human Capital Management (HCM) choose Brandon Hall Group to help them create future-proof employee development plans for the new era.

For over 30 years, we have empowered, recognized, and certified excellence in organizations worldwide, influencing the development of over 10 million employees and executives. Our HCM Excellence Awards program was the first to recognize organizations for learning and talent and is the gold standard, known as the “Academy Awards of Human Capital Management.”

The awards recognize the best organizations that have successfully developed and deployed programs, strategies, modalities, processes, systems, and tools that have achieved measurable results. We are honored to receive applications from organizations worldwide ranging from small, medium, large, and global enterprises to government, not-for-profits, and associations.