T. Rowe Price was operating in an investment industry experiencing rapid change, margin pressure, new technology and changing client expectations. As the firm grew and entered new markets, its leaders were being asked to initiate and execute change at a greater scale than before.
Leading at T. Rowe Price was designed around that context. Rather than separate leadership development from the strategic work of the firm, MJA and Accelerance created a multi-module journey in which participants developed themselves while working on the business, their teams and the challenges of execution.
The experience combined senior-leader dialogue, strengths work, customised 360° feedback, coaching and Home Groups with simulations and live business challenges. Participants explored decisions from the client perspective, examined how change travels through an organisation and worked on projects intended to create value for T. Rowe Price.
Between modules, development continued in the workplace. Participants met their managers, followed up with feedback providers, worked with coaches and deliberately ran ‘leadership experiments’ — trying new ways of leading and using the response of the system as data for the next iteration.
That intersession work mattered. The programme was not designed around the assumption that insight automatically becomes behaviour. Participants had to test what they were learning with real stakeholders, notice what happened, adjust and keep going.
The programme subsequently ran with cohorts in both EMEA and the US, creating another important layer of value: relationships across functions, locations and perspectives, and a wider network through which people could get work done.
In that design, leadership development became part of strategic execution. Participants had to make sense of complexity, engage others and experiment in situations where the outcome mattered — using the response of the organisation as evidence about what to try next.