“Our vision is pretty simple: Leaders Powered for Good. That’s our reason for being, to enable leaders to be powered and equipped to do great things,” says Scott Blanchard, CEO and co-owner of storied leadership development company Blanchard.
With that vision always top of mind, Blanchard aims to maximize individual achievement and organizational performance by three primary means — or what they refer to as the three pillars — their leadership experts, their rich library of content and their dynamic learning experiences. And they use their stated company values to inform this mission: Be True; Scale Kindness; Transform Together; and Relentless Pursuit (more on these later!).
Blanchard has a long history in the leadership development space, but it’s the story behind that history and the organization’s drive to modernize and scale that are truly notable.
“We’ve been here for 45 years doing the same thing, fundamentally, which is helping leaders equip themselves with the mindset and skill set,” Scott says. “But what’s changed is everything else.”
Same mission, more modalities
Although the bulk of Blanchard’s business is in the large corporate space, they also serve the middle market and smaller companies through a different structure, and they have a large reseller network that reaches companies Blanchard cannot reach directly. Approximately 250,000 people participate in Blanchard’s programs each year, either through Blanchard directly or through clients or resellers.
“[Our vision’s] not Leaders Who Work for Fortune 500 Companies Who Happen to Have a Training Budget Powered for Good,” Scott stresses. “It’s All Leaders Powered for Good.”
Blanchard is headquartered in Escondido, California, just north of San Diego, where it has been since its first permanent office space was constructed there in 1985. However, the majority of their close-to 300 team members work remotely, Scott says.
“Right now, we have about 30 people who go to the office, and everybody else is either completely remote or they come to the office occasionally, but mostly they work out of their homes.”
This more dispersed work arrangement was accelerated by the COVID pandemic, but Blanchard’s sales people, consultants and project managers have been predominantly field-based for the past 25 years, Scott says. And full-time and adjunct facilitators have always lived in the field.
Now, Blanchard also has offices in the United Kingdom and Canada, as well as global partners/resellers (similar to franchises) in more than 40 countries.
The company’s offerings, while rooted in the same mission of equipping leaders with the mindset and skill set to maximize individual achievement and organizational performance, have expanded from their more traditional, long-standing, one- and two-day classroom experiences led by facilitators. While these still are among Blanchard’s program offerings (albeit wrapped within a digital experience, including pre-work and digital tools for use after completion of the classroom experience), they also offer fully virtual sessions/seminars; learning journeys, which essentially take a one-day course and spread it over six weeks, including multiple modalities and immersive learning experiences; and longer learning journeys that are cohort-based and spread over nine to 10 months.
“It crosses the full spectrum,” says Blanchard Vice President of Custom Solutions and Chief Solutions Architect Ann Rollins. “If you’re a small or medium-sized business, and you’ve got a total of 20 leaders, it might be one or a collection of our off-the-shelf programs that’s going to scratch the itch for you, because you’re looking to level up a smaller number of people. [And it goes] all the way up to really customized learning journeys, inclusive of coaching, where we’re talking about complex challenges, looking at scaffolding skills, and also looking at making connections between our off-the-shelf content building blocks and your strategy and values.”
Blanchard also has a business called The Experience Center, which comprises their public seminars, train-the-trainers and a membership program called Propel by Blanchard™. Propel membership gives clients the ability and flexibility to craft the leadership development journey that matches each individual’s current career stage and future goals through live facilitated courses, online content and private community events.
The journey to get to where Blanchard is now, however, began almost five decades ago.
From 1979 to now
Blanchard was formally incorporated in 1979 as Blanchard Training and Development in San Diego.
“It started off as a seminar company, with my dad, Ken, and some colleagues doing leadership seminars,” says Scott. “A couple years into that, they started to create and publish supporting training products. And that really became the basis for our business that’s class- or seminar-based with supporting materials.”
In 1985, in addition to the completion of its first permanent office space in Escondido, Blanchard debuted its flagship leadership development program, SLII®, which subsequently became the world’s most widely used leadership training program. In 1993, Blanchard expanded into Europe with the opening of its U.K. office. And in 1998, the organization officially changed its name to The Ken Blanchard Companies and expanded into Canada.
In the new millennium and early aughts, the company launched its full-service coaching website and practice, which would become the genesis for Blanchard Coaching Services. And in 2009, Blanchard made its first all-virtual courses available.
Fast-forward to 2020. In January, Scott became president of Blanchard, and one of the first people he interviewed and hired was Ann, who was brought in as a solutions architect.
“I came in about three weeks before the world shut down,” Ann says. “It couldn’t have been better timing to be able to really sink in, because at that time the majority of the work that Blanchard was doing was largely face to face. And they knew that they needed to modernize how they were thinking about leadership development and needed a multimodal approach.”
Scott has since stepped into the CEO role; he has now been with the organization for more than 31 years. The company remains closely held; there are five owners, including founders Ken and Margie; Scott; Debbie Blanchard (Scott’s sister), who serves as executive vice president of marketing; and Tom McKee, who serves as chairman of the board.
Blanchard’s three pillars — content, leadership experts and dynamic learning experiences — are what continues to differentiate them in the leadership development space, according to Scott.
Developed around 14 core product lines, all within the leadership domain, Blanchard offers thousands of content “LEGO blocks” that can be customized, strung together and built on one another. The content is research-based rather than principles-based (a factor that Ann notes is a huge differentiator). And while much of the content stems from Ken Blanchard’s prolific generation — “my dad wrote more than 80 books, and we’ve had all these founding associates who were with us from the beginning who have authored programs,” Scott says — the organization has placed a huge emphasis on modernizing the delivery of that content.
As for Blanchard’s leadership experts, “We’ve always believed they have a really critical role,” Scott says. This is true of both Blanchard’s professionals and the professionals who work within their client companies, whether they are in-person or virtual facilitators, professional coaches, moderators or others.
The remaining piece, according to Scott, is intentional, well-designed learning experiences. This is an area that Ann has been instrumental in evolving since 2020, when the pandemic necessitated a move that was already very much on the minds of Blanchard leadership.
“Suddenly, we had to evolve,” Ann says. “We had this great program content that was extraordinary face to face, but we had very few variants of it that were available digitally. The entire tempo of that time was helping people see a new way forward that they weren’t familiar with so we could reach millions more leaders. And that’s been the work and the heartbeat of our area of the business ever since.”
From traditional to technology-forward
When Ann first began her role in 2020, Ken asked her, “So, what do you think you’re going to be doing here?” Ann replied, “I am going to take your thought leadership and your beautiful programs that are so easy to learn and apply in their current mode, and I’m going to blast a prism against that and blow it everywhere.”
And she has done just that.
A mere four years ago, Blanchard was beginning to sell its first truly multimodal spaced learning journeys. And their toolbox at the time was light, Ann says: “We were building these as we were selling them.”
Now, she says, Blanchard has incredibly deep content libraries, a solution architects team, and a finessed and capable sales team that has a deep understanding of Blanchard’s clients and what they need.
In the past four years, Blanchard has expanded its product offerings by releasing Conversational Capacity®, which teaches people how to engage in constructive, learning-focused dialogue when challenging topics or conflicts arise, as well as Courageous Inclusion™, a course that teaches participants how to become more active advocates of inclusion in their workplace, and Servant Leadership Essentials™. The company also expanded its digital offerings with the release of KenBot for SLII®, multiple digital learning journeys and a new collaborative online course curriculum. And in 2022, they launched the Blanchard Innovation Lab, a strategy and solutioning center.
In the past two years alone, Blanchard debuted its Essential Motivators™ and Fearless Innovation™ programs, and Blanchard Community and Propel by Blanchard™ were launched, bringing human-powered learning experiences to a wider audience in a shared online learning space.
And amid all this change and expansion, The Ken Blanchard Companies officially rebranded to Blanchard in 2023.
People helping people
For an organization that prides itself on being people-driven, it stands to reason that Blanchard strives to maintain a strong, positive internal culture for its team members. And that ties back to its company values of Be True, Scale Kindness, Transform Together and Relentless Pursuit.
“To ‘be true,’ from daily business decisions to daily interactions, means we remain true to our word,” Scott says. “We ground ourselves in transparency and directness, so it’s really important that we’re true, straightforward, forthright.”
Blanchard strives to fulfill this ambition by holding monthly all-team meetings and town halls, crowdsourcing regularly, requiring that leaders engage in regular 1:1 conversations with their people, and ensuring that the entire team is aligned on the company’s mission, vision and set of values.
Scale kindness is another value, “which is our commitment to do no harm,” Scott says. “We serve others with compassion, love and grace. We act as though the world is watching. And we always stop to ask: Are we getting it right? Is it fair, is it balanced, is it fundamentally right?”
“Our third value is ‘transform together,’” Scott continues. “Serving our clients, developing our products, doing everything we do — it’s a team sport. It takes everyone in the organization to create these experiences, and so we really are set up as a team-based collaborative structure.”
Blanchard’s final value — relentless pursuit — is very important, Scott says. “It’s the persistent quest to figure out how we can navigate this journey together and how we can leverage everything at our disposal to create great experiences for clients.”
That relentless pursuit also extends to creating great and meaningful experiences for Blanchard’s internal team.
“I think one of the important things we do is aligning people to affinity projects,” Ann says. “For instance, one of our solutions architects, Jeff, formerly had his own leadership development companies in Canada, and he is the ‘mayor’ of Blanchard. We actually have an employee who is voted in as the mayor! So Jeff is able to unleash his creativity and his joy there. Lisa and April, as another example, are very interested in getting into assessment work, and so we clear the way for them to be able to get their ECR certification, so they can really dig in there.
“Being able to help them fuel their passion and do things they love as part of their work is critical,” Ann adds.
What’s next
As we enter 2025, Blanchard is poised to continue carrying its mission and values into the future.
Ann is particularly excited about the future of Blanchard’s Propel offering, which is allowing them to democratize leadership development.
“Instead of our traditional buyer, who is right now an L&D buyer or a leadership development buyer, it allows individuals or small teams to be able to curate a leadership development experience for their people that has a heavily social learning component, that includes assessments, that includes formal and informal moments of learning,” she says. “For a lot of populations, the cost is simply too high. It allows us to democratize that a bit and reach more people. I think there’s extreme promise in that.”
Ann sees particular value in Propel’s potential to give access to these experiences not only to smaller businesses or teams within organizations but also to disenfranchised individuals who are looking to develop themselves.
“They now have an opportunity to access research-based, world-class, beloved content and become part of a network through the Blanchard community with people who have similar interests in becoming extraordinary leaders.”
Both Ann and Scott also are passionate about the work Blanchard is doing through its Student Self Leadership program, a version of Blanchard’s Self Leadership program adapted for high school students (and soon, middle school students). This four-week collaborative online course is offered three times each year to cohorts of 150 to 200 students, and they receive a portable digital badge upon completion. High school seniors are eligible to apply for a small college scholarship, as well.
“To me, that’s what it’s about,” Ann says. “Making the world truly a better place, not only in corporate, but for the new, up-and-coming people who will be in the work world soon. And especially giving opportunities to kids who maybe haven’t had the opportunities their peers have had.”
At the end of the day, Ann says, that’s the big goal: being able to reach more leaders, comfortably and at scale.
Scott agrees with this sentiment: “We’re constantly adapting to deliver a new, more scalable, modern approach to deliver sometimes the same ideas, sometimes the same ideas said differently – in a language that resonates more today – so that we can equip young leaders and middle-of-their-career leaders and even seasoned leaders with the right language to connect with each other. We really do believe that everybody deserves to work for a prepared leader, a leader who cares about them, and a leader who has the skills and abilities to have challenging conversations effectively.”
Blanchard is a corporate member of BetterWork Media Group, the parent company of Chief Talent Officer. Learn more about Blanchard by accessing BetterWork Media Group’s Corporate Member Directory.
