How ScentAir Built a Leadership System That Generated $250K+ in Savings

Background

As ScentAir navigated growth and organizational change, the team realized they needed a more consistent, scalable system for leadership development. They had strong leaders across the business and great ideas coming in from employees — but no intentional, integrated way to connect innovation, leadership, and execution, or to ensure future leaders would be ready when the business needed them.

Approach

To meet the need, ScentAir built the ELEVATE Academy and partnered with Big Think+ to power its self‑paced learning.

Elevate is a 12‑month integrated leadership system designed to connect:

Jessica’s team created a competency model built around what “great” looks like at ScentAir, then mapped Big Think+ courses directly to those competencies. This allowed them to:

1. Deliver world-class expert insight without building content themselves
   

2. Engage leaders with modern, high-quality video lessons they would actually watch

3. Focus the internal team’s time on program design, facilitation, and application

How ELEVATE Academy Works

A global cohort from the company's high-potential and emerging leader population moved through a 12-month program leveraging Big Think+ expert-led microlearning, monthly facilitated leadership circles, and cross-functional capstone projects tied to live business priorities.

Curated classes anchored to the ELEVATE competency framework — including content from Daniel Goleman, Liz Wiseman, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, and Cassandra Worthy — allowed the L&D team to focus on facilitation and program design rather than content creation.

ELEVATE runs on five interconnected components:

1. Assessment and Insight Function: Measure what matters.

Pre-, mid-, and post-program assessments completed by both participants and their leaders establish a shared baseline and track progress across all ELEVATE competencies over time. The dual-respondent model reduces self-report bias and produces a richer, more credible picture of leadership growth than self-report alone. For Jessica's team, the data provides real-time visibility into developmental progress and informs facilitation decisions. For participants and their leaders, it creates structured moments to reflect on growth, recalibrate focus areas, and reinforce leadership behaviors in role.

2. Self-Paced Digital Learning Function: Build shared language.

Short, cinematic Big Think+ video lessons, mapped to each of the seven ELEVATE competencies, give participants expert perspective they can fit into their day — between meetings, on walks, or even on a treadmill. For ScentAir's global audience, captioning and language options make the content accessible to leaders whose first language isn't English. The digital learning works as a priming mechanism: it introduces expert perspective and establishes shared leadership language before the live circle, so circle time isn't spent introducing concepts.

3. Monthly Leadership Circles Function: Connect competencies to role in real time.

Monthly 90-minute virtual sessions serve as the live heartbeat of the ELEVATE system, bringing the full cohort together for peer dialogue, scenario-based discussion, simulations, role plays, and live business challenges. Circles don't re-teach digital content. Instead, they challenge participants to apply leadership frameworks to real situations from their own roles, compare experiences across functions and regions, and practice leadership behaviors where feedback is immediate and peers are genuine. This is where learning moves from conceptual understanding into applied capability.

4. Strategic Capstone Projects Function: Engage as leaders in real enterprise priorities.

Capstones transform ELEVATE from a development program into a leadership operating system. Cross-functional, cross-regional teams take on real innovation ideas — often drawn from ScentAir's annual Innovation Contest — that the organization has already committed to executing. Each team is supported by a senior leader serving as Capstone Advisor, creating a direct channel for guidance, accountability, and executive visibility throughout the year. The work is intentionally ambiguous at the outset. Unclear scope, competing priorities, and evolving direction are treated as features rather than defects, replicating the conditions of real enterprise leadership and creating development opportunities that a structured curriculum cannot manufacture.

5. Structured Reflection and Executive Visibility Function: Make growth visible.

Reflection is embedded throughout the program through guided prompts, facilitated debriefs, and milestone presentations. The defining feature, though, is executive visibility. At program midpoint, participants present capstone progress directly to senior leaders responsible for organizational decision-making. For many, it's the first opportunity to demonstrate leadership capability under real enterprise conditions to executives outside their reporting lines — making leadership readiness visible to decision-makers while reinforcing the organization's investment in applied development.

Results

The ELEVATE Academy significantly exceeded expectations across participant growth, behavior change, and measurable business impact.

What's Next?

Elevate Academy was never meant to be a one‑off program. From the beginning, Jessica and her team designed it as a repeatable system they could refine with each new cohort.

As the first class completed its 12‑month journey, several clear signals pointed to what’s next:

• Cohort 1 is feeding Cohort 2. Around 50% of the inaugural Elevate cohort self‑nominated to mentor the next class, a strong sign of ownership and commitment to “sending the elevator back down.”
• The experience is iterating, not freezing. Jessica emphasizes that the program is already evolving based on feedback from both participants and leaders:
  “What we built in 2025 is different from what we're offering today… it's only going to keep getting better, because we're taking feedback from both leaders and participants to make the experience even stronger.”
• Global collaboration is now a feature, not an accident. Elevate will continue to bring together leaders from across regions, functions, and experience levels, using the capstones to strengthen relationships and collaboration across ScentAir’s global business.
  

Elevate remains core to leadership readiness. The program will keep focusing on connecting innovation, leadership development, and enterprise execution, so that future leaders are ready before the business requires them, not scrambling to catch up.