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Before pivoting into academia, Kathryn Ostermeier, PhD, worked in recruiting, mostly in the tax and auditing corner of the energy sector. She loved finding candidates for some clients, but recruiting for clients with reputations for sometimes difficult workplace cultures never sat well with her conscience. She also observed poor employee conditions within her own organization.

“I like to tell my students it was a very informative job, but it was also a terrible place to work, because I saw firsthand how much workplace culture and leadership mattered,” Ostermeier says.

Despite the circumstances, this was exactly where Ostermeier needed to be to discover her true passion: organizational behavior and workplace dynamics. “I learned a lot about, from an employee perspective, what I didn’t want, and from a company perspective, what companies should do. And I had a lot of questions,” she says.

Driven by this realization, she left recruiting, earned her PhD in management with an emphasis in organizational behavior, and quickly found her new home as a faculty member in ���Ĵ�ý’s Department of Management in 2018.

“Bryant is a great place,” Ostermeier says. “It has what you’d say about a house: really good bones. It has a great culture, it has really good students, and people really care about the institution.”

In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate business students, Ostermeier designs and leads custom leadership training programs for organizations through Bryant’s division. Rooted in research, practical applications, and her own first-hand experiences, Ostermeier’s approach to professional education keeps organizations coming back year after year.

Transforming Managers Into Leaders Through Custom Training

Over the last few years, Ostermeier’s returning corporate clients have included a state agency and an automotive group with locations across the northeastern United States. Both organizations enroll their employees in a specific number of training sessions every year, and each session is dedicated to a different topic.

Despite how different these organizations are, Ostermeier says the midlevel managers and supervisors they send her way often face similar challenges as they balance handling their work and oversight duties with solving problems as they arise.

“Middle management is the hardest place to be, because you’re still having to solve the technical problems of your functional area,” Ostermeier says. “If you’re at that level, your subordinates are going to ask you to help, but you’re also trying to hire and mentor. It’s a lot, and it’s a place where there’s a lot of burnout.”

Fortunately, these are exactly the types of issues Ostermeier is skilled at overcoming.

“I am a behavioral scientist by trade, so I study people and organizations,” she says. “The goal for each training is for people to leave with actual things they can do and also a better understanding of themselves.”

Translating Research Into Real-World Skills

In pursuit of these goals, Ostermeier’s trainings often include an introductory lesson on leadership. During this lesson, she focuses on research-backed skills in areas such as gaining employee buy-in, adapting one’s own leadership style to the needs of a team, and utilizing the Mumford skills model.

“The Mumford skills model talks about competencies that you need to be effective: problem-solving skills, social judgment skills, and knowledge,” she says.

To build on that, she also often includes a lesson on authentic leadership and cultivating authenticity in the workplace—one of her areas of expertise. In an international, four-study research project she co-authored, Ostermeier found that in employees and positively influences both employees’ job satisfaction and their engagement.

“We should want our employees to be themselves, but it’s not as simple as, ‘Be yourself,’” Ostermeier says. “It’s not saying, if you’re angry as a boss, you should yell at your employees. … It’s knowing and living out your values consistently, across different contexts.” 

Turning Values Into Authentic Leadership

Through an intricate series of self-assessments, group discussions, and other exercises, Ostermeier helps each person in her training sessions discover their own values, such as kindness and transparency. Then they work on actionable ways to embody those values as leaders.

“We know from all the research, and there’s a ton of it, that if you feel yourself that you are authentic, you’re going to have better well-being and better work engagement, higher life satisfaction,” she says. “But authenticity has two elements. The first part is you feeling authentic, and the second part is other people thinking you’re authentic. Because if you want all the career outcomes, it’s about whether people think you’re authentic.”

It’s a dynamic lesson that Ostermeier has been improving for years since she first taught it at the Naval Supply Corps School in Newport, Rhode Island.

Offering a Customized and Formative Training Experience

While there are some similarities in the trainings Ostermeier provides to different organizations, she and her colleagues in the Bryant Accelerator programs pride themselves on their ability to adapt to every client’s individual needs.

“Our state agency client really does love a case study, and they love really introspective work,” she says. “The auto group is not a case study group. They’re on the walls brainstorming, moving around. They love role-playing, so we get to adapt it to their context and people.”

In addition to tweaking the format to suit each organization, Ostermeier also customizes the curriculum based on the specific challenges they face at that very moment.

“I have a structure, but they also bring things to the table that they want to work on,” she says. “We get to adjust and adapt in real time, and really solve problems.”

By training in such a collaborative environment, the professionals in Ostermeier’s sessions don’t just walk away with practical skills. They complete the process as a much more cohesive leadership team.

“They see people’s names from emails, but they don’t actually really know each other that well,” she says of her professional education students, especially those who work from home full time or part time. “These programs, especially the in-person ones, allow them to put faces to names and really bridge connections. … They get to co-create together, which I think is a really powerful tool.”

Unlock Your Full Potential With Professional Education at Bryant

Through ���Ĵ�ý’s , individuals and entire organizations can get the skills-oriented, research-backed training they need to excel in an ever-changing economic landscape. Associate Professor of Management Kathryn Ostermeier, PhD, and her colleagues are committed to making that happen.

“People are always trying new things here. There’s a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, a lot of innovation,” she says. “Bryant’s a place that is successful, but is not resting on its laurels.”

For organizations with specific needs, Bryant offers custom solutions in the form of one-day or multiweek training sessions. Each program can be delivered in an in-person, a self-paced online, a live virtual, or a hybrid format.

“We tailor it to the context and the people,” Ostermeier says. “We see where your employees are, conduct the training, and use feedback and assessments afterward to evaluate what participants actually learned, and where they can continue to grow.”

To find out more about the fully customizable corporate trainings, self-paced certificate courses, or any of the Accelerator’s other offerings, reach out to ���Ĵ�ý today.