How Omaha Steaks Built a Leadership Development Program That Works Across Every Department
Now we’ve got high-potential people emerging from all parts of the business, instead of just certain verticals where we happened to have more equipped leaders to develop talent.
What We Did
Partnered with Omaha Steaks’ senior team to build a company-wide leadership development standard
Delivered in-house Accelerate Leadership Program (ALP) cohorts for managers and directors
Worked alongside Omaha Steaks’ internal talent development team to align the program with organizational goals
Established a common leadership standard across every department
Helped Omaha Steaks build a custom leadership program on ALP content
Key Outcomes
60+ Omaha Steaks leaders graduated from in-house ALP cohorts
High-potential leaders now emerging from every part of the business, creating a leadership succession pipeline
A shared leadership standard that can be measured across departments
Table of Contents
Background
Omaha Steaks is a Midwest brand with a family legacy stretching back more than 100 years, built on a clear promise: “We deliver exceptional experiences that bring people together, guaranteed.” When Nate Rempe became the first non-family CEO in the company’s history, he believed keeping that promise at scale meant developing the people behind it.
Leadership is really the foundation of success. Understanding how to lead yourself, how to make hard decisions, how to inspire others, is really how you build yourself professionally and personally. – Nate Rempe, President and CEO
The partnership began in 2018, when Nate was leading the technology division. He sent a high-potential team member through the Accelerate Leadership Program, and the marketing department enrolled its own leaders around the same time. Both groups saw real behavior change: people leveling up and taking on more responsibility. As Nate moved into the COO role, he set out to make that the standard across the company.
Those early wins also exposed a gap. Some teams were developing stronger leaders by chance, not by system, depending on whether the people at the top happened to prioritize it. An inconsistent process was producing inconsistent results, and for a company that guarantees every customer experience, leaving leadership development to luck wasn’t good enough.
Challenges
It wasn’t a leadership challenge. There wasn’t any foundation for developing leaders in the company. It was happening in pockets. – Nate Rempe, President and CEO
Without a formal leadership development program, Omaha Steaks faced:
- No consistent process for identifying and developing high-potential employees
- Leadership concepts that varied from department to department
- No shared language for what good leadership looks like at Omaha Steaks
- No way to measure leadership growth across the organization
The stakes were high. Omaha Steaks earns most of its revenue in roughly a three-month window, so leaders across marketing, finance, technology, and fulfillment have to execute under pressure and rely on each other. And as remote work spread, leading well got harder still.
Remote work introduces a couple complicated components… Leadership has to adapt to the virtual work environment to be successful. – Nate Rempe, President and CEO
Results
Omaha Steaks partnered with Leadership Resources to replace those pockets with a company-wide standard. The core of that strategy was the Accelerate Leadership Program, a cohort-based leadership development program that combines proven curriculum with coaching, peer learning, and real-time application on the job. Nate’s senior team sponsored the effort, and Omaha Steaks’ internal talent development team owned it.
Leadership Resources has found a niche in being able to build custom programs on top of proven curriculum, and that is so valuable. – Nate Rempe, President and CEO
More than 60 leaders graduated through in-house ALP cohorts. The first change was a shared language.
The biggest thing, and I’ve told Boyd [Ober, CEO of Leadership Resources] this a few times over the years, is this common vocabulary. When you have that standard across the board, leaders can speak to each other using the same language. Everybody is on the same page about what leadership traits matter to the Omaha Steaks culture. – Nate Rempe, President and CEO
With a common standard in place, leadership became measurable. Nate can now see which departments are indexing higher and push the leaders who are falling behind to lean in. The biggest impact showed up across departments, not just within them.
Where you really see it the most is cross-functionally, in peer groups. ALP-trained leaders tend to emerge in their peer group as leaders of leaders. They have tools in their belt that others don’t have. – Nate Rempe, President and CEO
The culture shifted too. Leaders saw the company investing in them, and that became a reason to stay. According to Nate, graduates say almost the same thing every time: they expected another boring leadership conference, and what they got was concrete, applicable, and worth every minute.
For Nate, the return speaks for itself:
Leadership development is not easy, and it’s not cheap in time or money. But the results are there. – Nate Rempe, President and CEO
Ready to build leaders in every corner of your business?
[Book a call] with us today and see how the Accelerate Leadership Program can give your company a leadership standard that lasts.
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