Savio Franco joins the Talent Management team to help Johns Hopkins become more 'leaderful' at all levels

"I'm a helping professional at heart," says Savio Franco, the inaugural director of Leadership Learning in the Johns Hopkins University Office of Talent Management. His specialty is helping transform leadership development within complex organizations. Drawing on his broad range of education and experience, he will lead the development and implementation of programs and resources at JHU to meet the needs of both faculty and staff leaders at all levels.

Franco has worked internationally in education, organization development, training, and human resources, and his multiple degrees include a doctorate in educational leadership. Whether he's coaching individuals or working within organizations, "I like to help systems and communities to do better at developing leadership pipelines," he says. "That's the throughline."

Franco says he believes in the relationship between good leadership and good culture and the greater good of society. "For me, this is very much a role on a mission," he says of his new position. His vision for Hopkins is to develop it into a "leaderful" organization, to use one of his favorite made-up words. "Leaderful" means that everyone within the university is involved in leadership development, he explains. "Programs don't develop leaders. Leaders develop leaders."

Who Does That?

Meet the people who help make Johns Hopkins run

As director of Leadership Learning at Hopkins, Franco will refine and scale existing initiatives, from the Hopkins Essentials of Leadership Program for incoming or new managers and supervisors to Hopkins' signature executive-level Leadership Development Program. He also will design and launch new programs to meet the growing interest in custom, division-specific leadership learning initiatives.

Kathy Forbush, executive director of Talent Management, notes that Franco's position was envisioned long before the right person was found for the role. "We have been fortunate to have several successful leadership development programs for many years already here at the university," she says. "At the same time, the need for effective and thoughtful leadership of our faculty, staff, and learners has never been more critical or more requested from our employees."

She continues, "We are so grateful that someone with Dr. Franco's experience in leadership development specifically within higher education has chosen to come and help us create and implement new and enhanced leadership development programs that will ultimately positively impact the work and career experiences of many here at Johns Hopkins."

Before joining JHU in August, Franco held senior positions in the IT industry for companies that include Infosys, Sutherland Global, and Aditya Birla Group. Most recently, Franco served as director of Leadership Development, Research, and Partnerships based at the University of Dayton, where he earned his doctorate in educational leadership and was a clinical faculty member and honorary research professor at the School of Education and Health Sciences. Franco also holds a bachelor's degree in psychology, a Master of Science degree in counseling and psychotherapy, and an executive MBA. "I am essentially an interdisciplinary scholar, an applied researcher, and a community builder. I have interests across a wide range of fields related to human and societal flourishing," he says, a trait that will undoubtedly serve him well at Hopkins.

Johns Hopkins' current leadership learning offerings can be sorted into several buckets. The introductory program, called Hopkins Essentials for Leadership, consists of nine courses designed for newly hired faculty and staff, or for those recently promoted into managerial or supervisory positions. There are modules on management, leadership, and Hopkins-specific culture, policies, and procedures.

The next level of training offers two developmental programs for current employees: Supervisor Development and Manager Development. The supervisor program is for first-time leaders who have direct reports, while the manager program is for employees who oversee supervisors. Both programs are competency-based sequences of courses designed to provide first-line supervisors and managers with the leadership skills they need to advance professionally.

While these trainings are encouraged, Franco says, "At Hopkins, we do not make learning mandatory. It is very invitational, and it's collaborative. We want the excellence of our offerings and word of mouth about them to be the primary draws."

Then there is Hopkins' flagship Leadership Development Program, which is now in its 28th year. This program serves executive-level leaders and accepts approximately 35 faculty and staff members each year through a nominee-selection process. "This is one of our most prestigious offerings, where we get leaders from all across the university and take them through a yearlong cohort experience of self-discovery," Franco says. The program emphasizes three types of leadership: leading yourself, leading your team, and leading within the organization. "It's a very holistic experience that leaders go through," he says. "We have more nominations than we can accommodate."

The way he sees it, Franco's mandate as the director of Leadership Learning is to do more, do better, and do new.

By do more, he means getting more supervisors and managers to complete Hopkins Essentials and the Supervisor and Manager Development programs. "Reaching scale is a huge priority," he says.

As for do better, this means having an ongoing process of keeping our leadership learning programs up to date. "We are constantly refreshing the content of all our offerings so that they are always relevant and customizable to the different cohorts," he says. Developing better content also requires simplifying complex topics to make them more bite size and user-friendly, he adds. "We can have the best programs, but if we have few people using them, that doesn't serve the organization."

The last mandate—and the most important, he says—is about creating custom programs that build on existing offerings. "To reach scale, we have to go not only wide, but we have to go deep," Franco says. To serve an entire organization with thousands of leaders, there need to be new initiatives that can leverage HR leaders and other key influencers within the divisions as the "frontline culture builders and leadership development facilitators," he says. That's the purpose of the new Manager Conversation series. The program is designed to equip all JHU managers and supervisors with the skills they need to effectively navigate a variety of critical work conversations on such topics as feedback and coaching, employee development, performance and discipline, leave and accommodation, compensation, and more. "A combination of universitywide and division-specific leadership learning offerings is going to be our strategy to achieve scale and sustain relevance," he says.

"Leadership is truly a core competency that an organization can have," Franco says. To achieve it, the university needs a unified vision. "There is a distinct Hopkins way to lead," he says, and articulating clearly what "leading in a Hopkins way" means will be one of his first projects and will flow from the university's Ten for One strategic vision.

"My role is very much about building this strategic capacity and making a difference in this organization," Franco says. "That's what I like to do: I transform leadership development within complex organizations, and this is my best opportunity yet. I'm really looking forward to making a meaningful contribution and invite all who have a passion for developing leaders at our university to partner with me."