AIIR Consulting Earns Two Gold Brandon Hall Awards for a Leadership Pipeline That Spans Frontline to Senior Leadership
AIIR Consulting is pleased to announce that it has earned two 2026 Brandon Hall Group™ HCM Excellence Awards® — both Gold in the “Best Leadership Development Program” category — for its work designing and delivering two flagship leadership programs in partnership with a nearly 200-year-old global commercial property insurer.
The double win reflects a multi-year partnership spanning the client’s full leadership pipeline: one Gold recognizes the Accelerated Leadership Development Program (ALDP), built for top-talent managers of individual contributors, and the other recognizes the Senior Leadership Development Program (SLDP), a flagship program preparing vice presidents for succession into the organization’s senior leadership ranks.
“Every year, the HCM Excellence Awards remind us that innovation is ultimately about impact,” said Brandon Hall Group Chief Operating Officer Rachel Cooke, HCM Excellence Awards program leader, of this year’s winners. For AIIR, that impact shows up as a pipeline of leaders — at every level — who are ready for what comes next.
The Problems These Programs Were Built to Solve
Both award-winning programs trace back to the same handful of problems AIIR’s leadership development work is built to solve. Left unaddressed, these show up as:
- Leadership skills gaps that surface as inconsistent execution, disengagement, and weaker customer outcomes at every level of the organization.
- A weak leadership pipeline that puts succession planning at risk when it matters most.
- Emerging leaders who reach bigger roles without the readiness to handle their scope and complexity.
- Development programs that are disconnected from the business strategy they’re supposed to serve.
Gold, Best Leadership Development Program: Building the First-Ever Top-Talent Program for Front-Line Leaders
The Challenge
The ChallengeMost organizations carry a leadership skills gap that shows up long before it reaches the C-suite — among the front-line managers responsible for team culture, coaching, and day-to-day execution. For the insurer, this gap had never been formally addressed: no structured top-talent program existed for managers of individual contributors, even though this population was both a real execution risk and an untapped source of future succession candidates. ALDP was built to close it — the first rung of the organization’s leadership pipeline.
The Solution
In partnership with AIIR Consulting, the company launched the Accelerated Leadership Development Program (ALDP), a 12-month journey for its inaugural cohort of 25 globally distributed managers. Grounded in AIIR’s evidence-based AIIR® Method, the program combined:
- Four global in-person learning blocks covering change leadership, business acumen, coaching, and team growth, hosted across offices in the U.S., Germany, and the U.K.
- Individual executive coaching anchored to a personalized development plan for each participant.
- Mentoring from SLDP alumni — the same senior leaders developed through the program one level up — creating a direct, lived connection across the pipeline.
- An applied challenge, in which each participant led a real, manager-nominated business change initiative over the full 12 months, culminating in presentations to senior leaders.
The Outcomes
- 64% of participants experienced promotions or expanded roles within two years.
- Over 90% reported significant improvement in leadership effectiveness across strategic thinking, change leadership, and trust-building.
- Business challenge recommendations informed strategic initiatives in AI, renewable energy, and knowledge management, several of which have moved into implementation.
- Alumni now serve as mentors in other top-talent programs, creating a sustainable leadership pipeline.
The program has become the newest link in the organization’s integrated leadership pipeline, with graduates now positioned to advance toward its senior leadership program.
Gold, Best Leadership Development Program: Preparing Future-Ready Senior Leaders for Succession
The Challenge
As the insurer approached its 200th anniversary, it faced a different version of the same pipeline risk — this time at the vice-president level. International growth, new product development, and client needs driven by climate risk, artificial intelligence, and the energy transition demanded a bench of enterprise-ready senior leaders that tenure and functional expertise alone could not produce.
The Solution
Now in its third cohort, the Senior Leadership Development Program (SLDP) is the pipeline’s senior anchor: a 12-month experience preparing top-talent vice presidents for succession into the company’s senior leadership group. AIIR Consulting served as strategic design and coaching delivery partner, applying its AIIR® Method, scaled to the complexity of senior roles across four phases:
- Assessment: a multi-instrument battery including 360-degree feedback, Hogan personality assessments, and AIIR’s Coaching Mindset Index®.
- Insight: individualized Strategic Development Plans built from assessment data, with coaching to the cohort’s top-ranked focus area, coaching others.
- Implementation: four global, in-person learning blocks on strategic insight, business acumen, innovation, and leading change, paired with ongoing executive coaching.
- Reinforcement: continued coaching and an alumni network in which graduates return as mentors to the organization’s other top-talent programs.
The Outcomes
- Program endorsement reached 8.9 out of 10, and coach endorsement reached 9.3 out of 10, both improvements over the prior cohort.
- 90%+ learning effectiveness and 88% team performance impact were reported on the final Business Impact Survey.
- 91% of participants reported improvement in strategic leadership as a direct result of coaching.
Across all three cohorts to date, participation in the program has consistently correlated with promotions and job movement, reinforcing its role as a genuine succession pipeline accelerator.
The Pipeline, End to End
Taken together, ALDP and SLDP give the insurer something few organizations can claim: a leadership pipeline with no gap in it, from the manager leading a team for the first time to the vice president one step from the senior leadership group.
About the Brandon Hall Group™ HCM Excellence Awards
The Brandon Hall Group™ HCM Excellence Awards® recognize organizations that have successfully deployed programs, strategies, and tools that achieve measurable results in Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, and related fields. Winners are evaluated by a panel of veteran independent experts and Brandon Hall Group senior analysts. The full list of 2026 winners is available here.