Senior Consultant - Leadership Development

About the Role

William Blair is looking for a Senior Consultant, Leadership Development who is passionate about helping leaders thrive in their roles and advance their careers. Our team takes a holistic approach to leadership development — combining formal programs, coaching, and performance systems, delivered as one collaborative HR team. This role owns the training and program piece of that effort: you'll lead the design and delivery of leadership programs for first-time managers through senior leaders, building and sustaining a healthy pipeline as you develop the firm's next generation of leaders. Concretely, that means designing and delivering formal programs for managers stepping into the role for the first time, alongside ongoing, targeted development for experienced managers already leading teams. You'll be equal parts content creator, facilitator, and program manager — running multiple leadership initiatives at once, most of which you'll be building from the ground up rather than inheriting fully formed.

Responsibilities

• Build program content: Design and develop curriculum, materials, and learning experiences for leadership development programs, working within an established strategic framework.
• Deliver post-promotion cohort programs: Design and facilitate structured programming for newly promoted senior leaders as they move into expanded roles.
• Run a pre-management pipeline program: Design and deliver a skill-building curriculum that prepares high-performing individual contributors for the transition into management.
• Facilitate ongoing manager development: Deliver targeted programming and coursework for experienced managers already leading teams, building their capability over time.
• Maintain the leadership self-service toolkit: Own and continually expand a set of resources managers can use on their own to support everyday leadership tasks.
• Deliver leadership assessment results: Facilitate readback and development conversations for senior audiences using tools such as Hogan.
• Manage external vendor relationships supporting leadership/management content, as needed.
• Partner with HR Business Partners to understand business-unit-specific leadership development needs and inform how programs are delivered.
• Manage programs operationally through the LMS, including scheduling, reporting, and participant engagement tracking.
• Additional responsibilities, as requested.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree.
• 9-12 years of professional experience in learning and development.
• 5 years of demonstrated experience designing and delivering end-to-end management and/or leadership development programs is required; this is not a role for someone who has primarily managed vendors.
• Strong instructional design and facilitation skills; must be confident and experienced both designing content and personally delivering it to manager and senior-leader audiences.
• Experience building programs in ambiguous, early-stage environments (i.e., building from a partial foundation rather than a mature program) strongly preferred.
• Strong consulting mindset with the ability to synthesize strategy, data, and stakeholder input into clear, actionable recommendations.
• Strong communication and relationship-building skills; comfortable partnering with senior stakeholders and other Learning & Development team members on shared programs.
• Strong LMS experience required; Workday Learning experience preferred.
• Working knowledge of adult learning theory and competency-based learning path design.
• Experience managing external vendors.
• Ability to work across multiple time zones.
• Willingness to come into the office a minimum of two days a week; more as learning programs may require.

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior direct people-management experience; candidates should be able to speak credibly to the manager experience even without having formally managed others.
• Financial services or professional services industry background.
• Hogan Assessment Certification; experience leveraging assessment tools to support leadership development, coaching, and talent management strategies is a plus.
• Professional credentials (e.g., CPTM, CPLM, CTDP, SHRM-CP/SCP, or equivalent).

Pay & Benefits

Base salary range: $140,000—$160,000 USD. This role is eligible for either a discretionary annual bonus (based on company, business unit and individual performance) and/or commission-based incentives. Benefit offerings include medical, dental and vision coverage, employer paid short & long-term disability and life insurance, 401(k), profit sharing, paid time off, Maven family & fertility benefit, parental leave (including adoption, surrogacy, and foster placement), as well as other voluntary benefits.

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