The Taxfix Leadership Development Program
In this post, People Development & Learning Team Lead Aki Friedrich explains how the recently launched Taxfix Leadership Program TXL provides a learning framework based on our cultural values to strengthen leadership skills throughout the company.
When I first joined the Learning and Development Team in 2020, Taxfix was three years old and much smaller than it is today. The organisation had 200 employees back then; today, it has more than 500. The position — People Development & Learning Partner — was new within the organisation. What drew me to the role was that a company as young as Taxfix was already thinking about personal growth and the value of creating a platform for people development that would benefit the company and individuals in tandem.
During the interview process — which also included a cultural interview — Taxfix’s strong working culture shone through, and the sense that the company was striving to live by its values day-to-day, not to treat them as abstract concepts. During discussions with my future teammates, it became clear that there was a golden opportunity to build a coherent company-wide development program from the ground up, based directly on Taxfix’s company values. In March 2022, we launched Taxfix’s Leadership Development Program, known internally as ‘TXL’. The name points both to Taxfix Leadership and to the old Berlin Tegel airport code because it’s a platform for managers to ramp up their leadership skills— similar to a plane taking off. The skills on offer are culturally-derived, meaning that TXL serves to preserve our company’s identity and strengthen our leadership philosophy as we grow.
Leadership, culture, and autonomy
The project began with user interviews with a range of Taxfix employees. We wanted to understand how team members had navigated their careers to that point and what had been helpful to them at various stages of their journey. Through surveys, we also found out what people believed would help them develop their skills further. Almost everyone told us that they need great people around them to inspire, provide guidance and direction within the organisation, have meaningful development conversations, and get practical support developing in their roles and beyond.
Leaders impact the growth of the organisation and its team members. They are multipliers of the vision of the company. That said, the mentorship culture in Taxfix means we think about leadership and development inclusively. We realised that leadership training need not be reserved for people in management roles; team members at every level can benefit from mastering leadership skills as they progress in their careers.
Often, there is the misconception that leadership is mysterious: that only a few people can do it, and most of us can’t. But leadership isn’t something innate. While attitude and charisma can go a long way, good leaders possess a range of learnable skills they are trained to call upon in critical situations. Conflict resolution, supporting and empowering teams, and strategic thinking are all hallmarks of good leadership and can be leveraged at any point on a person’s career path.
We built the TXL Leadership Development Program based on the idea that leaders need fundamental skills to be effective and successful with their teams. Actions dictate culture and vice versa. We also believe that because TXL has emerged directly from the Taxfix company values, it will continue to deepen the culture we strive for as it develops the next generation of leaders within the organisation.
Mirroring the high degree of autonomy and ownership given to Taxfix team members, we believe that by giving people the environment and tools they need to develop themselves, they will choose the right path for their own personal and professional growth. TXL, we realised, should be self-driven, not mandatory, and those in the program should be free to choose to build the skills they believe are most relevant to them and their teams.
Scientifically structured, value-based learning
Deciding on the scope and offering of a Leadership Development Program within a growing company like Taxfix is a challenge. Leadership training is a large market, and finding the sweet spot in terms of format, structure, and content is a process that involves a lot of research. To establish the range of leadership skills to offer, we explored Taxfix’s four core values — Understand, Deliver, Develop, and Trust — and the company’s twelve Leadership Principles:
We then translated each of these Principles into a corresponding TXL module. Some of them are: Coaching Skills, Strategic Thinking, Psychological Safety, Candid Conversations, People Development, Effective one-on-one’s, Productivity & Prioritization, Problem-Solving & Reframing, Data Basics & Storytelling.
At the start of the year, we ran a first ‘underground’ people development module to gain more insight into how our planned modules might be received. After taking some time to reflect on our learnings, TXL was officially launched in March 2022. The schedule, we decided, should be flexible: once a module reaches a required number of sign-ups, we are good to go. A module begins with an interactive kick-off workshop, lasting around two hours, but after that, we deviate from traditional teaching models.
I’m passionate about implementing modern science-based learning principles that can elevate a development program above those that follow traditional classroom-based models. There is a theory called the ‘forgetting curve,’ hypothesized by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1885, which states that, after a week, retention of memory has progressed downward rapidly. This means workshop attendees will have forgotten 80% of what they’ve been shown.
Standalone workshops have been proven to be ineffective. With this in mind, our modules are structured in a way that learners are contacted regularly with micro-learning check-ins and reminders, with mini-missions encouraging them to employ the principles. We also have check-in sessions and wrap-up events, in which we summarise what we have talked about and how our tools have been used. The best thing you can do is come back to the subject, check in each week and refresh and reinforce the knowledge. We are still learning, exploring, changing the program format, and evolving the structure based on ongoing feedback we receive.
Learning and growing
In a busy working environment, people need clarity. Initially, we didn’t provide module outlines or roadmaps of what our learners will encounter and when. This caused some confusion. Now, when we kick off, I make sure to give a short summary of the module and what it will cover. We want learners to feel they can commit. Though we structure the modules in a way that learning occurs through reinforcement, it will only work if people see the modules through to the end, when learners can apply what they have learned to their roles.
When we launched, I was worried we might have trouble filling seats, but the TXL program seems to be very popular. The program has around 90–100 learners, which can be a lot to manage. One of our challenges now is that urgent business developments sometimes prevent learners from attending or prioritising skill development during certain periods. However, we learned that in a company growing at such a scale, we have to consider people development a ‘moving target.’ The key is to regularly remind people what is on offer. Informing everyone about it and getting people involved is a challenge. In hindsight, I believe we could have been even more experimental in what we tried early on. I realise now that it’s always worth being flexible and seeing what lands with learners.
If it doesn’t land, change it. You don’t need a traditional learning mindset, that has a set program that people definitively follow.
If I see an element in a module that has little engagement, I make the time to change it. We constantly alter the modules on offer based on the latest learnings. The cultural emphasis on openness and feedback is the perfect environment for such an agile mindset. It means we can be endlessly adaptable.
We want the TXL Leadership Development Program to be as valuable to both our learners and the business as possible. So far, we have found that the key to this is to embrace flexibility in what we offer and how we encourage our learners to engage with it. Rather than searching for the program’s final form, we’re constantly researching new ways that TXL can fit into the everyday working lives of our Taxfix colleagues and provide a framework to develop the skills we need to grow.
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