Todd Billingsley
Director Business & Leadership Development
Boehringer Ingelheim
Redefining Leadership Development
Todd Billingsley is not just a transformational leader—he is transforming what it actually means to be a leader.
“Todd is a visionary and has single-handedly changed the culture around leadership development at BI,” says Rich Baron, Executive Director, Human Pharma Training & Development, Boehringer Ingelheim. “Cultures are generally created and driven from the top down. Todd has accomplished something remarkable in that he has built this and grown it from the bottom up.”
When Todd took over this role, BI had two programs: “Management Development Curriculum” and “Lead.” He totally dissolved MDC and built “New Leader Development.” While managers are trained to be great at hitting numbers and benchmarks, Todd believed leaders should be something more.
So NLD is a year-long program that teaches concepts such as servant leadership, emotional intelligence, and situational leadership as well as business tactics like strategic and critical thinking. Participants are also evaluated based on objective measures and rated on attributes such as emotional intelligence, the Hogan High Potential Model, and the Hogan Business Reasoning Inventory. So far, they have run five cohorts of the program, with 40 people going through the program and becoming leaders within the organization.
Todd and his team also built the “BILD – U” program to serve as precursor to NLD. The program teaches similar concepts as NLD while giving participants a small taste of being leader to see if it is a right fit for them. On top of that, Todd and his team also built a coaching academy with feedback from two leading sports psychologists: University of Clemson’s Dr. Milt Lowder and University of Georgia’s Dr. Drew Brown. The goal: Create leaders who are better at coaching employees through co-creation and not just observation and evaluation.
Todd’s work has also taken a leadership program that was 95% male dominated and made it closer to 60%-40% in favor of females. Now, his work is being applied across the organization with the animal health business in the U.S. picking up NLD, the team in Canada visiting the coaching academy, and Todd preparing to visit the global headquarters in Ingelheim to build out the program globally.
