Introduction

NOLS, the National Outdoor Leadership School, is a US based outdoor leadership program with locations across the US, Chile, India, Scandinavia, Mexico, and New Zealand. The school prides itself as the leader in wilderness education through activities such as hiking, climbing, mountaineering, sailing, and kayaking, to name a few. The school is split into the following streams:

• Expeditions
• Custom Education
• Wilderness Medicine
• Risk Services

In 2016, NOLS rebranded, removing the acronym to simply become NOLS, updated their logo and colour palette, and expanded course offerings. 

Over this period, the global economy and world is in flux. Issues such as:

• shifting economic power and cycles;
• course length and changing demands, including rapid decline in semester enrolment; 
• expectations of communication type, including social media platforms, and instant replies through the use of technology, and;
• globalisation 

affect NOLS’ students and team.  

Therefore, it is important for NOLS to become a High Performing Organisation (HPO). To get there, this report focuses on five areas:

• Strategy
• Leadership
• External Orientation
• Design
• Innovation

 

Strategy

NOLS is a HPO with a clear strategy to provide the necessary skills to students through quality experiences with nature. This strategy has a great challenge due to the constant risks that occur when operating in an environment wild, especially with drastic climate change, due to the risks to which students are exposed and the new competitors. NOLS mission is not only about improving quality of the content and instructors, also the understanding the efforts to increase the student’s attendance as well as increasing the influence of NOLS (NOLS, 2018).

The following strategy initiatives will amplify NOLS influence and improve the operations to offer better quality in all the experiences provided (NOLS, 2018). The first initiative is the use of marketing tools to reach new audiences. The use of business analytics is key in this stage because this tool can deliver great benefits for the company by data, technology and business trends (Chandler, 2012), individual analytical capabilities are identified for NOLS to define the action process. Another important tool to achieve new audience is the improvement of marketing research capabilities, including Focus groups that are used to gain depth opinions on an issue for specific groups (Queensland Government)

The second initiative is to improve the student experience through skilled faculty members to achieve exceptional experiences (NOLS, 2018). In order to achieve this objective, the strategy will focus on:

Design a relevant curriculum

Culture is vitally for any company but is a difficult to quantify and for one-third of worldwide customers prefer giving their money to those companies that focuses on sustainability (Craig, 2018). Therefore, the curriculum will focus on showing how sustainable the company is utilizing qualitative research to enhance the results.

Pedagogy

To review and increase if necessary the teaching practices methods. Teaching with motivation, giving the support needed from other teachers who master the subject and improving with a constant feedback to achieve better practices, the results will provide a higher degree or professional success in a cooperative business culture (Ashoka, 2018).

Leadership

Appropriate leadership style plays a necessary role to manage employees and improve their performance effectively in any organisation. The leadership style and skills should keep changing due to fit different organisation’s strategy.

NOLS demonstrated friendly and suitable leadership, however they must actively adapt to changing leadership styles to ensure they remain a high- performance organization.

NOLS operates with servant leadership by make efforts on encourage employees and constantly strengthen the team atmosphere (Learning goals & objectives, NOLS). It is important for leaders of a HPO to inspire employees to improve their performance, let employees feel the value of the team. NOLS has many courses to improve leadership, also focuses on the interaction and teamwork of leaders and employees, the leaders of NOLS learned the difference between leadership and authority, leadership is separate from authority (NOLS, 2018). As such, it is imperative that NOLS’s leaders communicate their expectation to employees and allow them to chance to respond.

NOLS’ leaders should continually encourage employees and make effort to improve their personal abilities, because NOLS as the leadership school that teach leadership and so on, NOLS should be a model for the public and establish a good reputation in high-performance organizations.

NOLS investing in all courses are effectively, this investment allows leaders to improve their individual abilities while also having a good reflection on their employees, it will initiative and remain respectful and inclusive of team member, let employees satisfied with real leadership during in the work rather than only keep “leadership” as an authoritative representative in their mind (NOLS, 2018).

To ensure that NOLS can be a leader in this industry, they must further support and continuously challenge the capabilities/ability of their employees. How to retain existing talent and keep them working effectively for the organization, NOLS leaders must be the key players to promote and motivate employees, and sustain their status as a HPO. 

NOLS Culture

NOLS describes culture in different mechanisms, including:

• Cultural elements gained through certain courses, such as learn about local languages, developing cultural competence through places visited, and spending time with host families on certain courses (NOLS, 2018)
• The culture that is built and shared within each individual course, including apply skills to challenges in a supportive learning culture (NOLS, 2018)
• Building a good team culture, and the importance of instructors to facilitate and create this in conjunction with their students (personal Instructor experience)
• The freedom within a framework that instructors have to run courses to meet both school and student needs
• The culture of NOLS as an organisation, one measurement method of which is the staff survey

Staff Survey

A school wide staff survey was conducted in 2017. Culture and climate was rated as a strength (76^thpercentile). In fact, the overarching sentiment was that “Overall, NOLS is a good place to work.” The data revealed that culture is “driven by personal treatment and employee development.” 

However, when looking at a breakdown of the data, instructors scored the lowest in a feeling of a support culture at 71%. Whilst instructors felt that NOLS was a great place to work, there exists opportunity with “supervisors encouraging instructors to balance their personal and professional lives” (National Business Research Institute, 2017) 

Given the seasonal variance in enrolment and therefore the availability of contracts, instructors can have difficulty finding non-NOLS work in the offseason whilst still enjoying time off their non-NOLS jobs to work the NOLS peak season. 

Interestingly, staff participation was low for instructors. 321 out of 609 instructors completed, a response rate of 52% (NOLS, 2018). An argument could be run that this is not an accurate representation, and perhaps engagement and culture is low, resulting in 48% of instructors not completing. Given that instructors are in the field for 5 weeks at a time, and the survey was open for three months, it is reasonable to assume that instructors over some point would have time to complete. 

One could argue that culture may not be important to NOLS, given the amount of acceptable turnover (at 45%), and that these staff surveys are only held every five years. The culture rating is not a measurement of the school’s success in terms of the metrics the executive team are working towards. 

External Data

Glassdoor gives NOLS a rating of 2.9 out of 5 with 34 reviews. Common comments of concern include:

• Little turnover at the executive level which results in a “boys club”
• NOLS headquarters not practicing what they preach
• A feeling of a witch-hunt culture if one piece of constructive feedback is received
• Feeling of a culture of poor communication
• Feedback to upper management is rarely acknowledged or implemented

(Glassdoor, 2018)

Freedom within a Framework

Instructors are encouraged to make changes as necessary to courses to meet the ever-changing demands of the unknown route, weather conditions, and both student needs and injuries (if they arise). 

Curriculum has a set of core subjects, such as technical capabilities and self-care, along with leadership topics such as the NOLS 4-7-1 leadership principles. Outside of these classes, the rest can be taught as a required as part of the philosophy on emergent curriculum. 

Whilst NOLS has models prescribed in their educator notebook, such as the No Doze leadership style, instructors have the freedom to teach whatever framework they like, such as DiSC or Myers-Briggs. This presents a limitation as a standard framework is not being taught, which can lead to different outcomes. 

Innovation

NOLS can undertake four actions to ensure it is a HPO:

Create a general App

While Wilderness Medicine has an app, we would look to create another app that can be used across all of the other disciplines, which would include a mapping screen, so users don’t get lost, access to training modules and an emergency function.

Content videos

While the research shows that the target audience is increasingly spending more time in front of screens, let’s look to buy in to some of that time with engaging educational material.  NOLS does have over 350 YouTube videos, and they are generally very educational, let’s create more that are step by step instructional videos about geography, mapping, navigation, wilderness survival, learn to sail and so on.

Short courses

Aim would be to create more short courses that could be utilised by groups such as Scouts, Girl Guides or Boys Brigade.  At last count there are 4.1 million Scouts (1.8 mil Girls, 2.3 mil boys) in the U.S.A. alone, and aligning N.O.L.S. with them in a co-branding fashion will increase course intakes.  By using these groups as a feeder in to the system so that interested individuals could continue on through the NOLS system to become a leader or Alumni.

Extend courses to professional industries

Position NOLS to be an industry provider of First Aid and Search and Rescue qualifications to Fire services, Paramedics, heavy industry, Forestry and Mining and other allied industries.  This will expand the range of clientele and bring in new contacts that can be targeted for direct mail for additional courses

Structure Design

To be a high performance organization, NOLS needs to enact changes and able to respond the changes in the external operating environment. NOLS is moving away from the traditional command and control structures toward a flatter organization. It is important to span the control in to the employees with fewer management levels.

To ensure NOLS remain in the competitive market, future support and change are needed in their organization structure and employees. The managers should not be the only to response the products and services. The entire organization needs to be oriented to the consumer’s needs.  The organizational roles need to be summarized in each individual while all of them should have managerial and technical knowledge skills. The knowledge should be given depends on the level of contacts with consumer. Given example, the first line employees such as the course leader should help teams discover their full potential but also has the ability to deal effectively with the unexpected incidents. Moreover, since NOLS operate in the global environment, it is important for them to have diverse teams that can consider and respond the needs from different part of the world. As well, consideration needs to be given, ensuring that the employees have the cultural awareness to operate in different countries that can fulfil local customer needs.

By developing the organizational structure, responsibilities have been divided to each department and employees. Analyses need to be taken and training is necessary to focus on the current organizational problems. To ensure employees have the skills and knowledge to support NOLS step forward into the future.