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Leadership Development Institute
Technical excellence is what got you noticed.It is not what makes people follow you.
LDI develops the leadership that makes people choose to follow you,
in the moments when you cannot require it.
The program
The Leadership Development Institute is
AIM Utah's applied leadership program
for technology professionals moving into influence.
A cohort meets across three full-day sessions to work on the part of leadership a title does not solve.
It is applied, not theoretical. Participants leave with practices they can use right away,
not a binder of frameworks.
Sessions are led by experienced leaders who have built careers developing people.
Who it's for
LDI is built for technology professionals who are handed leadership responsibility ahead of formal authority. New managers and technical leads whose results depend on people outside their reporting line.
It is for people who are ambitious about how they lead and honest about where they still have ground to cover.
What the cohort works on
Across three sessions, participants examine how their own behavior and reputation shape their influence. They work on building the trust and accountability that hold up under real pressure, and on recognizing the ordinary moments where leadership is won or lost.
The work continues between sessions, applied to the teams and problems each participant already owns.
Format
Three in-person, full-day sessions with a single cohort, held at WCF in Sandy. Lunch is included.
The cohort format is deliberate. It keeps the room candid and the work applied to problems people actually own.
Enrollment
LDI runs each spring and fall.
Registration for the next cohort opens ahead of its start date.
QuestionsFor questions about LDI, contact Niel Nickolaisen, who leads the program. nnickolaisen@gmail.com |
From the Cohort |
"I came into LDI already knowing what I wanted from it. I had ten to fifteen years of leadership behind me, and I still walked in believing there is always something you can do better. That mindset paid off. The part that stayed with me most was the role-playing, working through real scenarios from my own experience and rethinking how I would handle them. What made it land was the people in the room. Hearing how another participant would approach the same problem, someone whose perspective was completely different from mine, was where a lot of it clicked. You do not get many chances to rehearse the hard parts of leading, or to see them through someone else's eyes. What changed most was how I handled direction from above. I was leading a team of about fifty in a company going through real difficulty, and before LDI I would pass leadership's directives straight down. After the program, I would stop and think about how to deliver the same message in a way that was genuine and actually useful for my team, rather than just relaying it. Being intentional about the environment I created for them, that is the shift that stuck. The most lasting piece was an exercise where we wrote a leadership values statement, choosing the words that were true to how I wanted to lead and how I wanted my team to feel. I still use mine a year later. I wrote a new one recently." Tanya Cunningham, Senior Project Manager Attended: Spring 2025 Cohort |