Drexel-Arkema Program Builds Award-Winning Leaders in Manufacturing
As maintenance manager of a hydrogen peroxide plant, Shasta Johnson ’17 is in constant motion on the job. She’s assessing levels of volatile organic compounds and ensuring compliance with emission standards while navigating a busy industrial site filled with pipes, gauges, sensors and other equipment.
Since graduating from Drexel, Johnson has spent much of her career on the move, working for international chemical company Arkema with roles spanning plants and work sites in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, Texas and, currently, Tennessee.
Johnson’s perspective goes far beyond her Memphis site and the large-scale industrial processes happening there, thanks to her recent experience in the Manufacturing Management Development Program (MMDP), a leadership development program formed through collaboration between Arkema and the LeBow College of Business and jointly launched in 2019.
A highly selective, one-year program, with sessions held at Drexel’s University City campus, at Arkema’s North American headquarters in Radnor, Pa., and at the company’s global headquarters in Paris, MMDP offers participants in engineering and operations roles based throughout the Americas the opportunity to look at the other side of the business: the financial and strategic decisions that determine, for example, where the products from Johnson’s site go and what it costs to transport them.
Johnson applied to the third Arkema-Drexel MMDP cohort because of a specific, personal drive she felt toward leadership within her company.
“I want to be in a plant manager role someday, and this program made me able to speak to those strategies in the right setting with the right people,” she says. “It provided a great introduction to negotiation, as well as to ROI and other financial terminology.”
Because the program is tailored specifically to Arkema, she adds, “it has helped me to advocate for my plant and work more closely with vendors and contractors. What I learned applies not only to what I do on the job today but to where I want to end up.”
Johnson’s cohort received instruction from LeBow faculty — Professor of Management Jonathan Ziegert, PhD; Professor of Organizational Behavior Lauren D’Innocenzo, PhD; William A. Mackie Term Professor of Management Danny Tzabbar, PhD; and Dean’s Industry Fellow and Professor of Finance David Becher, PhD — over the course of four in-person modules, with virtual sessions led by Arkema leaders in between.
“MMDP promotes internal learning and knowledge transfer by bringing together leaders from different functions and business units, and participants build deep relationships and social networks across Arkema that they can rely on throughout their careers,” says Tzabbar, who leads modules focused on strategy and the final action learning projects, designed in collaboration with Arkema leadership to address real problems observed across business areas.
“These projects are particularly valuable because they expose participants to real strategic issues facing the company and provide opportunities not only to develop recommendations but also to help implement solutions.”
Becher, who covers finance topics in three of the program’s four modules, sees participants developing “both a mindset and a skillset to complement their technical skills.”
“When you combine that with projects that have real buy-in from leadership, they get a sense they’re making a difference,” he says.
Johnson’s final project involved operator training programs and devising a way to implement industry best practices across sites; she notes she was selected for that team because of experience with multiple plants in multiple regions.
“It’s a problem everybody struggles with, and we wanted to benefit not just one or two plants, or one or two types of plants, but nearly 60 plants across the Americas,” she says. “Working on this project definitely broadened my horizons.”
Soon after completing MMDP, Johnson became the third Drexel alumna to receive the STEP Ahead Award, awarded to early-career leaders in manufacturing by the Manufacturing Institute, a nonprofit workforce development and education affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers.
I didn’t learn how to be a leader by myself. I learned how to be a leader because I’m surrounded by amazing leaders, and through their investment in me, I learned how to invest in others.
Sandra Auffray, senior vice president of HR and Communications with Arkema Americas, sees great value in MMDP due to the close collaboration with LeBow’s Corporate and Executive Education program and the degree of customization it allows.
“In the final module, for example, we added more interaction with global leadership team of their business unit,” she says. “It’s not only about the content of the program modules but the access that goes with it. For participants, the broader the group of people they meet, the more they understand the bigger picture.”
