Kansas State University

Take a moment to reflect on the context in which you carry out leadership, maybe it is in your organization or within your community. When trying to learn about leadership imagine the floors of a building. Starting with the first floor to make sense of context, this is where leadership action occurs. You can think of the second floor as a reflective site, here, people get up on the balcony to see what is happening on the first floor from a different perspective and make the case for a third-floor approach. Reflection and sense making occur on the third floor by evaluating and researching what takes place on the first and second floors.  

In this blog series, we invite you to join us on the third floor to gain a deeper understanding and critically assess what is and is not working in our leadership efforts. Authors will spotlight Third Floor Research, a joint research initiative between Kansas Leadership Center and Staley School of Leadership and explore several projects designed to advance the exercise of leadership and its development. The series will start by introducing Third Floor Research in this blog post with each blog that follows sharing a deeper dive into our findings that might be useful to individuals, leadership educators, organizations and communities.  

Author Carlie Snethen is a Leadership Communication Ph.D. student in the Staley School of Leadership and a Graduate Research Assistant with Third Floor Research. With the first blog in this series, she will introduce the work of Third Floor Research while describing the levels of impact that organizes their projects.  

What is Third Floor Research? 

Making change on large system issues can be a complex, challenging, and difficult journey to embark on. With programs across the country seeking to prepare and equip attendees to complete this work the need for impact assessment heightens along the way. As the Kansas Leadership Center (KLC) continues to prepare leaders to tackle their most compelling challenges, our curiosity for determining what is effective and how it impacts participants has increasingly become a priority. Taking an evidence-based approach to their framework, KLC continues to push the boundaries of how we understand leadership through an innovative partnership. 

Since its creation in 2007, KLC has been working to empower organizations, corporations, individuals, and communities to make progress on their toughest challenges through the idea that anyone can lead, anytime, and anywhere. KLC facilitates leadership development programs and has collaborated with over 15,000 alumni from 44 states and 62 countries across six continents. These alumni are from five primary sectors including education, non-profit, government, faith, and business. With this large swath of participants KLC engages a diverse range of community members through five core principles.

KLC partnered with Kansas State University’s Staley School of Leadership to explore the impact generated by their leadership development programs. With a rich 25-year history, the Staley School continues to engage over 3,000 students a year with four academic programs including the Leadership Communication Ph.D. program. With a mission to create knowledgeable, caring, and inclusive leaders the Staley School is focused on developing the whole student to be effective within the contexts they engage. 

Seeing an alignment between KLC and the Staley School, a joint research partnership was formed named Third Floor Research. With our work we take a big picture view of what is happening within the first two floors using three areas: context leadership, leadership as a collective response, and how progress is measured/understood. Bridging research from K-State and KLC’s large-scale leadership initiative creates a partnership ripe with experiments to test. 

Launched in 2018, Third Floor Research, is an international initiative promoting innovation in leadership exercise and development in a rapidly changing world. We evaluate leadership programs and contribute to a global understanding of leadership, adaptation, and change management. Our research addresses individual development, organizational impact, and community capacity with the end design directed at creating a cycle of: theory- design – experiment -learning -theory. The work of Third Floor Research has been published in public reports and peer-reviewed journal articles as well as presented at conferences worldwide. With an emphasis in knowledge sharing, our work has opened the door for partnerships with organizations such as the Cleveland Leadership Center, University of New South Wales-Canberra, LeAD labs at Claremont Graduate University, Ewing Marion Kauffmann Foundation, and New York University. These partnerships cultivate diverse perspectives internationally when developing projects while generating global discussion about new approaches and methods.   

Levels of Impact

Third Floor Research utilizes a guiding framework that measures impact at four levels. The first level explores participant proficiency in leadership competencies with the focus on individuals. Approaches are inspired by fields such as psychology, education, leadership, and more. The next blog in our series will take an in-depth look at this level through the Your Leadership Edge Impact Report published 2023. 

The second level centers on organization as the unit of analysis by taking a deeper look at how systems engage in making change, approach challenges, and develop as a team. With inspiration from scholarship in systems, communication studies, and team/group dynamics, this area is aimed to unpack more about group work in relation to leadership development. A subsequent blog in our series will discuss learnings at the organizational level by describing the High-Tech Industry Report published in 2020. 

The third level of impact directs our research questions on the challenge itself by turning the focus to how complex challenges shift, what constitutes progress, and what we understand the challenge to be diagnosed as. Exploring the challenge level engages in contemporary leadership concepts while exploring new methods and ways to measure progress. Our fourth blog in the series will discuss the Kansas Beats the Virus Report to talk about how KLC approached the challenge through a large-scale education initiative during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

The fourth and final level of impact highlights the long-term goal that KLC is trying to accomplish by making civic, cultural, and systems change. We ask ourselves how we can measure the larger impact of this work within the greater community and what constitutes progress. Our final blog will discuss our curiosity in measuring the civic/cultural level and our desire to generate deeper learning to contribute to knowledge creation within the field of leadership studies.  

From its creation, Third Floor Research possesses a unique partnership to create impactful research for leadership education and development. Using the four levels of impact to understand our work, we gain focused perspectives on the potential for future research projects and evaluation. Throughout this blog series, we will excitedly share our relevant findings that have the potential to impact practitioners, scholars, community members, and leadership educators alike. 

Third Floor Research is an applied research partnership between the Kansas Leadership Center and the Staley School of Leadership. It is an international research initiative that fosters innovation in the exercise and development of leadership in a rapidly changing world. Third Floor Research contributes to a global understanding of leadership, adaptation and change management. Individuals, communities, and organizations that are interested to know more about our work can contact us at Research@kansasleadershipcenter.org.   

About the author

Carlie Snethen, M.A.: A student in the Leadership Communication Ph.D. program, Carlie is currently a graduate research assistant with the Third Floor Research team. She has been working on evaluation projects focusing on program outcomes, gap analysis, and qualitative data analysis. Named the 2024 Dr. Robert Shoop Student Research Award winner from the Staley School of Leadership, she has a passion for research and evaluation projects to assist in making progress on today’s toughest challenges. Originally from eastern Kansas, she earned her B.S. in Organizational Leadership from Fort Hays State University and her M.A. in Leadership from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.