Back in 2009, Wawa was working on a new competency model for the corporation, something that would grow out of the core leadership values that had helped the nation’s third largest convenience chain store thrive for so many years. That new focus meant any accompanying management training needed to be engaging and dynamic. It couldn’t come off the shelf.

Dorothy Swartz had received boilerplate solutions from a variety of the institutions with whom Wawa considered partnering to provide the training. They had done it before for someone else, and said the same process would work just fine for Wawa.

Except it wouldn’t. When “servant leadership” is the company philosophy, innovative solutions are as necessary as a cup of the chain’s fresh-brewed coffee.

“A lot of companies said, ‘This is what we do. We can twist it and make it fit your model,’” says Swartz, Wawa’s senior director of talent management and development.

Four universities and two leadership development companies thought secondhand approaches would work best. Swartz says Saint Joseph’s offered to develop something specific to Wawa and promised flexibility in working with senior management.

That’s the mission of the Haub School’s Center for Professional Development. It doesn’t treat companies the same way. And it doesn’t approach their specific needs in a been-there, done-that fashion. In an economy that has forced corporations to cut back — or eliminate entirely — their training and development arms, the Center has become a valuable resource for those looking to enhance in-house efforts with customized programs.

“We certainly provide responsive service for clients that are looking for a number of different things,” says Ralph Ciaudelli, program director for the Center for Food Marketing and Center for Professional Development. “We have customers who don’t have training and development departments. As they go through reorganizations and try to get leaner and more efficient, they are outsourcing their training and looking for someone to help them.”

While Wawa has a large and successful training and development arm, in this case, it wanted to augment in-house efforts with an external perspective. The Haub School’s program for 220 Wawa employees, which encompassed 10 intensive days of training spread over 20 months (April 2011-December 2012), gave directors insights and new techniques in leading people and a company. Wawa’s new competency model “raised the bar for performance,” says Swartz, so it was vital the training prepared the directors for the enhanced expectations. According to Swartz, it did.

“The feedback from the directors was terrific,” Swartz says. “We have begun training the corporate managers who report to the directors, and they say they can see a difference.”

Saint Joseph’s has always had a strong leadership presence regionally and nationally in food marketing, but over the past five-plus years, the school has worked to expand its executive education capacities, to better fit a growing need. Calling on significant resources in the Haub School — and other parts of the University — the Center has a variety of options that can provide necessary solutions to companies throughout the region and the nation.

Since arriving in 2005, Robert R. Higgins ’68, executive director of SJU’s Academy of Food Marketing, has built an infrastructure from among the school’s faculty that could meet diverse corporate training demands. The result is a Center capable of adapting to the marketplace and the individual needs of companies looking to help their people improve performance. Leading companies like Wawa call on the Haub School for its industry expertise, research and professional development programs.

“What we have learned is that one size does not fit all,” Higgins says. “We don’t have programs that meet on a certain day at a certain time. We customize everything. “This is for companies that want to put teeth into their programs and make sure they’re not just events. This is an education curriculum.” The Center boasts a combination of educators and professionals who can provide training that fits the marketplace while remaining grounded in sound business theory. Companies looking for management development programs can count on approaches that blend employees’ real-world experience with academic excellence.

As some might imagine, Comcast has a sturdy training team, designed to keep its professionals current with industry trends and management techniques. If you are selling cutting-edge technology, your people should be fluent in the language. But it’s always good to have another voice providing input, to better amplify internal communications.

Tailored to fit Comcast’s specific needs, the Center for Professional Development blended theory and practice and provided relevant information that was immediately applicable to the company’s requirements. The four-module program, accomplished over four months, included about 70 participants at Comcast, while also streaming live to another 100 employees. The targets were middle managers with 10-20 people on their teams, and Dan Gallagher ’94, ’99(MBA), vice president of Learning and Development for Comcast, says the results were extremely positive.

“This allowed us to complement what we were teaching in the classroom at Comcast University,” says Gallagher, author of The Self Aware Leader (2012). “It provided reinforcement and helped us get our topics in front of them.

“We have a lot of focus on things internally, and when you can use an external resource, it provides validation for what the internal message is.”

Higgins says the Center’s genesis dates to a 1998 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which asked the Center for Food Marketing to start a non-credit program designed to provide companies with strategic plans to help employees learn more about the industry. By doing that within its core competency, the Center developed an infrastructure and a series of processes for tailoring instruction to a company’s specific needs and then executing the training in ways that would benefit employees.

Higgins saw that the framework with the food industry could be transferred to other types of business, using Saint Joseph’s faculty in the areas of management and finance. The key was staying true to the formula that produced specific plans of action that fit the companies, not patterns.

The process begins with an assessment of a potential client’s needs, followed by a matching of Saint Joseph’s faculty and program materials with the company’s requirements. The idea is to create a practical application, heavy on real-world experience, which allows those who take part to improve their performance in measurable ways.

“We are working with students, even though they aren’t enrolled in school,” Ciaudelli says. “They are current leaders and future leaders, and we are providing them essentially what the Haub School is providing for undergraduate and graduate students. It’s an outstanding educational experience, grounded in theory, and it is highly applicable to help them do their jobs today and in the future.”

George Latella is a food marketing instructor in the Haub School who worked on the Wawa program. Because Latella has spent more than a decade with Tastykake, he applies his real-world experience to any educational program to which he contributes. This experience provides those who participate with a lot more than theory.

Latella attributes the Center’s success with Wawa to the ability to “put the organization’s values into the classroom.” And that came down to discussions at the outset about what Wawa wanted to accomplish and how best to reach those goals.

Just as the programs are not off the shelf, the locales are not static, either.

When members of Tampa-based Energy Insurance Mutual (EIM), a risk management company serving the electricity and gas industry, contracted with Saint Joseph’s, they didn’t want theory. The company’s Insurance Advisory Committee (IAC) suggested creating a plan to help bring the next generation of managers forward, and after a program at another university failed to meet its needs, the committee looked to Saint Joseph’s to provide something that would help younger professionals look beyond their individual areas of expertise. The result was “The Energy School,” a six-day curriculum designed around the parameters set forth by the IAC and created through SJU’s Academy of Risk Management and Insurance.

“We wanted to give people an overall view of what a risk manager does and examine the concerns of the industry,” says Jill Dominguez, vice president and chief indemnity officer at EIM. “We wanted to show them what goes on in the claims, legal and accounting worlds.”

SJU came up with a program rich in case studies that gave a broader view of the business. That way an insurance analyst could learn about other sectors and build networks to be more effective overall.

“One of the things they wanted to add was a section on ethics,” Ciaudelli says. “We talked with them, and through our Arrupe Center for Business Ethics, we developed a module. Our faculty decided that the best way to handle this was for the participants to write about the ethical issues they face every day.

“Our faculty then facilitated the discussions. It was highly interactive.”

The program provided a fresh look at the entire industry and helped participants understand just how much there is to know about their jobs and what others do.

“There were so many different things that people saw that I hadn’t realized from my point of view,” says Scott Leiman, an EIM property underwriter. “You’re basically examining what everybody is seeing at the same time. You get a full perspective.

“It comes out naturally when five people sit around a table looking at things. Before you know it, you have a laundry list of ways to handle the case.”

As the Center for Professional Development continues to expand its outreach, it is also looking within the University for opportunities to enhance its offerings. Latella reports that there have been discussions with administrators in the College of Arts and Sciences, along with the Initiative for Family Business and Entrepreneurship. The goal is to provide companies with as much expertise as possible, to better address their specific needs.

Ciaudelli believes “the sky’s the limit” in terms of how many different kinds of clients the Center can service. Because of its extensive resources, the Center can offer theory, knowledge and training experience across a broad spectrum of industries.

“We draw on our expertise in areas like food marketing, risk management and insurance, pharmaceutical marketing, ethics, sports marketing, family business and entrepreneurship,” Ciaudelli says. “We are strong in those areas and Saint Joseph’s has a highly accredited and recognized school of business.

“We have the resources.”

And companies all over are finding how compatible they are with their needs.