Prairie Drive Leadership Project

The Prairie Drive Leadership Project is an in-house employee development center. Defining success beyond monetary terms, we are mission driven people who hope to connect the leaders of tomorrow with the Prairieland EDC of today. Prairieland EDC has built upon a culture of teamwork where the best people are hired to create innovation, and we practice the "it's all over here" philosophy.

The Prairie Drive Leadership Project is a comprehensive strategy to hire, build upon, and retain the best people we can who share a common vision and purpose in being the best in assisting small businesses. The project is composed of very simple, easy to understand concepts, yet these principles are very difficult for employees to act upon and deliver on a daily basis.

Prairie Drive Leadership Project Principles

  1. Build a Culture of Teamwork
    For even the most mundane tasks, Prairieland EDC employees take a group approach. Staff share job responsibilities and must learn to cooperate on marketing, development, processing, closing and even servicing. Steve Dusek (CEO) insists on the minimal use of the first-person pronoun.
  2. Hire the Best People, Not the Best Leaders
    The Prairieland EDC recruiting process is as intense as that of any other CDC but is unique in the efforts to seek well-rounded individuals. Detours into public service or volunteering are seen not as irrelevant, but as a boon. The idea of helping others is a vision which creates a more productive, efficient, loyal, and committed employee base, which helps produce real results.
  3. Make Leadership a Priority
    Prairieland EDC employees are given comprehensive annual reviews, in which areas like cross boundary collaboration, tolerance for risk, commitment to culture, and creative innovation are made a priority.
  4. Foster and Reward the Environment
    An environment where innovation and personal and professional growth can occur is the goal of Prairieland EDC. With innovation we can create unique ways or processes of doing things which is much tougher for our competitors to react. To strive for the holy grail of strategic thinking is how we come up with a model that differenciates us, creates value for our customers, and uniquely positions us in our industry.
  5. Implement Pilot Project
    Prairieland EDC hopes to help individual staff develop personal dream plans that can be modeled and duplicated corporate wide.
  6. "It's all over here!"
    Every minute of every day at Prairieland EDC is lived with the "It's all over here!" attitude.

Prairieland EDC seeks to further instill this attitude, culture and development in its employees by:

  • Providing financial support for continuing education (short classes to multi-day training)
  • Holding annual and on-going strategic planning sessions
  • Holding sessions every three weeks to review our mission, purpose, culture and current goals
  • Conducting extensive annual job performance reviews
  • Allowing new employees to learn about our culture and make a public commitment to be a member of our team (after a three month period), and allowing other employees decide whether to support them in their efforts
  • Providing on-going team building activities and training