The Carlson School’s programs give leaders at Polaris an edge as the company zooms forward.
 Polaris is making a seismic shift to become more customer and globally focused. The Minneapolis headquartered ATV, snowmobile, and motorcycle manufacturer is driving this change company wide, which means big changes for its employees. “Looking at each of our processes from the customer’s perspective on value added has and will continue to require us to make substantial changes in the way we operate in many areas of our business.” says Vicki DeVore (left), Polaris’s director of human resources.
Polaris needs great leaders to help manage these and other changes, and it’s one of the reasons they’ve sent many managers and executives to the Carlson School’s Minnesota Management Institute (MMI) and Minnesota Executive Program (MEP).
DeVore, who participated in the MMI program in 2006, says Polaris has frequently turned to Carlson’ general management and other executive development programs for more than just its well-respected curriculum and proximity to Polaris’s Medina headquarters. “Carlson has a reputation for giving very practical training,” she says. “It’s learning and tools you can take back to your job.”
The programs have been particularly useful for Polaris, which doesn’t have a formal training organization as larger companies might. In addition to learning specific leadership and communications skills, DeVore says that she was encouraged to pass along her knowledge to promising employees. “I learned a lot about coaching in the program, and have used it with employees I am mentoring as well as in coaching managers on the job as part of my human resources job.”
While DeVore continues to use many of the tools she learned in the classroom in her day-to-day work, she’s also found the connections she’s built with the 20 or so other managers in the program enormously useful. “When we think about how Polaris should be doing something different, whether it’s about productivity or other business initiatives, we know we’ve got direct contacts to major organizations in the Twin Cities,” she says. “We’re asked to tap these networks to broaden our perspective. We don’t know everything internally, so it brings us new insights and perspectives.”
DeVore says that a willingness to accept and implement the advice and outside expertise—whether it’s from Carlson faculty members or from the network of colleagues—is the key to making MMI and MEP programs successful. “People [in the program] come back with all sorts of ideas—and sometimes they want to be able to apply them before the next session,” she says. “Students are challenged to think about what they can take back to the organization, and in order for the company to get the payback on their investment in the program, they need to be willing to make some of the changes their employees suggest.”
Polaris’s recent numbers seem to suggest that the changes they’re making—and the way they’re being managed—are working. In 2007, despite a slumping economy and a pullback on consumer spending, Polaris’s sales jumped 7 percent from the previous year.
It’s been more than two years since DeVore took the program, but she says getting out of the day-to-day churn of the work cycle to see the bigger picture continues to benefit her today. “I’ll find myself in the middle of a project and it will strike me that I might have some tools I can use or pass on to people,” she says. “It still comes back to me, and that’s really valuable.” | 
