At Expedition Technology (EXP), we believe leadership isn’t a title you’re given, but a quality you cultivate. It’s not about a position on an organizational chart, but about your impact on the people around you. It’s part of The Expedition Way.
When I joined Expedition ten years ago, our entire team could fit around one conference table, and the company’s philosophy was something you simply absorbed by sitting there. While we’ve long since outgrown that table, the spirit of the daily check-in—of shared understanding and purpose— is a spirit we actively cultivate. That’s why our growth has made it crucial to more formally define what leadership means here, why we define it that way, and how we pass on that knowledge.
Three times a year, we gather a diverse group of eight team members for our Leadership Development Curriculum. This course isn’t about creating middle managers; it’s about nurturing leaders. We bring together engineers, project managers, and back-office staff with varying levels of experience to explore a simple but powerful idea: true leadership comes from influence, and influence is earned when people choose to follow you. In a career at Expedition, you may step in and out of many roles, but the leadership skills you build—and the influence you earn—are yours to keep.
The philosophy of the course is grounded in a single, powerful belief: a leader’s primary role is to build an environment where others can excel. This begins with fostering a culture of trust and psychological safety, which is the bedrock of our agile, team-of-teams mindset. In this environment, autonomy isn’t just a buzzword; it’s the freedom for teams to experiment, learn, and grow from both successes and failures. We ask our leaders to build this foundation of trust so they can guide their teams beyond immediate tasks and toward our shared long-term vision.
To make this real, we turn theory into impact. Each leadership cohort identifies a real challenge at Expedition and works as a team to solve it. Recently, these projects have aimed at significant internal innovations, including:
- Revamping and improving our internal coaching program.
- Strengthening the training curriculum for the critical agile roles of Product Owner and Scrum Master.
- Initiating the creation of a new, easily indexable system for sharing common knowledge.
The Leadership Program at Expedition isn’t static. It evolves with every cohort and every new challenge. It’s our commitment to building a resilient, innovative culture by empowering leaders at all levels to champion our values and, most importantly, to empower those around them. It’s how we ensure that the spirit of that original conference table continues to thrive, no matter how much we grow.
