Growth Signals

Growth Signals: Leadership Training Built for Newly Promoted Managers

Growth Signals is a leadership development company specializing in training new managers, delivered through its flagship cohort-based program, Made to Lead. The company is led by founder and CEO Jen Arnold, MS, a TEDx speaker who spent 16 years leading organizational health and wellbeing efforts in public health, hospital systems, and health plans before founding her earlier company, Redesigning Wellness, in 2016 (achieve Engagement bio; Leadership Greater Washington, 2026). Arnold ran Redesigning Wellness and its associated podcast for several years, building a reputation in the corporate wellness space, before evolving the business into Growth Signals, with a sharper focus on new manager leadership training (Listen Notes podcast archive, 2026).

What Growth Signals does

Growth Signals' core program, Made to Lead, is a cohort-based, live, and facilitated leadership development system for newly promoted managers, explicitly designed to be ongoing rather than a one-off workshop, supporting new managers in real time as leadership challenges actually arise (Growth Signals, 2026). The company cites Gallup research that 70 percent of the variance in employee engagement is determined by managers, and its own data point that 85 percent of new managers receive little to no formal training before leading their first team (Growth Signals, 2026, citing Gallup and the company's own framing). Programs are customized to each client's culture and include coaching delivered outside the client organization, positioned specifically so leaders get expert support without HR having to serve as their coach or therapist.

Where it fits

Growth Signals has trained leaders at organizations including Cigna, Booz Allen, AtlantiCare, and Proskauer (Growth Signals, 2026). It's a fit for HR and people leaders who have identified a gap between promoting strong individual contributors and those people actually succeeding as managers, and want a structured, ongoing program rather than a single leadership seminar to close that gap.

Why this matters for people leaders

Growth Signals' central data point, that only about one in three employees under a first-time manager considered leaving, according to the company's own materials, points directly at one of the most under-addressed retention risks in most organizations: promoting someone for skills that have nothing to do with managing people, then giving them no support to develop the skills that actually do. For organizations focused on Culture, Performance, and Retention, new-manager failure is a compounding problem: it doesn't just affect the new manager, it affects every person reporting to them, which makes early, sustained leadership development one of the highest-leverage retention investments an organization can make.

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