Overview
Role: Instructional Designer (sole designer)
Audience: People Leaders
Tools: Storyline 360, Word (DSD), SCORM Cloud, Photoshop
Terminal Objectives:
Describe why effectively communicating is an important part of leadership.
Explain how effective leadership communication results in a more productive, successful workplace. Communicate successfully and effectively as a leader within the organization.
Overview:
I designed and developed this course end to end as the sole instructional designer, from stakeholder discovery through the final SCORM build. The client needed a scalable way to raise the communication capability of people managers across the organization, without pulling them out of the field for classroom training.
After multiple SME conversations, collaborative sprints, and iterations, the result is a self-paced, 20-minute Storyline course built around two recurring workplace scenarios — a cascade of an overtime-policy change, and a manager breaking news of a company acquisition. Learners don't watch these scenarios; they critique and steer them, then apply the same judgment in two spaced knowledge checks.
Business Challenge and Solution
Business Problem:
Senior-leadership decisions stalled at the manager level — employees like Jose waited days for information that directly affected their pay.
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Managers treated communication as optional or someone else’s job, defaulting to a promised email instead of a real conversation.
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When managers did talk, they delivered facts without context — employees didn’t understand the "why," so they disengaged from decisions that affected them.
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Practice was wildly inconsistent across the leadership population — some managers built trust in the room while others inadvertently eroded it.
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Left unaddressed, the pattern compounds: high performers absorb the slack of disengaged peers, and frustration spreads cross-functionally.
Solution:
A scenario-based Storyline course that puts learners inside real cascade moments rather than lecturing at them.
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Branching decision points with consequence-driven feedback, so learners practice judgment, not just recall.
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Two spaced knowledge checks (drag-and-drop fact-or-fiction, pick-many) reinforcing transfer after each concept block.
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A leave-behind job aid — a printable leadership-traits tip sheet — for on-the-job reference after the course ends.
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Three measurable terminal objectives, each written to a Bloom’s level the assessments can actually verify (describe, explain, communicate).
Action Map
Before opening Storyline, I mapped the course using Cathy Moore's Action Mapping model: start from the business goal, isolate the real performance problem, define the on-the-job actions that close it, then design practice — not information — around those actions.
Business Goal:
Increase employee trust and productivity by closing the gap between what senior leadership decides and what front-line teams actually hear — measured through engagement survey sentiment and speed of information cascade.
Performance Problem:
Managers aren’t withholding information out of bad intent — they don’t consistently know how to cascade it. Some intuitively build trust through in-person, two-way dialogue; most default to email, silence, or a bare recitation of facts with no context. This is a genuine skill and practice gap the training can close — paired with a lightweight cascade checklist as a non-training reinforcement.
Design and Development
Text-Based Storyboard
Before touching Storyline, I wrote a full text-based storyboard — a DSD — columned by narration/VO, on-screen text, visual and media notes, interaction and branching logic, and developer notes. This let me pressure-test the branching scenarios with the SME and stakeholders on paper, where changes cost a comment, not a rebuild.
Visual Mockup in Storyline
With the DSD approved, I built the visual mockup directly in Articulate Storyline: character art and dialogue bubbles for the scenarios, hotspot markers, and interaction states, all matched to the approved script.
Interactive Prototype
I published a clickable prototype for stakeholder review and a small usability pilot ahead of full development, gathering feedback on branching clarity, pacing, and whether the knowledge checks actually predicted the right behavior — and revised the DSD accordingly before locking final content.
SCORM Package — Final Deliverable
The finished course was packaged as SCORM 1.2 for broad LMS compatibility, tested for tracking and completion status via SCORM Cloud, and deployed. Kirkpatrick Level 1–2 data (reaction, knowledge-check performance) is captured in-course; Level 3 behavior change is tracked post-launch through the engagement-survey and cascade-speed metrics defined in the Action Map.
Measurable Outcomes
▸Improved score on the engagement-survey item "my manager keeps me informed" within two quarters of rollout.
▸Reduction in HR escalations tied to communication breakdowns or perceived favoritism.
▸Shorter average time between a senior-leadership decision and its cascade to front-line teams.