As 2023 begins, Corporation for a Skilled Workforce is entering a new era. At the conclusion of 2022, co-founder, President & CEO Larry Good entered retirement, paving the way for new leadership. As of January 1, 2023, Kysha Wright Frazier has assumed the role of President & CEO. Formerly the Vice President of Policy and Strategy, Kysha has worked in various capacities at CSW for fifteen years.
Prior to joining CSW in 2008, Kysha created and served as Business Unit Leader of Cascade Consulting Group, a consulting division of Grand Rapids Manufacturer, Cascade Engineering. Kysha was responsible for identifying and designing innovative solutions to assist clients in becoming employers of choice. Before working in the private sector, Wright Frazier served as the Assistant Director of Career Services at Hope College. Kysha serves on the Board for the Marvin Community Development Service Corporation, is a lifetime member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, and owns a national snacking brand. Kysha earned a master’s in higher education administration, policy and leadership from the University of Iowa, a master’s in organizational management from Spring Arbor University, and a bachelor’s from the University of Iowa in anthropology and African American world studies.
Her insightful approach to leadership and decades of experience in the workforce development system make her an ideal candidate for the transition and managing the future of CSW. We asked Kysha to sit down and discuss her history and CSW’s future, outlining her goals for her new role:
How did you come to join CSW?
I connected with CSW while working at Cascade Engineering in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the early 2000’s. My role at the time was focused on expanding good employer practices around employee retention, particularly for new entrants into the workforce. With Cascade’s President and CEO, Fred Keller’s emphasis on human capital, the company developed employee career ladders, DEI and culture change development practices, and nationally recognized retention practices, including locating human services case workers onsite. I remember getting invited to a meeting that Larry Good and Jeanine LaPrad (former CSW leadership) attended, along with The Mott Foundation. CSW wanted to better understand what Cascade was doing and how they were having so much success with employee retention, particularly with frontline workers. We didn’t call it this then, but today, I’d say Cascade was a forerunner in job quality.
I thought CSW was intriguing and did compelling work. It was several years later that CSW reached out looking for someone who understood and spoke the language of the private sector and had interest in working at a national level. I was a little hesitant since I didn’t have a traditional workforce development background, though a close friend encouraged me to apply, recognizing my diverse education and experience in the various sectors of the workforce system. I interviewed and was offered the position of Senior Policy Associate for the Business and Industry Strategies team. My time at Cascade Engineering and Hope College before that was very valuable. Fred Keller was particularly an impactful mentor who gave me a front seat and place at many tables. These experiences gave me the opportunity to work and learn across the broader workforce system.
What have been your roles and responsibilities with CSW over the years?
My longest role was as a Senior Policy Associate within the Business and Industry Strategies team from 2008 to 2016. After that, I took over the Workforce Benchmarking Team (now called the Improving Practices and Outcomes team) and served as the lead until 2021. I became the Vice President of Policy and Strategy in 2021.
What accomplishments at CSW make you most proud?
After stepping into a key leadership role as VP, I was able to closely partner with Larry Good and better position CSW to develop a healthy range of meaningful work that also supported the organization’s sustainability. This started with an organization restructuring and lots of input from team members on where CSW should concentrate. It also included engaging with our board of directors to adopt a revised mission and set of values that centered racial equity and inclusion, both related to our internal culture, policies and practices, and the work we design with clients and partners.
We knew we couldn’t go to this next level without a larger team. The restructuring led to some impactful changes to the way we hire new team members. This resulted in stronger and more racially diverse candidate pools, and a team that has more than doubled in size. My colleagues are not only leaders in their areas of expertise, they are also thoughtful, humble, and dedicated. Staff span the gamut in age, location around the US, and a wide variety of fascinating backgrounds. The people at CSW continue to make me excited and proud to be part of this organization. Every day I am amazed at the standout work our team leads! We have built a highly talented staff and broadened our national reach with partners, in communities, and with the population groups we are most interested in working with.
I am also very proud of the team’s commitment to CSW, modeled by Larry. CSW is in a financial position where we have achieved our highest level of sales in the last seven years, surpassing our 2022 annual goal. It takes a full organizational effort to make that happen!
What are some of CSW’s initiatives that make you most proud?
A few examples come to mind. The first project that really introduced me to workforce development at a national level was through our partnership with The National Governors Association. With this initiative, we provided technical assistance to over 150 Department of Labor American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) Grantees. It was an amazing experience; I was on the ground conducting onsite visits, facilitating webinars, managing forums, and leading large scale national convenings. Meeting with and hearing from workforce leaders from all around the country grew my national perspective and understanding of what’s working in different parts of the country, what pitfalls to avoid, and what different states are doing when it came to helping workers reinvent themselves and skill up.
In 2013, we worked with the Kellogg Foundation to better understand the various levers and actors in a community that helped to support family economic security. It was a comprehensive way to examine all the parts of a community that need to come together including residents, community-based organizations, employers, training providers, faith-based orgs, and more. Having a funder who was truly interested in understanding where they should make investments and learning from all aspects of the community, particularly residents, stood out for me. It also stands out because internally at that time, we really didn’t have a particular term for what is generally known as “centering participant voice” today. I continue to take lessons from this project and the organization has strengthened our approaches in not just who we engage, but how we meaningfully engage with individuals and groups. Today, we are more intentional about elevating and incorporating the voices of the impacted in all the work we do because of the passion and skill of our team, and in particular from leaders within our Improving Practices & Outcomes and Research & Evaluation strategy teams.
What guides your decision making as a leader?
One message that I repeat often is simply to remain authentic. Having worked at an organization where the values so closely align with my own personal values, it’s not as difficult to make the hard decisions. For me, our organization’s values are clear, and those values drive purpose, and that purpose drives action and results. Staying authentic to those core values, as well as my own, is vital to being an effective leader.
I am also a proponent of not letting perfection prevent progress. I describe myself as a calculated risk taker; I believe you must take some risk if you’re going to grow at any rate. I also believe to be an effective strategic leader, you have to think of strategy as a verb, and not a noun. It’s something you must act on, not something you have and hold on to. Taking risks, using uncertainty as an opportunity to explore, acting with calculation, and considering how the organization and people will be impacted have been key points in my growth and leadership.
Finally, I believe in lifelong learning and surrounding myself with mentors, friends, and colleagues that can push me to see things in myself, the organization, or the field that may not be as apparent to me. I aim to build a network of people who encourage me to take chances but can also speak honestly on where I should deeply reflect.
What internal strategies will be key for continuing CSW’s success?
Several thoughts come to mind when I think about our ongoing success. It’s a new chapter for CSW; we’re nearly 32 years old, though we also have a great number of new staff. This places us in a unique position, primed for greater creativity, expanded opportunities, and making greater impact. Being established three decades ago, we have the ability to reflect on our historical decisions and challenges, which can make us more strategic for future decision-making.
Internally, I’m focusing on long-term objectives, recognizing new opportunities, continuing to strengthen our culture and structure, adding more talent, and managing our growth and change. I’m working closely on these initiatives with CFO, Sherri Cavanaugh and VP of Operations & Strategy, Travis Reid. The transition plan and hand-offs between Larry and I has been effective and smooth thus far, though relationships can function differently when the founder is no longer with the organization. It’s important that existing partner and funder relationships are strengthened and reaffirmed, but new relationships are also developed. This means ensuring stakeholders get to know me, and that staff continue to be positioned in ways where they can drive these relationships. I think it’s an important shift that our staff be at the forefront of our work with partners and that it’s not only leadership who build those close relationships.
What external strategies will be key for continuing CSW’s success?
Externally, I want CSW to continue to sharpen our racial equity point of view, along with a growing set of marked approaches that disrupt the legacy of economic discrimination, in which workforce development policy has played a part. Increasing equitable learning, employment, and economic opportunities, and ultimately closing the wealth gap takes multiple approaches, entry points, agencies, and partners. We want to be at the center of that change-making process.
I like our ability to be nimble and flexible, so when we see needs in the field, we have the flexibility to tackle them. The needs of job seekers, training providers, and employers evolve. We’re all seeing that now. That means our areas of focus need to adapt to the ever-changing dynamics within workforce. For example, our Trauma and Resilience at Work team was created in 2022 in direct response to the levels of trauma so many people have been facing, which has intensified across the country. Listening to staff, hearing their interests, bringing their multiple skillsets and expertise to the forefront, we were able to see the need for trauma and resilience work and create a new strategy team as a result. This is something I want to support.
Additionally, placing more focus on growing national movements, rather than working project to project, is a direction we’re wanting to lean into more. CSW has partnered with some amazing organizations to lead large scale initiatives in the past, such as our national sector strategies and One-Stop Career Centers reinvention work. Today, we are helping lead a national initiative called Credential As You Go, which focuses on validating all learning in its many forms so that learners are recognized for what they know and can do. Creating national movements will take strategic partnerships that span across the workforce development system. We’re here and ready to share our ideas and to hear from others who share in our mission of increasing economic mobility.
What’s going to stay constant in CSW’s work is the focus on skill development, lifelong learning, and the expansion of work that focuses on populations who are left out and let down, developing multiple strategies on how we can create change for them.
We are proud and excited to see Kysha in the role of President & CEO. If you would like to send her a welcome message or hear more about work she’s spearheading, send her an email at kfrazier@skilledwork.org.
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