Closing the Loop of Learning

Charles Carpenter, III, is a Kansas State University graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in leadership communication, and a graduate research assistant for Third Floor Research (TFR).

TFR is a joint research partnership between the Staley School of Leadership and the Kansas Leadership Center. Established in 2018, benefiting from the knowledge and research capacity in K-State’s Leadership Communication doctoral program, Third Floor Research (TFR) measures the impact of leadership development and civic engagement efforts.

In this entry, Carpenter reflects on his experience with a report for the Cleveland Leadership Center.

If I had to sum up my first project as a graduate research assistant with Third Floor Research in a few words, it would be “uncomfortable growth.”

Since 2018, Third Floor Research has conducted several impact studies for Kansas Leadership Center (KLC). It has also partnered with universities such as Harvard, NYU, Claremont Graduate University, Fort Hays State University to study leadership. TFR has additionally partnered with leadership organizations across the United States to demonstrate their impact and diagnose what is working and not working with their leadership development interventions.

A recent important partnership was with the Cleveland Leadership Center (CLC) in Cleveland, Ohio. TFR first had the opportunity to evaluate the CLC Alumni Survey and develop a comprehensive report in 2022.

Since joining TFR this past fall, I wasn’t sure how I could contribute or make an impact within the research team. My first project was to evaluate the 2025 CLC alumni survey, which was an amazing opportunity—but for me it meant entering uncharted territory. It was my first time working with such an expansive data set, analyzing more than 800 alumni survey responses, an intimidating data set for any researcher, and all while working under a timeline with a community partner.

This project builds on TFR’s earlier work with CLC. In 2022, a report and evaluation conducted by Carlie Snethen (a fellow leadership communication Ph.D. candidate) helped establish both the partnership and TFR's role as CLC's research partner. My work on the 2025 alumni survey is a continuation of that partnership and a more recent phase of that collaborative evaluation effort.

Partnering with organizations like CLC aligns directly with our purpose: to evaluate and inform stakeholders, practitioners, scholars, and communities about the impact of leadership training. Moreover, it provides a hands-on opportunity for Staley School’s faculty and graduate students to build engaged scholarship and research skills.

While creating the report, I noticed interesting trends and patterns in the alumni responses that could apply to other leadership development programs. For instance, I learned how leadership development programs can impact community engagement and what challenges people face in transferring leadership skills to their work environment. I learned how risk might play a key role in discouraging people from exercising leadership and how leadership programs can incorporate this concept/skill in their training modules.

These findings also pushed me to think beyond the survey results themselves. As I worked through the data, I began to see that evaluating leadership development programs involves more than identifying patterns—it also requires careful attention to context, interpretation, and purpose.

Additionally, partnering with CLC and being part of TFR helped me realize that collaboration in this context is an ongoing process—adapting to the needs of the partner is more beneficial than enforcing a top-down approach to research where the researcher works in isolation without considering the community partner’s needs or valuing non-expert perspectives.

Leadership research, when conducted through an engaged approach, is not just about producing knowledge and storing it on our shelves, in our databases, or sending it to partners. It is about providing practical recommendations that partners can use in their future efforts. In TFR, we call this “closing the loop of learning.” In other words, evaluation isn’t about proving impact everywhere—it’s about measuring alignment with mission.

Reflecting on this experience, I began to better understand how research, leadership development, and community partnership intersect. Additionally, [KR5] the project gave me the tools, time management skills, and communication strategies to replicate the process and perform even better on the next opportunity.

Much like leadership itself, growth is often uncomfortable — it demands that we step into complexity before clarity appears. For me, this project demonstrated that meaningful leadership research requires both rigorous analysis and genuine partnership with the communities we aim to serve.