Döhler North America Success Story

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From Silos to Strong Leaders

Döhler is a global provider of premier food and beverage ingredients and consumer-packaged products, supplying natural flavor, color, and nutrition solutions to well-known brands. Döhler North America’s Cartersville, Georgia, plant has 200 employees and serves as one of the company’s key manufacturing sites.

Two workers wearing hair nets and safety glasses talk in a warehouse beside stacked boxes and blue chemical drums on pallets at a staging area.

Situation

When Learning, Development, and Communications Manager Katie McCoy joined Döhler North America in 2023, it became clear there was an opportunity to further strengthen leadership capabilities across the organization.

As new leaders stepped into their roles—whether hired externally or promoted from within—they were often expected to quickly adapt without a consistent foundation of formal leadership development. At the same time, team silos, inconsistent communication, and varying levels of confidence made day-to-day leadership more challenging.

McCoy recognized an opportunity to better equip frontline leaders with shared tools, a common language, and the confidence to effectively manage people as well as processes.

Through her supervisor, she was introduced to Andy Helm, strategy and leadership development project manager with the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP) at Georgia Tech.

Solution

Döhler partnered with GaMEP to design a customized leadership fundamentals program tailored to the company’s culture and operational needs. With Helm’s guidance, they built a 10-week leadership program delivered over five sessions, covering topics such as crucial conversations, emotional intelligence, performance management, and effective delegation.

Participants completed a capstone project at the end of the program, applying what they learned to real workplace challenges, from improving floor communication to streamlining engineering workflows. Over time, Döhler expanded the partnership to include CliftonStrengths training for leadership teams and food safety training for its quality staff, reinforcing a shared standard of excellence across shifts and departments.

Döhler continues to collaborate with Helm, and GaMEP has become a trusted partner that is helping the company build on and sustain program learnings long after the formal training sessions have ended.

Results

Through its collaboration with GaMEP, Döhler has:

  • Trained 40 leaders across four leadership cohorts
  • Seen 90% of participants report application of skills within 30-60 days
  • Increased retention of high-potential employees by more than 10%
  • Improved cross-functional project completion timelines by 10%
  • Delivered measurable outcomes from capstone projects (e.g., cost savings, efficiency gains, and process improvements) tied to business goals
  • Held quarterly meetings for program participants to continue collaboration
  • Created a leadership playbook combining program takeaways with Döhler values

Testimonial

“The GaMEP trainings provided our leaders with a shared universal language, and they’ve become much more confident and proactive in communication. They’ve not only improved their delegation skills, which has helped resolve some day-to-day efficiency issues, but we’re also seeing these new leadership behaviors being passed down, with more employees stepping up to lead their own teams.”

— Katie McCoy, Learning, Development, and Communications Manager, Döhler North America