ConAgra Foods has announced that Lucy Dinwiddie, vice president of organizational Development, received the prestigious Vanguard award from Chief Learning Officer magazine.

The Vanguard Award is given to executives who have either launched a new enterprise learning function or completely overhauled existing workforce development initiatives in the past year. Dinwiddie received the award for her work in conceptualizing, designing and deploying ConAgra Foods’ Leadership Excellence Series - a development program for the company’s top 150 executives.

Under Dinwiddie’s direction, the Leadership Excellence Series was developed at ConAgra Foods in partnership with Lore International Institute. The program is delivered in three separate sessions: Leading Self, Leading Our People, and Leading the Business. It develops a leaders’ ability to effectively listen and respond to internal and external stakeholders — to lead the former and better serve the latter. The program has been successful in building these leadership competencies, and in so doing, fostering one vision for those who drive and impact business results. 

“The Vanguard Award from Chief Learning Officer magazine is well deserved and a testament to Lucy’s hard work with regard to organizational development at ConAgra Foods,” said Pete Perez, executive vice president of human resources. “The LES program successfully engages the leaders of ConAgra Foods to pursue one vision and develops a unified set of core leadership competencies needed to be a strong organization.”

“The Learning In Practice awards were established to recognize transformational and visionary leaders in enterprise education,” said Norm Kamikow, president and editor-in-chief of Chief Learning Officer magazine. “A record number of top learning executives and solution providers were nominated by their peers this year. The winners are the industry leaders who truly champion innovation and transform it into learning and value for their organizations.”