Strategy Into Performance
Next Level Training Strategies was founded on a simple idea: improving performance starts with understanding the work — what people need to accomplish and what helps or gets in the way.
Experience at the intersection of strategy and performance
Adriene Russell brings more than 25 years of experience helping organizations turn business priorities into the roles, capabilities, processes, and practices people need to perform.
Her experience spans learning and development, operations, workforce performance, organizational change, and enterprise transformation — including executive leadership in a complex Fortune-scale organization.
A view shaped by the work
Adriene’s perspective was shaped inside organizations where strategy had to survive contact with real work — competing priorities, complex structures, limited capacity, changing roles, and the practical realities of implementation.
Her work has included centralization, operating model design, governance, role and capability design, adoption, measurement, and large-scale organizational change. Across those experiences, one lesson remained consistent: performance problems rarely belong to a single function or have a single solution.
Sustainable improvement comes from understanding how the pieces of the organization work together — and where they don’t.
Practical by design
Adriene’s approach is grounded in a simple question: What must people be able to do differently for the organization to achieve the result it needs?
From there, the work moves outward — examining roles, processes, tools, capabilities, reinforcement, leadership, and measures to identify what is helping or hindering performance.
That practical orientation also led to Performance First™, her framework and book focused on designing learning around the performance people must produce rather than simply the content they need to know.