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Research Focus: Workforce and Economic Development

“Empowering Leadership: A Peer Collaborative Approach to Retaining & Supporting Black Women Leaders Across Sectors”

What research challenge did your dissertation address?

My dissertation examined how peer learning collaboratives can improve the retention, advancement, and leadership experiences of Black women professionals across organizational sectors. The central challenge my research sought to address is the persistent gap between institutional diversity commitments and the lived experiences of underrepresented professionals navigating systems not designed for their advancement.

Across industries — from finance and healthcare to technology, law, and government — organizations struggle to retain diverse talent, translate inclusion commitments into measurable outcomes, and create leadership pathways that are both equitable and sustainable. Traditional professional development models often focus on individual skill-building while overlooking structural barriers, relational isolation, and the informal networks that quietly drive advancement. My research responds to this by exploring how structured peer collaboratives grounded in adult learning theory can build social capital, strengthen belonging, and improve career progression outcomes.

This challenge is not limited to the United States. Institutions worldwide face similar tensions between talent development, equity, and organizational performance. The frameworks this research produced — grounded in the real experiences of leaders navigating real organizations — are designed to travel across sectors and contexts.

What inspired you to pursue this research?

I was inspired by both lived experience and professional observation. Throughout my career in corporate and nonprofit settings, I repeatedly watched talented Black women enter institutions with strong credentials and real ambition, only to encounter invisible barriers to advancement, belonging, and long-term retention. I experienced many of these dynamics personally. The disconnect between what organizations said about diversity and what colleagues actually experienced every day made me want to understand how leadership development could be reimagined — not as a fix applied to individuals, but as a structural investment in the conditions that allow people to lead.

During my doctoral journey, I became particularly interested in how peer learning environments could serve as both protective and empowering spaces. Rather than positioning individuals as the problem to be fixed, my research explored how institutions could intentionally design collaborative structures that increase social capital, foster belonging, and create genuine pathways to leadership. The findings affirmed something I had suspected: when organizations invest in structured peer networks built on adult learning principles, they improve not only individual outcomes but their own institutional effectiveness as well.

What did your research find, and what is its impact?

My research found that structured peer learning collaboratives significantly improve retention, leadership confidence, and advancement outcomes for Black women professionals. The results were concrete: by the end of the six-week Peer Leadership Collaborative series, 80% of participants reported increased confidence in advocating for themselves — up from 40% at the start. Professional network strength rose 35 percentage points. Confidence in navigating workplace challenges, including microaggressions and biased systems, increased from 35% to 75%. And 75% of participants reported that they had already begun implementing at least one of the co-developed strategies within their own organizations before the program even concluded.

Beyond the numbers, participants built something harder to quantify: a community. Many described the collaborative as the first professional space where they felt neither isolated nor required to represent their entire identity group. That sense of belonging — and the practical tools developed through shared experience — is what makes the model replicable and durable.

The study produced a practical, adaptable framework that institutions can apply, including design principles, facilitation strategies, and evaluation metrics to measure impact over time. The research moves the conversation away from representation as an end goal and toward the question of what systems actually need to look like in order to cultivate and sustain diverse leadership.

“The study produced a practical, adaptable framework that institutions can apply, including design principles, facilitation strategies, and evaluation metrics to measure impact over time.”

Holly Davis

The impact of this work is still unfolding. Participants left with toolkits they built themselves — bias response guides, mentorship frameworks, self-advocacy strategies — grounded in their own lived experience rather than borrowed from theory. One participant began working with her HR department to implement a formal mentorship program based on resources developed during the collaborative. Another used negotiation strategies from the series to successfully advocate for a pay increase she had been seeking for years.

Those aren’t abstractions. That’s what it looks like when research does its job.

Fulbright Specialist Program

In 2026, Holly Davis was accepted to the Fulbright Specialist Program — a U.S. Department of State initiative that places credentialed experts at institutions in more than 150 countries for short-term collaborative engagements of two to six weeks. Selection is competitive and peer-reviewed, and specialists are recognized as globally credentialed practitioners in their fields.

Davis applied for the Specialist track — distinct from the undergraduate Fulbright Scholars program — after recognizing that the challenges her research addressed were not unique to American organizations. Institutions worldwide grapple with retaining diverse talent, developing equitable leadership pipelines, and translating inclusion commitments into structural change. The Specialist program gave her a pathway to bring the evidence-informed frameworks from her dissertation into new global contexts, collaborating with host institutions to co-design leadership development programs and workforce strategies suited to their own cultures and constraints.

Her application was supported by faculty references from her doctoral committee and drew directly on the action research methodology and stakeholder engagement skills developed through the EdD program. “The program really prepared me for the Fulbright application,” Davis said. “A lot of the questions were about how you’d apply your research in a community context, how you’d engage stakeholders — and I already knew how to answer those. I’d been thinking that way for two years.”

Davis is now on the Fulbright Specialist roster and actively reviewing placements. She is drawn to engagements in Japan, Egypt, and South America — settings where her expertise in organizational change, peer-based leadership development, and inclusive workforce design can meet the specific needs of a host institution. She brings to those engagements more than doctoral research: a career in global HR at organizations like Citibank has already required her to navigate cultural difference, communicate across geographies, and design programs for colleagues and teams spanning Europe, Asia-Pacific, and beyond.

For Davis, the Fulbright is less about being recognized as an expert than about what becomes possible when that expertise travels. “I look forward to the collaboration,” she said. “Learning how another culture approaches inclusion and change management — things I’ve never thought of that way. And then bringing that back.”