21 minute read
Enabling the Future of Work
Enabling the Future of Work IMPLICATIONS for L&D
BY ALBERT SIU, PhD
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If you work in the learning and development field, you know that the nature of work is changing and the competition for skilled talent is intense.
The learning function must be strategic and accountable for all its actions to close skill gaps and meet the company’s emerging talent needs. As a clinical research organization (CRO) and global provider of biopharmaceutical services, Parexel has focused its attention on our changing workforce, training functions, and how learners are experiencing the training to meet everchanging business requirements.
SETTING L&D PRIORITIES Two years ago, Parexel collaborated with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to study the impact of innovation on drug development. We noted that in the prior 10 years, drug development costs had doubled, and looking ahead to the next 20 to 30 years, costs might increase 10 times. Concurrently, the “time to market” in our industry—from identifying a compound that has clinical treatment possibilities to launching a new drug—is around 12 years, and the failure rate of these new inventions runs as high as 90%.
The study dug into understanding the “why” of those findings and identified two broad drivers. The first is an inadequately trained workforce, and the second is the low adoption rate of innovative methodologies in clinical studies, which are hampered by organizational silos and risk-averse cultures. Parexel partners with our biopharmaceutical clients to remediate these gaps, and we have had many external discussions about the impending global skilled labor shortage. In clinical research, we need scientists and technicians who are well schooled in their respective disciplines and people who have strong foundational knowledge in the academic disciplines they pursue. We hen provide industry and functional skills and knowledge to our recruits to complement the strength of their foundational knowledge. For Parexel, three sources of information were seminal in influencing our thinking about enabling the future of work and the implications for L&D.
In a 2017 Pearson report, “The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030,” the researchers took a comprehensive approach to describe how employment is likely to change and the implications for skills acquisition being shaped by the dynamics of globalization, technological advancements (e.g., AI), and unique industry segments’ requirements. At the 2019 World Economic Forum, in a white paper titled “Strategies for the New Economy,” the authors argued that “…skills are the new currency for the New Economy, the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” In the drug development industry, the EIU analysis revealed a similar pattern, particularly evident in the area of recruiting properly credentialed data scientists. Finally, a 2018 Korn Ferry report, “The Talent Crunch,” forecast that by 2030, demand for skilled workers will outstrip supply, creating a global talent shortage of more than 85.2 million workers. With the changing skill-set requirements and impending talent shortage, we know that the war for talent will only intensify. An organization must make it a priority to examine what the learning and development function will do to address the talent challenges ahead.
FOCUSING THE EFFORTS OF L&D At Parexel, we’ve focused on both internal and external needs. Internally, we examined how we train our workforce. In the contemporary drug development industry, we are looking for well-rounded talent with broad interdisciplinary and functional skills. For example, we need people who are well schooled in their scientific or technical disciplines, but they also must have sound business and interpersonal skills. We understand that at the end of every drug development pathway is a patient, and we keep the patient at the heart of everything we do. Another area of internal focus is to reexamine our workforce development framework based on a new “taxonomy,” breaking down key skills, competencies, experiences, and capabilities into four components: foundational, contextual, practice, and credentialing. The foundational component is largely the output of employees’ education. We are beneficiaries of our educational system. We can influence but not necessarily control this component. The contextual component is the domain controlled by industries. As an L&D function, we are the organizer and provider of functional and industry knowledge. The practice component begins to straddle both the internal and external focus, where we provide on-the-job training to make sure employees know how their skills and knowledge are applied in a real-world setting. We also provide internships and faculty exchange opportunities to help influence the design of academic curricula and provide students with practical experiences that shorten their development lead time and reinforce how work gets done. The credentialing component encompasses the partnership organizations, including academic institutions, professional associations, and government agencies. Through the design of partnerships, we can create a strong talent development pipeline.
CREATING A TRAINING GOVERNANCE BOARD An L&D function needs an internal governance body that can be relied on to identify and prioritize issues and allocate the appropriate resources to address the issues. Parexel’s governance body has two levels (see the figure on page 14): • The Training Governance Board includes the most senior-level leaders. They help determine the right training priorities for the company, with the appropriate level of financial and expertise resources allocated. They help to set the strategic direction for training. • The L&D Leadership Council includes all leaders who have a training remit. Training is required by many parts of our businesses; therefore, we engage all learning leaders to define common training approaches to requirements, standards, processes, metrics, and practices. At Parexel, we have learned that governance is a must-have to manage the training investments required to meet the business needs.
ALLOCATING TRAINING INVESTMENTS Many companies have difficulty getting a handle on how much money they spend in training, or whether they are investing adequately in one area versus another. I have created a framework (see the figure on page 15) to separate training investments into four categories and have collected benchmark data on how much companies on average spend in each category. At Parexel, training investments are made for two general purposes. The first is focused on the tactical and strategic aspects for training, and the second is focused on the organization and individual aspects for training. As shown in the figure, these dimensions create four quadrants of training • Functional training. Most companies spend 50% to 80% of training hours and costs here. • Professional development. This investment is meant for the individual’s consumption and benefit. • Mission, values, strategy and culture. The smaller investment here merely reflects a smaller target audience,
not lesser importance. Many would argue that this is the most important investment needed. • Leadership and management practices. Companies that have a strong cultural identity tend to spend a robust amount to ensure the business is managed according to their unique and indigenous management expectations.
Perhaps the most important use of this training investment map is not just to decide how much to invest where, but to discuss with the training governance body which investments should be redirected from one quadrant to another. Companies in general are reluctant to increase training investments just for the sake of it. But if the leadership has a firm understanding of these investments, they can redirect expenditures. We’ve managed the cost of people and management development through leveraging resources and practices not indigenous to Parexel. This requires a close business relationship with a partner that can globally support Parexel’s mission, vision, corporate values, business and training strategy. Parexel has forged a 10-year partnership with American Management Association, International, in which we’ve utilized content assets, delivery resources, and delivery methods to scale globally more than 18 different programs covering management skills, interpersonal effectiveness, business acumen, analytical intelligence, and project management. AMA has trained over 8,500 of our leaders and individual contributors in 46 countries over the last decade. This kind of partnership has led to high performance scores across the board and a direct impact on job performance and on our bottom line. We credit AMA with helping us develop talent in an efficient and cost-effective way. Managing these four dimensions carefully is the most important reason to have an accurate understanding of the total training investments made in a company.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE OF WORK As companies position themselves to meet talent challenges, there are two additional requirements for L&D. The first is to make sure the L&D organization has the right mechanisms to stay close to the business, attending to business needs in order to adjust the learning needs and requirements. At Parexel, we have “training business partners” who are the dedicated client account representatives. They interface
Create a Training Governance Body
The Governance Process Model: Two Levels
Stakeholders’ Representation
L&D Leadership Council
Measure Impact and Accountability
Training Governance Board
Focus and Priorities
Who Does What How and When
• Engage all leaders that have training responsibilities • Define common training approaches to requirements, standards, processes, metrics, practices • Negotiate sequence and cadence of releases • Coordinate development of qualified instructors • Review proposed target audiences (right training for the right people at the right time)
• Determine training priorities • Allocate resources (e.g., financial, SMEs) • Resolve cross-functional training issues • Drive training accountability • Decide strategic direction for training
with the business leads and translate business requirements into training and learning requirements. They manage all the training design and development projects and work closely with the business leads to determine who needs to be training on what, and when and how. The training business partners guide the curricula assignments within the assigned businesses and functions, and they collect data and feedback on the volume, costs, effectiveness, and efficiency of programs delivered. The second requirement is to measure training outcomes and impact. The training business partner helps the business to answer this question: For all the training investments made, how do we know it matters for the business? We focus the measurement of training on two key dimensions: reactions and impact. The measurement of reactions occurs right after a training experience. We gather reaction data from participants on their perception of content quality, relevance, and instructor effectiveness, and their “net promoter” score for that learning experience. These metrics help ensure our programs meet the “fitness for use” expectations and provide information to guide our continuous improvement actions. The measurement of impact is broken into two parts: business results and outcomes. The business result metrics come from the businesses, not from HR or training. Each business has a set of results it likes to measure, so when a program is done, we measure the achievement of those expected results. Training outcome measurements are executed using metrics and indices from the employee opinion survey data and other experimental design study outcomes. Internal studies have shown a direct correlation between AMA’s management training program and leader performance, particularly in those key competency categories that have been identified that have led to performance success. Since training is both an investment and a cost, we take it seriously that we should know the returns on such investments.
COMPETITION FOR SKILLED TALENT IS INTENSE AND REAL It is a worldwide phenomenon, and the learning and development function has a strategic role to play in meeting the looming challenges. Leadership actions are needed to engage the right partners inside and outside the company in mapping out remediation strategies. L&D must also have a firm grip on the dynamics and realities within the enterprise, and the learning leadership must have the mechanisms to manage its own function credibly. A trusted management team and system will ensure the training function delivers on its charge. AQ
Albert Siu, PhD, is corporate vice president, Global Learning and Development, at Parexel. He has over 30 years of experience in managing global learning and HR functions. Siu’s specialty is in creating a costeffective and globally centralized learning and talent management infrastructure.
Manage the Right Workforce Development Investment Portfolio
Assess How Training Dollars Are Invested: Two Dimensions
ORGANIZATIONAL FOCUS
TACTICAL FOCUS
(50% - 80%)
Functional capabilities (skills / knowledge / process) • Business strategy • Mission • Vision • Values, culture • Core philosophy (1% - 5%)
(5% - 20%) (50% - 80%)
Professional skills and knowledge
(% - %) = Benchmark ranges on the % of total training investments • Leadership effectiveness • Management processes • Excellence in execution • Quality culture: philosophy and practices
INDIVIDUAL FOCUS STRATEGIC FOCUS
The Role of Management Competencies in Achieving Success
SURVEY RESPONDERS’ LEVEL IN ORGANIZATION
50%
26%
Beginning to mid-level management
Nonmanagement
24%
Senior management
SM
Business Acumen
Professional Effectiveness Analytical Intelligence
Relationship Management
AMA’s Total Professional SM competency model classifies the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to meet today’s performance demands.
#1 Most Important Proficiency Within Each Area #2 Most Important Proficiency Within Each Area
Professional Effectiveness # 1
Communication
#2
Self-awareness
Relationship Management #1
Coaching for performance
#2
Collaboration
Business Acumen
Analytical Intelligence #1
#2
Customer focus
Talent management
#1
#2
Critical thinking
Decision making and analysis
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How Leaders Can Build Winning COACHING CULTURES
BY ASH SEDDEEK
Engaging in five key steps, including reviewing your talent acquisition strategy and long-term business vision, can lay a solid foundation for your coaching efforts.
On April 26, 2019, I sat in the Hahn Auditorium at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., listening to YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki interview Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO and chairman and current chair of Defense Innovation Advisory Board, Jonathan Rosenberg, former senior vice president of Google, chief operating officer of Motorola, and current advisor at Alphabet, and Alan Eagle, Google’s director of communication. The three are the authors of a book called Trillion Dollar Coach (Harper Business, 2019). The book features management lessons from coach and business executive Bill Campbell, who the authors say helped create well over a trillion dollars in market value through his mentoring of entrepreneurs and executives. From the interview, it was obvious how much impact Campbell, who also coached and was a close friend of Steve Jobs, had on Schmidt, Rosenberg, and Eagle and the organizations they work for. In their book, they talk about how the Google leadership team came to see that the best
path to success in today’s fast-moving, highly competitive, technology-driven business world is to form highperforming teams and give them the resources and freedom to do great things. According to them, a critical component of these high-performing teams is a leader who is a very good manager and, more important, a “caring coach.”
There is a lot to learn from the work Campbell did with Silicon Valley luminaries and high-performing teams, teaching leaders to not only manage their teams but also coach them along the way.
I asked Michael Bungay Stanier, author of The Coaching Habit (Page Two, 2016), about the key action steps leaders should take to build a coaching culture and how this culture ties in to high-performing organizations. According to Stanier, while many organizations strive to create a coaching culture, they struggle to do so. There are two things organizations need to do.
“First, get clear how a coaching culture serves the business goals,” he says. “A coaching culture can only ever be a means to an end, not an end in itself. If the two goals every organization has are productivity and engagement, how will a coaching culture tangibly improve one or both? Second, culture change means at its root behavior change across the organization. It’s not enough to talk about, it’s not enough to stick up posters about it, it’s not enough to running training programs. You have to tackle the difficult challenge of starting and sustaining different ways of working from the top to the bottom. No behavior change, no culture change.” So what can companies do to lay the foundation for a coaching culture? I recommend five key steps: 1 Review the company’s long-term business strategy and vision. Just as Stanier emphasizes the importance of focusing on behaviors and behavior change, companies today are looking at the experiences of employees and customers and how to transform them to create differentiation advantages in a highly competitive world. As you look at your company’s strategy, determine what elements of the strategy would require everyone to adopt an updated set of values and behaviors to achieve success, and how these behaviors should be manifested daily. It’s important to look at what you’re doing today—your business model, systems, and the values and behaviors that support that vision—and from
there figure out what key changes you need to make to be positioned for future success. 2 Review your talent acquisition and development strategy. As you start to steer the ship in the right direction, how are you going to balance between running the day-to-day business and acquiring and developing talent? Shefali Budhraja, global HR leader at Uber, says the company is developing its managers to be coaches to their teams and pairs some leaders with coaches as part of the development process. “Coaching creates a unique one-toone development environment that cannot be replicated in a large group training setting,” Budhraja says. “We’re evolving our coaching culture as we speak.” According to Robert Novak, consulting systems engineer for big data at Cisco, the company is using coaching as more than “pinstripe therapy.” “When Chuck Robbins took the helm at Cisco and in one of his first leadership companywide talks, Cisco Beat, he observed that we build products in teams, we sell in teams and serve our customers in teams. And we need to build on this strength,” Novak says. Cisco’s Leadership and Team Intelligence group, which includes Jennifer Dudeck and Francine Katsoudas, Cisco’s chief people officer, uses a coaching culture model that is designed around how people managers coach their teams
to their strengths. “We reimagined coaching to be strengthbased and, more importantly, team-based and included measures,” Novak says. “We also built a community of external coaches to help our team leaders become better coaches internally.” Using the app teamspace, in-person encounters, and videoconferencing technologies, Cisco’s team leaders can do oneto-one check-ins and team-specific pulse surveys that allow them to adjust and modify their approach. “We found that the best teams had leaders who were focused on strength and goals, meeting with their teams every week or every other week,” Novak says. Novak advises companies that are trying to build a coaching culture to start to network and talk to people who are further ahead in the journey. “Not all leaders will come along at the same pace. Start with the ones who are more supportive,” he says. “In our case, we saw one sales leader and one engineering leader come and say, ‘We want to roll out this coaching approach to the whole organization.’ So we went where the energy is to find sponsorship and start implementing this coaching approach throughout the organization.” 3 Align the talent development strategy to the immediate and long-term business strategy and outcomes. One coaching culture model is the Marshall Goldsmith stakeholder-centered approach. According to Chris Coffey, a leadership coach and a mentor to many coaches in the Marshall Goldsmith community of coaches, this coaching model, when applied by internal or external coaches, creates a culture of accountability and a leader-driven
coaching culture. The culture not only encourages forwardlooking behavior improvement but also creates an esoteric perception change and the reengineering of key relationships within the organization. Coffey argues that the magic in stakeholder-centered coaching cultures is the rebirth of more aligned and energized relationships among leaders, their staff, and individual contributors. 4 Create a cohesive approach to talent development at all levels: learning and development and coaching. Companies now combine leadership assessments, 360 assessments, performance reviews, stakeholder input, pulse surveys, and culture surveys as the inputs for an integrated leadership development approach. At Cupertino Electric, an electric utility and services firm in San Jose, Calif., I am part of a team of coaches working with the senior leadership team. Coupled with leadership training, assessments, and peer calls, coaching is taking place here in a one-to-one format with key leaders. As part of the coaching, we work with these leaders to develop their own coaching capability within the firm so they apply discovery questions with their team of managers and directors to help them uncover solutions to problems. I ask them to cascade such an approach throughout their teams—ask more, tell less. At Symantec Corporation, I also saw a high-potentials leadership program coupled with a yearlong coaching program. At Uber, where I am coaching key leaders in engineering and finance, I am applying what I call “deep coaching” that extends behind the leaders being coached to
include their teams and stakeholder engagement. This looks at performance as a reflection of the overall environment and how leaders can impact and be impacted by their context. 5 Measure results through regular impact assessments and adjustments. Coaching organizations use measurement tools and metrics heavily. We agree that if you don’t measure it, it is not going to be top priority. 360 assessments are now a stable feature of many organizational efforts to ensure that leaders and their teams continue to track to performance expectations and remain aware of behavior strengths and weaknesses and whether behavior changes actually match with the perceptions of those changes. However, the conversations around performance are still not frequent and timely enough. Coaching leaders should be willing to share their own and stakeholder input on the performance of each team member regularly so there are no surprises. The longer leaders wait to have these critical conversations, the more negative the long-term impact will be on employees. Nido Qubein, president of High Point University, emphasizes the role of leaders in building capacity within their organizations, through working with their teams and helping people grow as individuals and as a group. “In its essence, leaders, as good coaches, eye existing levels of performances, identify where they need to raise standards, and work with their teams regularly to uplevel their skillsets, mindsets, and toolsets,” he says. “Without measurement, they can’t do this. Ensure you have high regard for metrics and share dashboards with your leadership team and their teams. Transparency on metrics, accountability, and commitment to results and what you’re doing about them is fundamental to your coaching ,culture success.”
STAGES OF COACHING CULTURES There are three potential stages in building a coaching culture:
Stage 1: Coaching for today’s business needs. At this stage, coaching focuses on the behavior delta that we need to address to sustain our existing business and protect it.
Stage 2: Coaching for the obvious future. Here, coaching focuses on how we can scale our existing business as we organically grow and serve our customers.
Stage 3: Coaching for self-disruption and innovation. This stage focuses on a courage-to-lead model in which leaders challenge the status quo, create an aspirational view of the future, and use coaching as a support mechanism in their capacity-building efforts. One tool that can be used is my own Courage To Lead 360 Assessment, which is focused on a feed-forward set of behaviors the organization must adopt and apply to achieve a transformational future vision. This kind of assessment can help create a blue-ocean strategy where you can fashion your own unique approach to how the organization will fare going forward. AQ
Ash Seddeek is a leadership communications coach and the founder of Talent Coaches, a global coaching service provider focused on helping organizations create coaching cultures. His clients include Cisco Systems, Uber, Cupertino Electric, Ebates, Philips, PayPal, and the State Fund of California.
“In its essence, leaders, as good coaches, eye existing levels of performances, identify where they need to raise standards, and work with their teams regularly to uplevel their skillsets, mindsets, and toolsets.” —Nido Qubein, President of High Point University
