Chief Learning Officer - November 2018

November 2018 | CLOmedia.com

Telus International’s

Michelle Braden

Gender in Education Technology - Corporate Ethics and Compliance - Never Too Late to Learn Today’s Learning Agenda Exposed - Internal Tech Training at Techtonic

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I N PA R T N E R S H I P W I T H

EDITOR’S LETTER

No Status Quo for the CLO

T

here’s no playbook for becoming a CLO, and if Being successful in the role means constantly trying there’s one simple fact that shines through from something new and evolving the practice. The times the hundreds of formal interviews and countless more demand it. Some estimates put the half-life of knowlconversations I’ve had with learning leaders, that’s it. edge and skills at two years. That means by the time The backgrounds of learning leaders are diverse, fas- you’ve done an analysis, identified a needed competency cinating and often surprising. set, developed a curriculum and created the content, There was a time when the majority of learning lead- that knowledge is quite likely already obsolete. ers grew up through traditional learning and developThe times demand moving beyond skill development roles. They were classroom instructors, instruc- ment and mastery to an environment where people tional designers and learning technology specialists. learn from one another and create new things. It’s the According to recent research, that’s not the case any- agile, nimble and opportunistic CLO who can thrive. more. A few months back, our research team at Chief That’s the reason we launched our new CLO BreakLearning Officer decided to conduct a first-of-its-kind fast Club podcast series: to share the stories of learning survey about the CLO role, asking practitioners to share executives who are reinventing the role. For years as part their career path, how they developed themselves, the of our CLO Breakfast Club events, I’ve traveled to cities scope of their responsibilities and how they work. around the country interviewing executives from comThe results validated what we’ve been seeing. Nearly panies large and small to learn how they built their cahalf of current CLOs report they grew up through the reers and their organizations. But until now we haven’t L&D function. But a majority cut their teeth outside of shared those stories more widely. That’s changing. learning. They worked in general management roles or Along with my co-host, veteran CLO Justin Lombusiness-facing jobs. bardo, we talk to learning executives from companies like Microsoft, McDonald’s, Aon Hewitt, Citibank and others. We hear their stories in their own words — in conversation that reflects the changing dynamics of the world we live in.

One more thing that unites CLOs no matter where they work or how they got there is the incredible opportunity that lies ahead. It’s not an exaggeraCLOs are former teachers but they’re also salespeo- tion to say that learning leaders have the power to ple, marketers, psychologists, engineers and lawyers. positively affect millions of people.

I’ve even met one who was a professional wrestler.

That requires continual reinvestment in ourselves — Those skills must come in handy when budget season to invest in others in our community; to develop a rich rolls around. set of soft and hard skills; to evaluate in hard numbers While the paths to the role are many, there are com- and inspire through an audacious vision; to lead and monalities. There’s a passion for developing others. agree to be led; and to take advantage of the power of Whether it was sparked from an early age or realized technology in front of us but never forget what remains later in life, it animates the work of all the CLOs I meet. indelibly human about the work we do.

There’s a deep commitment to the mission. Whether What is common to the role of chief learning officer or not the work always receives the respect it deserves, is the fundamental realization that your work is not that commitment never wavers. Continually developing simply a need-to-do but a must-have for the future the workforce is essential to the future of the organiza- success of all of us. CLO tion. It’s also the right thing to do for the health and happiness of the people within the company.

What’s also shared is the realization that what worked in the past — and what continues to drive results — is not enough. Changing times call for reinvention.

They recognize the value and power of what their Mike Prokopeak teams have created but realize it’s not enough. There is Editor in Chief no status quo for the CLO. mikep@CLOmedia.com

What unites the diverse people who fill the role is the constant drive to reinvent.

4 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

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NOVEMBER 2018 | VOLUME 17, ISSUE 9 CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER John R. Taggart jrtag@CLOmedia.com

EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES David Chasanov dchasanov@CLOmedia.com

MARKETING DIRECTOR Greg Miller gmiller@CLOmedia.com

PRESIDENT Kevin A. Simpson ksimpson@CLOmedia.com

Brooke Pawling bpawling@CLOmedia.com

MARKETING SPECIALIST Kristen Britt kbritt@CLOmedia.com

VICE PRESIDENT, RESEARCH & ADVISORY SERVICES Sarah Kimmel skimmel@CLOmedia.com

REGIONAL SALES MANAGERS Derek Graham dgraham@CLOmedia.com

VICE PRESIDENT, GROUP PUBLISHER Clifford Capone ccapone@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF Mike Prokopeak mikep@CLOmedia.com EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Rick Bell rbell@CLOmedia.com MANAGING EDITOR Ashley St. John astjohn@CLOmedia.com

RESEARCH MANAGER Tim Harnett tharnett@CLOmedia.com DATA SCIENTIST Grey Litaker glitaker@CLOmedia.com MEDIA & PRODUCTION MANAGER Ashley Flora aflora@CLOmedia.com

Robert Stevens rstevens@CLOmedia.com Daniella Weinberg dweinberg@CLOmedia.com DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Kevin Fields kfields@CLOmedia.com AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cindy Cardinal ccardinal@CLOmedia.com

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Christopher Magnus cmagnus@CLOmedia.com

VICE PRESIDENT, EVENTS Trey Smith tsmith@CLOmedia.com

DIGITAL & AUDIENCE INSIGHTS MANAGER Lauren Lynch llynch@CLOmedia.com

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Andie Burjek aburjek@CLOmedia.com

EVENTS CONTENT EDITOR Malaz Elsheikh melsheikh@CLOmedia.com

DIGITAL COORDINATOR Steven Diemand sdiemand@CLOmedia.com

Ave Rio ario@CLOmedia.com

WEBCAST MANAGER Alec O’Dell aodell@CLOmedia.com

AUDIENCE INSIGHTS COORDINATOR Micaela Martinez mmartinez@CLOmedia.com

EVENTS GRAPHIC DESIGNER Tonya Harris lharris@CLOmedia.com

LIST MANAGER Mike Rovello hcmlistrentals@infogroup.com

BUSINESS MANAGER Vince Czarnowski vince@CLOmedia.com

BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION MANAGER Melanie Lee mlee@CLOmedia.com

EDITORIAL ART DIRECTOR Theresa Stoodley tstoodley@CLOmedia.com VIDEO AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER Andrew Kennedy Lewis alewis@CLOmedia.com

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Amy Liu Abel Ken Blanchard Agatha Bordonaro Tamar Elkeles Sarah Fister Gale Julie Winkle Giulioni Elliott Masie Lee Maxey Bob Mosher Stephanie Neal Jay Tangney

CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Cedric Coco, EVP, Chief People Of ficer, Brookdale Senior Living Inc. Lisa Doyle, Head of Retail Training, Ace Hardware Dave DeFilippo, Chief People and Learning Of ficer, Suf folk Tamar Elkeles, Chief Talent Executive, Atlantic Bridge Capital Thomas Evans, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, PricewaterhouseCoopers Gerry Hudson-Martin, Director, Corporate Learning Strategies, Business Architects Kimo Kippen, President, Aloha Learning Advisors Rob Lauber, Vice President, Chief Learning Of ficer, McDonald’s Corp.

Maj. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel, ( Ret.) U.S. Air Force, Director, Deloit te Consulting Justin Lombardo, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, Baptist Health Adri Maisonet-Morales, Vice President, Enterprise Learning and Development, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Alan Malinchak, CEO, Éclat Transitions LLC Lee Maxey, CEO, MindMax Bob Mosher, Senior Par tner and Chief Learning Evangelist, APPLY Synergies Rebecca Ray, Executive Vice President, The Conference Board Allison Rossett, ( Ret.) Professor of Educational Technology, San Diego State Universit y Diana Thomas, CEO and Founder, Winning Results David Vance, Executive Director, Center for Talent Repor ting Kevin D. Wilde, Executive Leadership Fellow, Carlson School of Management, Universit y of Minnesota James P. Woolsey, President, Defense Aquisition Universit y Chief Learning Officer (ISSN 1935-8148) is published monthly, except bi-monthly in January/February and July/August by MediaTec Publishing Inc., 150 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 550, Chicago IL 60601. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Chief Learning Officer, P.O. Box 8712 Lowell, MA 01853. Subscriptions are free to qualified professionals within the US and Canada. Digital free subscriptions are available worldwide. Nonqualified paid subscriptions are available at the subscription price of $199 for 10 issues. All countries outside the US and Canada must be prepaid in US funds with an additional $33 postage surcharge. Single price copy is $29.99.

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7

CONTENTS N

ovember

2018 10 Your Career

NEW SECT ION!

J.C. Penney’s Miya Maysent on her career journey; Casper Moerck of Siemens talks learning tech; and quick hits on what you’re using and reading.

30 Profile Telus About Your Global Learning Agatha Bordonaro Michelle Braden prioritizes learning and development for Telus International’s 30,000 global employees.

56 Case Study Seismic Shifts in Hiring Sarah Fister Gale A software apprenticeship program has cracked the code to produce engineers.

58 Business Intelligence Mobile Learning on the March Mike Prokopeak Mobile learning continues to make inroads into learning investment and delivery.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY STEVIE CHRIS

8 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

CONTENTS

November 2018

24 42

52

Features

24

42 48

Experts

Technically Proficient

16 IMPERATIVES

Ave Rio There are more women in education technology when compared to the technology industry as a whole, but far fewer when compared to the L&D industry. Several factors can explain the disparity within these three related fields.

Elliott Masie CLOs Say the Darndest Things

18 SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

What Lurks Beneath the Surface

Bob Mosher We Must Lead the Charge for Change

20 LEADERSHIP

Jay Tangney Authentic ethics and compliance training is gaining traction and visibility in the corporate workspace. What does this mean for your company and how can you execute on it?

Ken Blanchard Finding a ‘Soar’ Spot

22 MAKING THE GRADE

Today’s Learning Agenda Exposed

52

48

Tamar Elkeles There are big business challenges facing global organizations today. To avoid the traps of the modern learning agenda, think social, mobile and global.

Lee Maxey Taking the High Road

62 IN CONCLUSION

Never Too Late to Learn New Tricks

Amy Lui Abel and Stephanie Neal #MeToo in Mentorship

Resources

Julie Winkle Giulioni Young workers tend to be the focus of development programs, but older workers also deserve to have their learning needs met.

4 Editor’s Letter

No Status Quo for the CLO

61 Advertisers’ Index ARE YOU A PART OF THE CLO NETWORK? Follow us:

twitter.com/CLOmedia

Like us:

facebook.com/CLOmedia

Watch us:

tinyurl.com/CLOmediaYouTube

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Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

9

YOUR CAREER

Career Advice from

Miya Maysent vice president of talent development and diversity, J.C. Penney

Miya Maysent, vice president of talent development and diversity at J.C. Penney, shares her career journey and how she came into L&D. What’s been your career path?

Mine might be a little bit different than the traditional — although I don’t know what the traditional path is anymore. My background is all in psychology.

I began my education thinking I wanted to be a child psychologist — following in my family’s footsteps. My father was a therapist, so it was sort of like the family business. After completing my bachelor’s degree, the only thing you can do with a bachelor’s degree in psychology is either bartend or go to grad school. So, I did both. I went to grad school and got well into my studies and discovered that I was an absolute horrible therapist.

I mean it sincerely — I pity the people I did therapy with. I had a professor who suggested industrial and organizational psychol-

Personnel Decisions International 1998: Became senior consultant.

1998 1993

10 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Valero Energy Corp.

2002: Led four departments as the executive director of talent management and organizational development.

2002

ogy might be a better fit. I followed that academically and then went into consulting for about 13 years. The foundational consulting was all in leadership selection and also in change management. Then, one of my clients asked if I was interested in starting up an OD [organizational development] function for them — and that led me into more of a corporate role. L&D wasn’t my stock and trade until I got into a corporate role and then we started bundling different pieces together.

It was OD first, then it was training and development and talent management.

When your client said, “I’d like you to come into the corporate role,” were you eager to do so?

Why did you do it?

Not at all. I was working for a consulting firm, Personnel Decisions International. The client that I was working with was Valero Energy Corp., an oil and gas refining company down in San Antonio. The reason I said no was because I was able to negotiate in the consulting world a three-day workweek. I had two little kids, and I had always had the vision of being a stay-at-home mom and I was getting closer and closer to that when they offered me this position. So I was like, no, I’m good.

But what was interesting was that I talked to my boss in

7-Eleven 2009 – 2012: Moved from sr. dir. of talent mgmt. to VP of people and organizational development.

2009

J.C. Penney 2014 – present: Vice president of talent development and diversity.

2014 2018

Practical Applications

the consulting organization and I told him the situation, he said, give it a try because you’re going to learn things being internal that you would never know being a consultant and if you ever decide to come back to consulting, No. 1 — we’ll take you back, and No. 2 — you’ll be a better consultant for having worked internally. I was sort of a reluctant corporate person and my new boss knew that. It was funny because he said to me, “Maybe at a year we check in and see how things are going.” So, at a year, we did, and my response was that I used to think I was really smart as a consultant because people pay you for your opinions, and I didn’t realize just how hard it actually is to execute what seem like brilliant ideas that can come through a very fancy PowerPoint deck and then actually figure out how you’re going to bring that to life inside an organization.

The organization’s priorities are never your priorities, so what seems super important — and you’re questioning why it’s taking them so long to get this done — they have a million other things they’re focused on. So, there was no question it made me much wiser.

I may have been smarter before, but I was wiser for doing the work inside.

Are there things that you wish you would have known in hindsight before you took on that first corporate role?

One of the things I learned along the way is that when you’re a consultant, you typically have a relationship with leadership. You’re working directly with the leaders themselves. You’re given permission to say certain things. One of the funny things about consulting is consultants tell you what you already know — you’re just paying them so they’ll say it, so you don’t have to or so maybe it’ll be heard if somebody else says it even though you’ve said it before. Coming into a corporate role, I discovered that the thing you get paid to do as a consultant — which is sometimes to hold up the mirror, sometimes to say the hard things — you have to use a different approach when you’re going to live in that house for a while if you want to keep being invited back into certain offices in that house. I had to temper how I thought about my role and I had to adjust my influence strategies. It wasn’t to give up what I knew how to do as a consultant, but it was to layer on a lot of other approaches. In consulting, they were dismissive about backdoor influence strategies, but quite honestly, it’s huge once you’re inside the business. CLO

Power Director A tool I have found very useful in both training co-workers and helping our clientele understand new services we are offering is “Power Director.” Rather than sending out lengthy emails, I have been using “Power Director” to create easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorials. This has been more effective in getting the message across, and people find videos easier to follow than written text.

— Vanessa Bauer, K-12 private school office manager Quotes One app I have found to be a great resource is called “Quotes.” I love quotes and use them often to emphasize topic points in a training presentation or to help with storytelling as well as inspiration to start conversations. It’s a quick reference to find a picture quote on any topic and includes several options. It’s quick, simple and free.

— Rita B. Allen, president of Rita B. Allen Associates YogaGlo I am a huge fan of “YogaGlo,” an inexpensive phone app with literally thousands of videobased yoga and meditation classes. It’s a great way to fit in some exercise on the road, flexibly and on my schedule. But what I appreciate even more are the mediation classes — searchable by teacher, topic and time available. It’s a great way to start the day, destress, get ready for an important presentation or unwind in the evening.

— Julie Winkle Giulioni, co-author of “Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go” Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What app or tool are you currently using?

Send your submissions to Ave Rio at ario@CLOmedia.com.

Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

11

YOUR CAREER

What Are You Reading?

The Trusted Advisor

by Robert M. Galford, Charles Green and David Maister I am a learning and development analyst always looking to enhance my craft in the learning industry. I chose this book to help me have more impactful performance consulting conversations versus being an “order taker.” I want to be able to solve the true problems, change behaviors to lead to better results, and most importantly make an impact on the overall business. Relationships give me energy. I want to know the challenges of our business partners and help with a solution versus a Band-Aid approach.

This book has offered me so many practical tips that can give me that consulting edge, such as: be an empathetic ear and listen to everything, don’t be insecure; act like a real person not just someone in a role; the ability to focus on the other person is essential, don’t be over eager to solve the problem. I highlighted this book to death and wrote in the margins. This will be my go-to before and after a consultation. My favorite part is that the authors compiled all the practical tools referenced throughout the book at the end for easy access.

— Chanda Frenton, learning and development curriculum analyst at State Farm Insurance

Leadership from the Inside Out, 3rd ed. revised

by Kevin Cashman Kevin’s book is a great reflection tool and he encourages to have pen in hand to catch insights and thoughts that come up about you and your leadership as you read. The book focuses on leadership and self-master. This revised edition includes his thinking, case examples and reflection questions for personal, story, interpersonal, change, resilience, being and coaching mastery. While reading an earlier edition proved to be helpful many years ago, revisiting some of the concepts and questions has been helpful in reflecting on where I’m at presently in my leader journey and learning what is possible as I center in the here and now with an eye on what’s next. As a coach, to keep integrity with my work it is important that I do my own inner work. This book enables me to cultivate a personal practice of self-reflection while honing my capabilities as a leader.

The Story of Philosophy

by Will Durant After spending a certain amount of time in a censored environment (the past year in China and a few years ago in Saudi Arabia) some time is needed to reboot one’s overall way of thinking. After Saudi, it was a review of Drucker. Now I am going way back to the classic thinkers of philosophy to reboot my thinking. The works of great writers (like many artists) were not really appreciated, nor the true impact felt, until well after their death.

That means many of them wrote knowing much of their life’s work would not really benefit them in their time. Maybe a few of us should take this same approach in this day and age of insurmountable misinformation. Sometimes you just need to step back and look at everything in context. It has been a most interesting and enlightening process.

— Carolyn Butcher, executive coach

Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What’s at the top of your reading list?

Send your submissions to Ave Rio at ario@CLOmedia.com.

12 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

— Jeff Carter, global learning and education specialist at CarterEducation

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YOUR CAREER

Top of Mind Experience API Will Bring Key Changes to L&D By Casper Moerck Casper Moerck is head of learning technology at Siemens, where he is responsible for infrastructure and learning technology in the Americas.

A

Casper Moerck Siemens

few years ago I first spoke about Experience API at the Masie conference in Orlando. I was excited by the Tin Can project and wanted to share my thoughts on how it could improve our ability to calculate return on investment. Since then, I have broadened my understanding of the topic. I recently had a conversation with Mike Rustici, who was part of the development of xAPI and sits at the helm of Watershed LRS. One thing he said was that L&D will go through the same development that marketing has. For some reason, that stuck with me. I always think of the TV show, “Mad Men” when the word “marketing” comes to mind. Do you recall the episode where Don Draper pitches the “pass the Heinz” campaign? That’s how it worked back in the days: Dazzle them with elegant ideas, flashy images and your own charm and charisma.

If you think that is how marketing works today, think again. In today’s marketing world, it is all about conversion rates, clicks, impressions and bounce rates. Since the introduction of digital marketing, things have changed.

With that in mind, think about how L&D programs and courses have been developed throughout the past several years. Sure, we do our needs analysis and follow ID methods, but I have been in many meetings where internal developers or ven-

According to

Casper 14 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

dors basically pulled a “Don Draper,” with elegant arguments and pretty slides about how an initiative should be put together.

So here is the question: Will xAPI change learning from being an art to science in the same way that digital marketing did for the ad agencies? In my opinion, it might; but I think it’s fair to assume that just like artful ads never left the marketing business, innovative and creative learning content will never leave the learning space.

Experience API is the next generation of the SCORM [shareable content object reference model] format, but it is much more than that. Experience API is much more flexible than SCORM ever was.

In xAPI, you can customize what is reported on, and thus you can get a lot more information about learner behavior. Further, xAPI is an open format which means it can be applied to almost anything, not just learning.

I contend that xAPI will change learning in a few key ways. First, it will provide better learner insights. By being more flexible and customizable to your particular learning initiative, you will be able to capture data about user behavior in a richer and more detailed fashion. This will give you insights that SCORM never could. Second, based on the insights from user data, you will be able to personalize the learning experience. This is particularly true if you marry the use of xAPI with adaptive learning. Third, you will be able to better understand ROI. This is perhaps the biggest change I see coming. Just like the digital marketing space now has more data about how effective their campaigns are, we will get a better opportunity to analyze the impact that our learning initiatives have. With the help of xAPI, learning record stores and effective data analysis, we might be on the cusp of a paradigm shift based on data. CLO Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What are you thinking about? Send your thoughts to Ave Rio at ario@CLOmedia.com.

The most overrated trend in L&D is

The most underrated trend in L&D

Microlearning Artificial Intelligence

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IMPERATIVES

CLOs Say the Darndest Things

Questions rock learning. Have the courage to ask them • BY ELLIOTT MASIE

C Elliott Masie is the chairman and CLO of The Masie Center’s Learning Consortium and CEO of The Masie Center, an international think tank focused on learning and workplace productivity.

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

hief learning officers often have favorite statements, expressions and points of view. These can be key as they help shape the learning culture and knowledge ecosystem of the enterprise.

The most powerful words from a CLO can be in the form of questions. Asking a provocative question can be the ultimate power tool. Statements may or may not be heard, understood, responded to or remembered. Targeted questions can be multiplied and amplified.

Here are three general examples before I share my own CLO question list: • To a departing employee: What did you learn while in our organization and how did you learn it?

• To a business leader: What skills do employees in your group need to build and maintain in terms of changing roles, technologies and/or marketplace shifts?

• To a CEO: What are buzzwords or terminologies that you hear but don’t fully understand (e.g., blockchain layered servers)?

My ideal CLO is like the rabbi that I had in my synagogue as a teenager. He said that his role was to ask a provocative question and then step aside to let the community members have rich dialogue and disagreement on the topic. He said the good question never has an easy or “right” answer. Instead, it provokes the listener to engage and learn.

So, here is the start of my own CLO question list: • To learners at the end of a program: What did we cover that you knew at the start of the program?

• To learning designers: As designers, what are your default habits or rituals? What do you think would happen if you purposely did not perform those habits and rituals when designing your next program?

• To a business group requesting a new course: If we could not give you a class on this topic, how would your workers learn or cope?

• To a chief financial officer: What percentage of an employee’s compensation should the shareholders invest each year to maximize return on employment?

• To an external vendor: How many and which features of the system that you are selling are rarely or never used by other customers?

• To a new employee: What information do you really want in the first two days on the job?

• To a compliance regulator: How can we demonstrate compliance in ways other than providing classes?

Would you accept other predictive indicators?

16 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

• To a global division business leader: How would you teach a skill to your employees — mapping it to your marketplace, culture and educational traditions?

• To a bored-looking colleague in the lunch room: What is something you would love to learn — on any topic — if you could?

Asking a provocative question can be the ultimate tool for the CLO. • To another CLO: How many months/years do you think you have left in your current organization?

Could you double that or leave sooner?

• To your family members: What mood(s) does my work cause me to have? What projects impact my happiness or joy the most?

• To your customers: If you could send our organization to “Doing Better University,” what courses should we take?

• To your online instructors: How “present” do you appear? What is your default facial expression?

• To an SME: How can you explain a topic in five sentences rather than five pages? What do people misunderstand the most about your area of expertise?

• To a book author: What opinion or perspective do you want your readers to consider or change? What would you remove from the book — months/years after you wrote it?

• To a home-based worker: What time of the day do you feel the most alert or smart? Could we schedule our calls at that time?

• To participants in a staff meeting: What two words would you use to describe this quarter in the business?

• To yourself: Do I have people around me that are challenging and teaching me as a CLO? This is just the start of my list. I would love someone to create a card deck of CLO questions (and I will help fund it). Perhaps in the future, CLOs will ask Alexa or Siri to track how many questions they asked each day.

Become the CLO with amazing and endless questions. They are your greatest multiplier of impact. CLO

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SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

We Must Lead the Charge for Change Workflow-embedded learning’s time is now • BY BOB MOSHER

C Bob Mosher is a senior partner and chief learning evangelist for APPLY Synergies, a strategic consulting firm.

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

hange is hard, especially in the learning and development field. The irony of this revelation is that those of us in the L&D profession are supposed to be in the business of helping our learners navigate change.

We want our learners to be flexible and self-motivated. Yet, my experience is that we are often our own worst enemies at exhibiting these same characteristics. I spend a lot of my professional life being invited into organizations by the L&D department to help them introduce and adopt new learning technologies and approaches, and when asked which stakeholders are often the most resistant to these changes, it’s the L&D team itself that tops my list.

This is a problem since we’re facing one of the toughest internal transformational challenges we’ve ever encountered — moving from a training deliverable focus to a workflow embedded and performance focus. According to the recent 2018 “Annual L&D Benchmarking” report from Toward Maturity, we’re sailing into a perfect storm of both desire and skills when it comes to enabling this transformation. The reports shares that 98 percent of top organizations name “improving organizational performance” as a top priority, with the L&D department following suit at 93 percent listing “integrating learning into the workflow” as one of its priorities. All good right? Not exactly. The issue is that there is a large variance between the desire and the ability to deliver with “supporting workplace learning” listed as one of L&D’s weakest skills.

We have to realize and accept the need for a fundamental and significant change. What I’ve learned is that many don’t truly want to change. What they want is a validation that, with minor tweaking of a few operational processes, instructional methodologies and existing learning technologies they can have their cake and eat it too. Workflow based deliverables aren’t training deliverables. You may include or embed a degree of training in there somewhere, but training isn’t the focus.

The sooner we realize that the sooner we’ll begin to turn our thinking, analysis and efforts to focusing on creating workflow deliverables in the first place, and not just massage older efforts in a new way.

The second thing I see creating this disparity is our constant defense of old and outdated models. OK, deep breath, here it goes: Let’s look at approaches such as ADDIE, examine where they came from and

18 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

exactly what they’re good at creating. I can feel the irate emails coming. Now I hope you’ve read enough of my columns that you know to stay with me on this one. I’m not blasting ADDIE or saying that it doesn’t have its place. What I am saying is that a methodology designed to meet a learning need from more than 40 years ago probably targets different learners and organizations. The deliverables, primarily the training, are not the deliverables of workflow learning. The challenging reality though is that studies outing organizations like ATD on the use of various ID approaches find that a large majority of us still use ADDIE as the primary approach to our design work, while newer approaches such as the Successive Approximation Model, just to name one, sits at a much smaller percentage. I’m not promoting SAM as the answer, but I am challenging us with owning the fact that this brave new world won’t appear without the adoption of newer approaches on our part.

This brave new world won’t appear without newer approaches on our part.

Finally, it’s tough to beat Dustin Johnson on the golf course with wooden shafted clubs. When it comes to performing at the optimal level, equipment matters.

That applies to the equipment and tools as well. If you want to lead with workflow deliverables, we need to design first and foremost with equipment and tools that enable and create workflow learning deliverables.

There is a whole host of incredible new authoring tools that help create workflow learning. I’m tracking eight in my own work that I didn’t use three to five years ago.

Back to my golf metaphor, I’m not going to beat DJ even with the best clubs because I don’t have the golfing skills to do it. In other words, ability beats tools.

Workflow learning will change the L&D landscape forever. The questions are will we change, do we know how to make the instructional change, and are we adopting the tools to enable it? CLO

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LEADERSHIP

Finding a ‘Soar’ Spot

What does it mean to lead at a higher level? • BY KEN BLANCHARD

E Ken Blanchard is chief spiritual officer of The Ken Blanchard Cos. and co-author of “Servant Leadership in Action.”

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

very day, leaders around the world have the opportunity to choose to serve others instead of themselves. But when you look at leaders of businesses, churches, educational institutions or even countries, it’s clear that many have chosen to be self-serving rather than to serve.

Why is that? It’s because leaders everywhere have been conditioned to think about leadership only in terms of power and control. They don’t have a different leadership role model. People need a better benchmark for leadership if they are going to lead their organizations at a higher level.

For years, my colleagues and I defined leadership as an influence process. We believed any time you tried to influence the thoughts and actions of others toward goal accomplishment, you were engaging in leadership.

In recent years, though, we have taken the emphasis away from goal accomplishment. We now define leadership as the capacity to influence others by unleashing their power and potential to impact the greater good.

Why did we make that change? Because we know most leaders who are focused mainly on goal accomplishment are interested only in results. When people lead at a higher level, goal accomplishment is not enough. The key phrase in our new definition is the greater good — what is best for all involved.

both long-term results and human satisfaction. When this process is in place, self-serving leadership is not possible. Why? Because when you lead at a higher level, you realize it’s not about you — it’s about the people you serve.

Over the years, we have found that people who lead at a higher level do four things well. They: • Set their sights on the right target and vision.

• Treat their people right.

• Treat their customers right.

• Have the right kind of leadership.

This kind of leadership begins with a vision. Jesse Lyn Stoner and I wrote a book called “Full Steam Ahead!” about the power of visioning. A compelling vision tells your organization who you are (purpose), where you’re going (picture of the future) and what guides your behavior and decisions (values).

Your company’s purpose is its reason for existence.

It answers the question why. It clarifies what business you are really in. Your picture of the future is a mental image you can actually see of what the future will look like if your organization is successful. Your values are how your organization defines leadership and how people act on a daily basis.

A compelling vision creates a strong organizational culture where everyone’s interests and energy are aligned. This results in trust, customer satisfaction, an energized and committed workforce, and profitability.

We believe your number one customer is your people. If you don’t empower your people and treat them right, they won’t take care of your second most important customer — the people who use your products and services. If that happens, you won’t get your desired results in the long run. Good customer service requires an empowered, motivated workforce. WithIt is possible for leaders who place an emphasis on out it, your organization won’t survive. goal accomplishment to be successful — in the short My travels over the years through organizations of run. What falls by the wayside is the condition of the all shapes and sizes have convinced me that the right human organization. These leaders don’t care about kind of leadership is servant leadership. Servant leadmorale and job satisfaction, only results. From there it ership is grounded in humility and focused on the is a short leap to believing the only reason to be in greater good. Through servant leadership, leading at a business is to make money. These leaders have an ei- higher level can become a reality. ther/or philosophy about people and results — they For years, my dream has been that someday, everybelieve you can’t focus on both at the same time. one will know someone who is leading at a higher level.

But people who lead at a higher level have a both/ Self-serving leaders will be a thing of the past, and and philosophy: The development of people is just as leaders all over the world will be people who, as Robert important as financial performance. Their focus is on Greenleaf said, “serve first and lead second.” CLO

People need a better benchmark for leadership if they are going to lead their organizations at a high level.

20 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

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MAKING THE GRADE

Taking the High Road

The path back to civil discourse includes higher education • BY LEE MAXEY

L

Lee Maxey is CEO of MindMax, a marketing and enrollment management services company.

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

ast July 4, the Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that “There is cause today to be nervous about our national debate, in part because the tactics have moved from merely attacking each other’s arguments, or even attacking each other, to attacking the legitimacy of the institutions and conventions that allow the debate to take place.”

We can, and must, return to civil discourse in the public square. There are millions of homes across this country wherein civil discourse still happens. In fact, home is where we learn how to air grievances respectfully, acquire facts and discuss opinions intelligently.

If higher education can offer one thing to our nation, it’s building on what we’re supposed to learn at home: Looking at things from someone else’s perspective, critically (in an analytical sense) and compassionately.

And if we haven’t learned these lessons from our family, then colleges can pick up the mantle and teach us to lift our speech to a higher level.

What better time than now for universities to emphasize courses and seminars on debate, critical thinking and apologetics. I see our universities and employers creating a partnership (and a place) where we can go to learn to discuss what divides us.

There’s a problem with higher education if all we have to show for our participation is one viewpoint.

We have to infuse our speech with compassion and civility. We have to see these traits as an invitation to learn instead of naiveté.

In the early 1970s, management consultants began using the phrase “think outside the box” to encourage businesspeople to consider any number of options for a solution. That phrase is now as bland as oatmeal.

But the original intent might be an anecdote to the bifurcated approach of today’s debates (if we can even call what we do with one another debate). Our arguments are largely one dimensional, devoid of facts and hurled across an ideological fault line.

One important role for the educational experience is to help us suspend our opinion while we learn. Brown University has been doing this sort of thing for 50 years.

Since the turbulent 1960s (and to create a safe, organized forum for protest) Brown has had a policy allowing any student organization or faculty member on campus to invite any speaker of their choice. When students complain or object to a speaker, administrators point to a policy that’s served everyone for half a century.

22 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Universities, many of which are research institutions, exist to postulate theories and back them up with facts. So why can’t universities model a way for us all to speak about topics where there isn’t agreement? Our universities, along with educating us about the tools for engaging in civil discourse, could offer the physical space for companies to explore charged topics that workers may suppress on the job.

Without a way to reasonably, kindly articulate how we’re feeling about our co-workers or workplace, employees’ emotions are bottled up; good people grow weary and may even quit without really explaining why. Productivity and ingenuity suffer because we harbor grudges or passively resist working with certain teams.

When better than now for universities to emphasize courses on debate?

Imagine a workplace discussion where colleagues speak out on a topic you disagree with on moral grounds. You’re asked your opinion. You can decline to comment, lie or share your belief.

Does offering that deeply held belief become widely known and even get in the way of you closing a deal with a customer? Will your co-workers accept your right to hold a certain position, maybe even empathize with you? I believe our universities could teach employees how to not agree and see the value in a person or an idea held by a co-worker.

So how can a company create an environment for civil discourse? I believe it comes down to an employer’s values and willingness to let workers air opinions and beliefs without fear of retribution. Universities can give young people the learning experiences to understand and appreciate different people and ideas. Higher education can also provide the physical space and tools to help us reclaim civil discourse. And perhaps companies could tap into this neutral space as a potential resource for discussing topics too hot to handle on the job. CLO

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There are more women in education technology when compared to the technology industry as a whole, but far fewer when compared to the L&D industry.

Several factors can explain the disparity within these three related fields.

BY AVE RIO

E

ducation has historically been a female-dominated industry.

Currently, more than 70 percent of teachers in U.S. public schools are women, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

In learning and development, data from the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board found that women make up 60 percent of training and development managers. Similarly, the Association for Talent Development’s 2017 salary survey, notes that 70 percent of talent development professionals working in the U.S. are women.

In the $76 billion global education and talent technology market, however, women aren’t as easy to find. From 2015-17, at the education and talent technology ASU GSV X Summit, just 30 percent of the 300 to 400

24 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

companies that attended were led or founded by a woman. However, it is increasing — in 2018, 39 percent of the presenting companies were female-founded. In the female-dominated education industry, why aren’t there more women running ed-tech companies?

Well, it’s hard to be a woman in tech. While there are slim numbers of women in ed-tech roles, there are substantially more women in that niche when compared to the general tech industry. According to a March 2018 report by Entelo, only 18 percent of U.S. tech roles are held by women and the ratio decreases with seniority. At entry and midlevel positions in tech, women hold 19 percent of roles. At more senior levels, the percentage of women drops to 16 percent and at the executive level, it’s just 10 percent. Further, women hold just under a quarter of the world’s STEM jobs.

Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

25

L&D: A Safe Place for Women Many industries are notoriously bad for women; notably, tech. But the learning and development industry doesn’t seem to fall into the same category.

Kathy Gallo, SVP and CLO at Northwell Health, said she didn’t face any obvious challenges in her career because of her gender. “Was there something going on that I wasn’t aware of? I don’t know, but I never felt that because of being a woman, I was not getting either the appropriate roles, compensation or voice in the organization,” she said. “I sat around the table at the C-suite.”

Gallo, a baby boomer, said the workplace is totally different for Gen X women and millennial women starting their careers than when she started hers. “There was never the attention and focus there is today around diversity, glass ceilings and the knowledge that the more diverse the team is, the better the decisions are for the company,” she said.

“Organizations are going to have to create cultures and environments where women can move through a pathway.

Women on the boards and women in senior executive roles can help create the environment and the culture necessary for an equitable workplace.”

Jenny Dearborn, CLO at SAP and a Gen Xer, agreed that her gender didn’t help or hurt her through her career. “I have always found doors open and people eager to coach, mentor, support and promote me,” she said. “If I worked for a company with horrible gender metrics, they knew it, and they were actively trying to do something about it.”

Niki Lustig, director of learning and development at GitHub and a millennial, said she doesn’t think her gender has played a role in her development, especially because she has mostly worked with women. “The first three L&D teams that I was part of and helped build out we’re all started by women,” she said.

Lustig said she felt like she most stood out as a woman when she started her career at IBM in learning technology.

“I was often one of the only women and usually one of the youngest by about 30 years,” she said. “There were instances when I would go to client’s sites that we’re a little less traditional … like a manufacturing supply system.

Being a young woman in a warehouse, probably didn’t help me and often could make [me] uncomfortable.”

Throughout her career, Lustig said she has experienced microaggressions, such as being interrupted, asked to order food, asked to serve on “special task forces” without credit and evaluated on her current skills rather than potential (as men often are). But Lustig attributes these to being a woman, not toward any particular industry.

— Ave Rio 26 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

A Lack of Founders and Funding Alida Miranda-Wolff, founder of Ethos, a talent strategy firm for tech companies, said one of the main issues in tech is that companies are often started by the outside proportion of male technical founders or engineers. She said women are less likely to pursue paths in entrepreneurship or founding technology companies in large part due to the well-known gap in funding.

In fact, in 2017 female founders got just 2 percent of total venture capital dollars, according to data reported in Fortune. Miranda-Wolff said one problem creates another, because when men start companies, they often do not do any formal recruitment. Instead, they look to their network, which often consists mostly of men.

Of the small percentage of women founders in tech, there’s Emily Foote, founder of ed-tech company Practice at Instructure. After teaching for five years, Foote went to law school to practice special education law. With a male co-founder, Foote decided to found Practice to advocate for education outside of the classroom.

Foote said that the female-dominated education industry is exposed to issues in education, which could explain why there are more women in ed-tech than the general tech industry. “You’re at the frontlines seeing problems,” she said. “If you’re inclined to solve them, one way to do that is starting an education technology company.”

On the other hand, Miranda-Wolff noted that the majority of the ed-tech companies she’s worked with have not been founded by people from the education space, but by people from the technology space who want to fix educational problems, and in turn, the companies tend to behave like traditional technology companies. Either way, women founders are likely to endure additional challenges.

In the early days, Foote and two male co-founders received grants from the government to fund Practice. “I don’t know if there was any discrimination at that point,” Foote said. “If it was three women, I don’t know if it would be different in getting the grant funding.”

After a few years of working on grant funding and research, Foote and her partners decided to commercialize and raise funds. “At that point, it was pretty obvious that there’s a lack of people that look like me in the investment world,” Foote said. “Almost every single one of our investors was male. Our board, which typically is made up of who invested in you, was all male.”

Indeed, a 2017 Techcrunch report found that just 8 percent of partners at top venture capital firms are women. Deborah Quazzo, managing partner at GSV AcceleraTE, a venture capital fund in the education and talent technology sector, is one of the few women investors.

“I think fund LPs [investors] need to be clearer about their diversity priorities for fund leadership and acknowledge that diversity is a competitive edge,” Quazzo said. “The lack of female VCs definitely impacts the number of females funded and mentored.”

When you don’t see people that look like you, Foote said it’s hard to imagine yourself in those positions. “It’s also intimidating that you’re pitching a room full of men that you perceive maybe know more than you or have more experience than you,” Foote said.

To complicate things, Foote was pregnant both times she was attempting to raise funds. “I kept it a secret as long as possible because I recognized that there is unconscious bias and I didn’t want investors to not invest in us because they were afraid that because of my pregnancy I’d be out or I wouldn’t be able to focus 100 percent,” she said.

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After she had to reveal her pregnancy, she wanted to erase any unconscious bias that did exist. “I felt like I had to work even harder to prove that I could have a family and do this just as effectively,” she said.

Luckily for Foote, she’s the boss, which allows for flexibility and work-life balance. She brings her two infants to work if she needs to, she can work from home if needed, she can afford the luxury of having a nanny and she works with her husband, who serves as the director of marketing at Practice. “I have all of these luxuries that I know most women don’t when they have to juggle both work and family and that has made my experience much easier,” she said.

After starting a family, she had to learn how to compartmentalize — focus on family on one hand and work on the other. “I don’t think it’s changed the effectiveness of my work,” she said. “If it were up to me, I’d hire all working moms, because I’ve become a much smarter and more effective worker, learning how to juggle family and work effectively and with mindfulness and focus.”

That flexibility is not available for most women in the workforce, let alone women in technology — and Foote recognizes that. “If I didn’t have the flexibility that I have now I wouldn’t be as successful, to grow both myself individually and for the company,” she said. “I’d feel constant guilt about not being able to either do my job, nor raise my family well, which would ultimately impact my job and my family.” Foote said the industry — and the country — should do a better job of supporting working mothers and fathers.

FIGURE 1: WOMEN AT WORK Female teachers in U.S. public schools

70% Female training and development managers

60-70% Female education-technology company leaders

39% Women in entry and midlevel positions in tech

19% Female executives in tech

10% Source: Compiled by Ave Rio.

Barriers and Bias for Women in Tech Another reason there may be so few women in ed-tech compared to L&D is the bias women face in the tech industry. If and when male founders do bring in women to the company, it’s often not an inclusive culture, Miranda-Wolff said. She said the lack of inclusivity may be gestured by small signals (i.e. all the company outings are happy hours at baseball games). Or there may be larger signals like unwanted comments or harassment, she said.

28 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Miranda-Wolff recalls working at her first technology company and being surprised by a comment that doesn’t surprise her now. “Our founder was an engineer and I told him, rather proudly, that I was teaching myself to code, because while I was working on marketing, I wanted to be able to build the website I was updating,” she said. “He said to me, ‘As a woman you’re naturally born nurturing, why wouldn’t you stick to communications, which you would be good at? Someone like me would be good at coding.’ ” Miranda-Wolff said comments like that are common for women in tech. “You’re often told that you’re

When you don’t see people who look like you, it’s hard to imagine yourself in those positions. being paranoid or difficult or challenging, or you’re being told nothing, which is even worse, because you have no insight into the company,” she said.

Pratima Rao Gluckman, a software engineer and author of “Nevertheless, She Persisted: True Stories of Women Leaders in Tech,” agreed the tech industry is rife with gender bias. To succeed in tech, Gluckman said women need to have more than technical and leadership abilities; they also need to overcome adversity.

Throughout her own career in tech, Gluckman never attributed the challenges she faced to her gender; rather, she encountered imposter syndrome, which is common among women in the tech industry. Imposter syndrome is defined as a psychological pattern where one doubts their accomplishments and has an internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.

“As a woman, your technical credibility always gets questioned,” Gluckman said. “You have these messages going around that women can’t be leaders and women can’t study a map or they’re not technically credible and it actually makes women believe it.” She said when women feel like they can’t be leaders or that they are not technically capable, it has a negative impact on their performance. “It’s stifling the potential women have,” she said.

It wasn’t until Gluckman became a senior manager that she realized the challenges she had been facing all along were because of her gender. “I kept bumping into these glass ceilings and I didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “I wasn’t getting strategic projects. No one ED TECH continued on page 60

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Profile

Telus About Your Global Learning Michelle Braden prioritizes learning and development for Telus International’s 30,000 global employees.

BY AGATHA BORDONARO

G

rowing up in Overland Park, Kansas, a busy suburb of Kansas City, Michelle Braden didn’t have dreams of becoming a learning professional.

In fact, she didn’t take much to education in general.

“I was probably one of the worst students,” Braden said, laughing. “I always had a hard time staying engaged.”

But that very quality is, today, what makes her a powerhouse in the learning industry, as she continuously evaluates what keeps people engaged and how she can improve the learning experience. “I guess if I were a good student right off the bat,” Braden said, “it probably wouldn’t have helped me get to where I am.”

An Unconventional Path It’s been an interesting path that’s brought Braden to her current role as global vice president and chief learning officer for Telus International, a worldwide provider of customer-service outsourcing and IT services. She began her career as a computer programmer for Xerox, fixing bugs and writing code. Naturally talented and hardworking, she advanced quickly, but the higher she rose within the field, “the more isolated I became,” she said. The self-proclaimed “people person” increasingly enjoyed opportunities to work with others, gradually becoming the go-to professional for any client-facing work.

“Whenever they needed someone to explain something to a client about the software or some solution we created, they always asked me to do it. I just had a way of taking technical stuff and putting it into very simple terms,” Braden said. “It eventually got to where I was like, ‘This is pretty cool, being out in front of people, helping them learn and grow.’ ” Braden moved into marketing and sales, where she was responsible for teaching clients how to use Xerox’s equipment. One client had a developmental rotation 30 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

program that resulted in Braden having a new employee to teach every few months. With no official training material to speak of, Braden decided to take matters into her own hands and created her own.

“I built a whole course to teach the customers,” she said. “This was back in the day of overlays; it wasn’t like today — no PowerPoint!”

Senior management got wind of Braden’s handiwork and asked her if she would relocate to the company’s headquarters in San Diego to help educate others. She willingly accepted. A few years later, the head

“Once I get into learning, I get really into it and I can’t stop.”

— Michelle Braden, global vice president and chief learning officer, Telus International of the company’s Latin America group created a training-management position specifically for her, making it her first official role in the L&D space — and a global one at that. The learning strategy Braden created in this role was so successful that it not only boosted the business’s bottom line but also won the company a President’s Club award.

“It was the first time that I felt like, ‘OK, I have something different to add here and someone’s going to value it,’ ” Braden said.

A Simple Approach Braden has always been a self-starter. More than a decade into her career, with degrees from junior college and technical school under her belt, she decided to go back to school to earn her bachelor’s degree — and then continued on for an MBA from the New York Institute of Technology, from which she graduated with high distinction. “Once I get into learning, I

PHOTOS BY STEVIE CHRIS

Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

31

Profile get really into it and I can’t stop,” she joked.

“She’s a very hardworking individual,” said Estuardo Ligorria G., vice president of operations at Telus International Central America, based in Guatemala. “She has a work ethic like very few people.

She’s very detail oriented. She’s very good at working with different departments. And she doesn’t shy away from big challenges.”

This straightforward, from-the-ground-up approach is one of the things that makes Braden so successful as a learning professional. And she credits her son with helping her refine it.

“Several years ago, when my son was small and I was first really getting into global learning, I remember him saying to me one day, ‘Mom, I wasn’t born knowin’ it!’

And it struck me when he said that because nobody — Michelle Braden was born ‘knowin’ it,’ ” she said. “It changed my approach because I started thinking, ‘I need to go back to some of the basics and make sure people really have them.’ You can’t assume that everyone knows how to do things or knows what you do. Now I take a step back and really look at the learner experience and where they’re coming from.”

This same approach applies to Braden’s management style, which puts the focus on her team members and their needs.

“When I have a one-on-one with her, it’s very clear it’s my meeting. It’s my opportunity to set the agenda,” said Margot Cook, senior manager for learning excellence solutions and one of Braden’s direct reports.

“There may be times where she has things for me to handle, yet, unless it’s urgent, those things come second.

She gives me the support that I need when I need it, but doesn’t necessarily micromanage.”

“You can’t assume that everyone knows how to do things or knows what you do.

Now I take a step back and really look at the learner experience and where they’re coming from.”

digital transformation. But even though some things are automated or digitized, you still need human beings to resolve the more difficult issues and have the skills and knowledge to support all that technology,” explained Ligorria. “Talent itself is one of the most coveted resources in the emerging digital age. We’re investing in our people because we believe that’s the road to success.”

“A lot of contact centers don’t do that,” added Cook. “We are in an industry that’s so competitive. It’s very easy for people to get poached. But we have a higher retention rate [than average]. People definitely feel that there are learning opportunities here, that this is a place where they can grow. A lot of other contact-center companies don’t give their frontline people those opportunities. It has a lot to do with the work that Michelle and the team have done globally.”

In fact, Telus International’s attrition rates are up to 50 percent lower than the industry average in most of the regions where the company operates, according to the company’s 2017 employee engagement survey, which is administered by Aon Hewitt. The report also found that 87 percent of Telus employees worldwide believe the company strongly supports the learning and development of its team members (that’s 3 percentage points higher than Aon Hewitt’s “best employers” benchmark for that year), while 76 percent agree with the statement, “My future career opportunities here look good” (four percentage points higher than the benchmark). Meanwhile, global engagement is 83 percent — a leading industry score.

Investing in People at Telus International After moving from Xerox to SAP, where she led the organization’s global learning and development team, Braden was recruited to Telus International in 2012 with a threefold objective: to build a leadership pipeline; to grow the skills of the entire Telus workforce; and to help create custom learning curricula for clients. She also undertook to centralize the company’s L&D function, bringing together disparate region heads into one department and growing the team from 50 in 2013 to more than 400 today.

“The new way of doing business in our industry is 32 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Michelle Braden, global vice president and chief learning officer for Telus International, credits a youthful observation by her son with helping her find a from-the-ground-up approach to learning.

Profile

“It seems like just when you think it’s going to be the same, next year it’s not. It just keeps growing and it keeps expanding,” Michelle Braden said. “That excites me.”

Learning Inside and Out Telus International’s internal success is due in part to a key initiative that Braden and her team rolled out in 2015: the Learning@TI Roadmap, which is a series of development programs that target employees at different stages of their careers. It kicks off with IEvolve for all new frontline team members, then moves to IAspire for emerging leaders, IExcel for managers and supervisors, and finally ILead for senior leaders. Each program consists of a combination of online, offline, in-person, peerto-peer, mentoring and coaching opportunities.

“I’ve been in companies before where nobody knew what you had to do to get to the next level other than network,” Braden said. “This way, people know how to gain the skills and knowledge they need so that they are better positioned to get that next job. Plus, we found that the people who have gone through this program and have been certified and then promoted are hitting the ground running.” It’s no surprise that in 2016, just a year after launching, the Learning@TI Roadmap won an ATD Excellence in Practice award in the Organizational Learning and Development category.

Other popular programs Braden has helped launch at Telus include the ongoing Learn & Grow program, which provides continuous learning opportunities around soft skills such as leadership and management, and In Session, which consists of TED-Talk-like presentations by anyone within the organization. Braden herself has given many In Session talks, Cook pointed out. “She leads by example and tries as best as possible to reach as many people as she can,” she said.

Braden’s influence doesn’t stop with internal successes. She and her team regularly create custom learning solutions for Telus International’s clients. One such client, Fitbit, the maker of the wearable fitness tracker, came to Braden’s team looking for a highly specialized,

realistic digital emulator that would allow customer service agents without access to actual Fitbit trackers or the Fitbit app to learn the technology in a hands-on way and provide knowledgeable service to customers.

Braden and her team unveiled the first solution in July 2017 and positive results have already been rolling in.

“We have a lot of anecdotal feedback from the agents in terms of how it made their lives and jobs less stressful and more fun,” said Chris Underwood, director of customer support operations and training for Fitbit.

“So far feedback has been really good,” said Marjorie Etter, manager of customer support training at Fitbit, who worked on the design and implementation of the emulator. “Every project has its challenges, but when you’re able to collaborate with respect and great communication, it just makes everything so much easier. We made decisions together, we worked together, we innovated together, we strategized together. And the maintenance work is something we’re doing together.”

Future Goals As customer-service agents are increasingly called upon to handle more complex issues, Braden is focused on continuing to raise the skills of the entire Telus International workforce.

“If you really have some issue you need to speak to someone about, you don’t want to be speaking to a robot. You want to speak to a person,” she said.

“So my team is focused on how we can support our frontline team members in providing that great customer experience.”

She added it’s also critical for HR and L&D professionals not to get too enamored with new tech tools — particularly since there are so many coming to market — and continue to put the learner’s needs first.

“The challenge is not to get blindsided or distracted by these shiny new pennies, like AI [artificial intelligence], but to figure out how you can prepare yourself to use them,” she said. “We have a lot of leaders who have come up solely through the education or HR ranks, and they don’t have a technology background — I think they’re going to be at a disadvantage. So they have to start to learn more about the technologies, and how to leverage them for learning, and how to put learning into the flow of work for the individual.”

It’s also wise not to get too attached to any one tool or method, since tomorrow’s challenges may be different from today’s. But that’s the thing about the learning industry that Braden loves most.

“It seems like just when you think it’s going to be the same, next year it’s not. It just keeps growing and it keeps expanding,” she said. “That excites me.” CLO Agatha Bordonaro is a writer based in New York. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Before You Use Another Assessment, Read This.

HR leaders who integrate pre-employment assessments often use one tool to help identify the best candidates and a different resource to develop them once on board.

However, using multiple solutions often comes at a substantial cost and lacks consistency. So you may be thinking, “Why can’t there be one reliable assessment I can use for selection, coaching, and development that makes sense and won’t break the bank?”

A New Way Forward Assessments of the past typically measured individual traits without meaningful context. Today’s best assessments can predict with a much higher degree of certainty how someone is likely to perform in a given role, whether that individual is a new hire or an existing employee.

Using scientific validation studies to identify performance competencies, companies can gain a deep understanding of what success looks like in a particular job and identify which competencies top performers have in common.

With these competencies as building blocks, data scientists are able to construct precise, accurate job models that lay the foundation for measuring success.

Making it Meaningful At Caliper, we’ve been collecting, validating, and measuring performance data for over 60 years. We’ve developed a single assessment that can be used for selection, coaching, and individual development based on criterion validity, not just construct validity. In other words, we predict performance.

To put validated data to good use, it’s important to consider its application across the employee lifecycle.

Caliper recently introduced Caliper Essentials™, a robust report suite that is built on Caliper’s scientifically validated assessment. The data provided in Caliper Essentials™ has been thoroughly researched and tested for accuracy. It tells HR leaders everything they need and want to know

about job applicants and existing employees—what motivates them, what stresses them, how they are likely to behave in response to different work-related stimuli, and how best to coach them for success.

But before you decide to integrate an assessment into your process, there are four critical questions you should ask:

#1: Can the assessment be used across the employee lifecycle – selection through development?

Caliper has used the latest in assessment science to create a single assessment that generates a suite of reports that addresses each stage of the employee cycle.

Why pay one vendor to assess for hiring and another for development? The Essentials Report Suite is a holistic talent alignment solution, from employee selection to coaching to development to succession.

After all, successful hiring isn’t over after your applicant accepts the offer. It continues through training, onboarding, and career pathing.

#2: Does the assessment have practical application?

Have you ever looked at an assessment report and wondered if you missed some management class about which employee is a bird and which one is a fish? Have you ever looked at an underperforming department and thought, “Ok, the manager is a yellow-orange and I’m a purple-green, but what about this underperforming sales territory?”

If you can’t stand weird jargon, we have good news: Caliper Essentials™ gives you meaningful data, not zoo animals. It uses words and phrases like communication, persistence, decisiveness, problem solving, quality focus, accountability, and time management. Essentials outlines an applicant’s or employee’s motivators and stressors,

Caliper is a human capital assessment company leveraging decades of data and validated assessment results to help companies select high-quality candidates; predict workplace performance; build high-performing teams; and engage, develop, and retain employees.

Caliper partners with all types of organizations – from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses and from government agencies to non-profits. Whether your business needs to hire for an important position or develop current and future leaders, Caliper can help you make the best talent management decisions.

and it provides practical coaching suggestions, followup interview questions, and tips for managers based on the scores. By placing the emphasis on actual on-the-job behaviors, the report offers guidance on how to maximize each new hire’s and newly promoted employee’s strengths while compensating for limitations.

#3: Has the assessment been validated using advanced statistical science?

Anyone with access to software development tools can make a “personality test.” If you see one that’s free or costs $15, remember…you get what you pay for.

When legitimate assessment companies talk about scientific validation, they mean the tool has been researched and tested to make sure the assessment measures what it claims to measure. Validity varies greatly among instruments, so it’s up to you to investigate quality.

Caliper Essentials™ takes validation two steps further:

outcome (job performance). In other words, instead of measuring traits in a vacuum, Caliper Essentials™ shows you traits in relation to job performance. The benefit is practical simplicity that provides at-aglance answers to critical question around selection, coaching, and succession.

#4: Is the assessment scalable?

Are you the talent management director of a major corporation looking for an all-purpose selection and development tool that will provide scientifically validated, EEOC compliant, and consistent results that can serve as a foundation for competency modeling, people analytics, and succession planning? Caliper Essentials™ may be right for you.

Are you the owner of a three-person insurance agency looking for access to assessment tools that you only need to use once or twice a year and that must fit within a tight budget? Caliper Essentials™ may be right for you.

• Essentials is scientifically validated for Selection. All those other pre-employment assessments that simply measure personality traits have no predictive power regarding job performance. They may only tell what someone is “like” but not how well that individual fits the job you need to fill.

Whatever your organizational size or talent management needs, the Essentials reporting suite has the scalability and flexibility to meet your requirements. You might have five employees or fifty thousand, but you will benefit from the same assessment built on the same extensive data-collection platform. How deeply you want to delve is up to you.

• Essentials is designed for criterion validity. Criterion validity is how well a criterion (traits) predicts an

For more information about Caliper or its report suite, visit www.calipercorp.com.

The Case for Moodle & Totara

Understanding the Open-Source eLearning Ecosystem

By Adina Sapp

Not surprisingly, recent data from CLO’s 2018 Learning State of the Industry survey found that budget is one of the greatest L&D technology challenges for the next year, along with data integration and the need to align L&D technology operations, practices, and systems across different business units. Pricing is the top consideration for any new L&D technology platform, followed by ease of use and product features. Analytics, ease of integration with existing ERP/in-house software and vendor support are also highly prioritized.1 Corporations of all sizes around the world are finding that open source eLearning is the best answer to their budgetary, integration and analytics requirements for enterprise education. Of the many learning platform options out there, Moodle is the most widely used, with a user base of more than 130 million worldwide.2 “Open source clients are incentivized by the fact that it is free,” says Brian Carlson, CEO and Co-Founder of eThink Education. “But it is also a very powerful solution. The fact that it is open source is an enormous advantage from a technical and functional perspective. The code is open, and you can do whatever you want with it. It is extremely flexible.”

followed by in-house custom development. Moodle and Totara support the implementation of both.

“Moodle and Totara excel at streamlining the educational lifecycle of the employee. Both platforms provide the ability to assign personal and company training goals while offering engaging educational opportunities for employees and can monitor learner progress to provide valuable analytics for informed decision-making regarding your training programs.”

—Cheryl Patsavos, COO and Co-Founder, eThink Education

Founded in 2008, eThink has been an official Moodle Partner since 2016 and an official Totara Partner since 2017. Moodle has been the best-known open source LMS in the world for more than a decade,3 and Totara emerged in 2014 as a “fork” of Moodle that builds upon Moodle’s core structure with features tailored specifically for the corporate, health care and government environments. Totara is also ranked as one of the world’s top learning portals.4

“The corporate and pro-ed market is following a similar trend to what we saw in the college market about 10 years ago,” Carlson says. “Many organizations are moving from closed source legacy systems to open source. It is very much a best-of-breed market right now, and clients are buying multiple technologies and tools that fit together in their open eLearning environment.

Having solutions that integrate and play well together is imperative to achieving eLearning success today.”

CLO’s 2018 Learning State of the Industry survey also found that cloud-based software is the most preferred method of acquiring L&D management software,

What makes Moodle and Totara exceptional from a technical and functional perspective is their extreme flexibility and the active user communities that continually

Chief Learning Officer (2018). State of the Industry survey.

Moodle Statistics. moodle.net/stats/.

3 Hall, Brandon (2007). “Five Open-Source Learning Management Systems.” Chief Learning Officer.

4 eThink (2017). eThink education becomes a Totara partner.

1 2

eThink Education provides a world-class, fully-managed eLearning solution including implementation, cloud hosting, integration, consultation, and management services for open-source Moodle and Totara. Managed by experts, eThink’s total solution provides a dynamic and customizable platform to meet specific institutional and organizational needs. With clients in various industries including Higher Education, K-12, Healthcare, Nonprofit, Government, and Corporate, eThink can help all types of organizations to maximize the effectiveness of their eLearning programs for improved business outcomes. For more information about eThink Education, please visit www.ethinkeducation.com.

provide new solutions and modules. There are thousands of active users in the Moodle forums and more than 1,500 free plugins that can be used by anyone.5 While the technology across organizations may be different, the business problems are often the same. “The community doesn’t just provide edits and contribute code; they talk to each other about how they solved problems and configured their sites in a certain way to achieve certain goals,” Carlson says. “There is a wealth of information in the community to take advantage of.”

decide whether Moodle or Totara will suit them best, and even help them migrate between the two as their needs change.

For service providers such as eThink Education, the fact that Moodle is free lowers the price point for customers; they pay only for services. “That makes us, as a company providing a free solution, very powerful in terms of providing options. This unique model means that we have to be very strong with the services we offer.

The benefit to the market is competition on services. eThink is able to ensure exceptional service quality, and because of this we’ve held a 99 percent client retention rate over 10 years of business. Open source solutions enable a different model than what you typically see in the closed source market,” Carlson says.

To learn how to take advantage of the flexibility and functionality of an open source learning platform, attend a virtual webinar, contact a certified Moodle or Totara partner, or schedule a personalized demonstration. From very large federal agencies to the smallest nonprofits, open source technology can be customized to meet specific business and training needs. Learning leaders need an individualized demo to see what the Moodle and Totara learning platforms can really do.

In addition to education on integration, coaching, video solutions and analytics, eThink can help companies 5

Moodle Plugins. moodle.org/plugins/.

Moodle is appropriate across all organization types and education levels, including K–12, colleges, universities and professional learning at corporate businesses, nonprofits and federal institutions. Totara, with specific features aimed at meeting training needs in organizations, is ideal for any type of business.

Learn more about eThink’s enterprise level support for Moodle and Totara or the move to open source at www.ethinkeducation.com/request-a-demo/

Learning from Others in the Digital Age Don’t overlook the importance of vicarious learning for sharing critical knowledge at work

By Christopher G. Myers, PhD

People today have access to more information than at any point in human history. A 2014 report estimated the size of the internet at 1 billion unique websites, and by 2021, global internet traffic is expected to reach 3.3 zettabytes.

That is 3.3 trillion gigabytes of information moving around online – enough, by my rough estimate, to fill 12.9 billion iPhones (the 256GB iPhone X, to be specific).

It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most common ways we seek out and learn new things is by going online — embodying the 21st-century learning mantra “I don’t know… hang on, I’ll Google it.” However, because of this volume of readily available information and knowledge, we risk forgetting one of the most important ways people learn, particularly at work — by learning from the experiences of others, or vicarious learning.

Though we have long recognized the benefits of not repeating others’ mistakes or “reinventing the wheel,” the emphasis of many modern organizations on selfdirected learning and more autonomous, independent work means that employees are often turning to Google for answers, rather than learning vicariously from a colleague’s knowledge and experience.

This is a costly trend. Recent reports estimate the annual business cost of failing to share knowledge effectively to be in the millions of dollars, even for smaller organizations, and potentially totaling billions of dollars per year in collective losses for the companies in the Fortune 500.

“Recent reports estimate the annual business cost of failing to share knowledge effectively to be in the millions of dollars, even for smaller organizations.”

Failing to learn from others’ experiences at work is a concern for several reasons. Despite the plethora of hits returned on any given Google search, not all information is available online. The knowledge needed to succeed in many organizations relies on unique or sometimes proprietary information (such as patented designs or procedures). In addition, differences in the way knowledge is captured and retained can make it difficult to find certain pieces of information through online searches, even within an organization’s own digital archives. For instance, differences in terminology or document “tagging” practices can impede individuals’ efforts to search their companies’ online knowledge databases, leaving them unable to find important information simply because they searched the wrong keyword.

Most importantly, though, much of the knowledge needed for employees to learn and thrive at work is not the kind of formal, codified information that is typically documented in online repositories or knowledgemanagement systems. Instead, what is often critical for success is mastery of the tacit knowledge of the organization – the complex, interpretive knowledge that is difficult to capture or write down.

This need to learn vicariously from others’ tacit knowledge and experience pervades most organizations, particularly as the world of work continues to become more adaptive, complex, and knowledge-based. As it does, we will have to ask ourselves how we can harness the power of technology to support, rather than replace, these key interpersonal learning interactions.

For instance, in our executive education courses at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, we prioritize cohortbased learning experiences in which participants can learn from in-depth discussion and interaction with faculty and peers. These interactions are often supported with technological tools (including simulations, online readings, and web modules), but the core experience always centers around rich, face-to-face learning interactions. This learning experience arms participants with research-based

ideas and the nuance necessary to go back to their dayto-day work and adapt knowledge to meet their dynamic demands, rather than just trying to implement a boilerplate solution they found in a document online.

Balancing the growth of technological tools with the benefit of in-person learning and tacit knowledge sharing will continue to be a critical challenge for human resources managers, and raises a plethora of questions and possibilities. How can we use technology, for instance, to enable greater vicarious learning between members of geographically dispersed teams? How might

the availability of information online be used to provide a “foundation” of codified knowledge that can be expanded by learning from stories of others’ experiences? And what role could social media play in facilitating the sharing of more tacit knowledge across teams, organizations, or even industries?

Hang on, I’ll try Googling it and see what I find out.

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Fall 2016 Carey Business magazine. Learn more at http://carey.jhu. edu/exec-ed

Christopher G. Myers, PhD is an Assistant Professor and Academic Director of Executive Education at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School with joint faculty appointments in the School of Medicine and Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety & Quality. His research explores questions of learning, development, and innovation in organizations, as well as how people learn vicariously from others’ knowledge and experience at work.

Building resilience to changing conditions

New research from ICF and HCI shows how vanguard organizations navigate change management through a strong coaching culture

By Tim Harnett It’s been more than 20 years since John Kotter’s seminal book on change management, Leading Change. In 1996, Kotter found that only a third of change management efforts succeeded.1 In the years since, change has come at organizations more rapidly, affecting leadership change, acquisitions, new product development and more.

Recent research suggests the needle hasn’t moved much.

According to a 2016 report from the Human Capital Institute (HCI), 77 percent of HR practitioners and leaders report that their organization is in a constant state of change, and 85 percent report unsuccessful major change management initiatives in the past two years.2 However, new data from HCI and the International Coach Federation (ICF) shows that there are steps organizations can take to increase employees’ resilience during times of change.

For the past several years, ICF and HCI conducted studies to identify organizations with a strong coaching culture. ICF’s benchmarking index identifies coaching best practices to determine when organizations have reached that level. This year’s study focused on how a coaching culture affects change management — a rapidly escalating topic area. We spoke with Mark Ruth, director of research and education for ICF, about the study findings and how organizations tackle change.

Get ahead of the change and be proactive in your response There’s a great deal of complexity and ambiguity around change and change management, with continually shifting priorities. With processes changing all the time, Ruth stresses the importance of being proactive about

change management. “Change readiness means you’ll be more successful with change management,” Ruth says.

“Everyone experiences change, but no one really does it well. We want to know why.”

The best organizations use coaching to embrace change head-on, rather than wait to react. “If you integrate coaching into a change management initiative after it’s started to derail, you’re already too late,” Ruth says.

Build a strong coaching culture ICF identifies six markers of strong coaching cultures. To be labeled as such, organizations need to demonstrate that at least five of the following elements are in place:

1 Employees who value coaching.

2 Senior executives who value coaching.

A combination of external coach practitioners, internal 3 coach practitioners and managers/leaders using coaching skills.3 Managers/leaders and/or internal coach practitioners 4 who have received accredited coach-specific training.

4

line item in the organization’s budget 5 Afordedicated coaching. access to a professional coach practitioner for 6 Equal all employees in the organization.

Since 2014, an average of 17 percent of ICF/HCI survey

Aiken, C., and Keller, S. (2009). “The irrational side of change management.” The McKinsey Quarterly, Number 2.

Filipkowski, J. (2016). HR’s Role in Change Management. Retrieved from http://www.hci.org/hr-research/hrs-role-change-management.

5 ICF defines a professional coach practitioner as someone who provides an ongoing partnership designed to help coachees produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources and creativity that the coachee already has.

An internal coach is a professional coach practitioner who is employed within an organization and has specific coaching responsibilities identified in their job description. An external coach is a professional coach practitioner who is either self-employed or partners with other professional coaches to form a coaching business. A manager/leader using coaching skills is a leader who uses coaching knowledge, approaches and skills to create awareness and support behavior change.

2 ICF defines an accredited coach training program as any program consisting of coach-specific training that’s met the rigid criteria required to be approved by a professional coaching organization.

1 2

The International Coach Federation (ICF) is dedicated to advancing the coaching profession by setting high ethical standards, providing independent certification and building a worldwide network of credentialed coaches across a variety of coaching disciplines. ICF is active in representing all facets of the coaching industry, including Executive, Life Vision and Enhancement, Leadership, Relationship, and Career Coaching. Its 29,000-plus members located in more than 135 countries work toward the common goal of enhancing awareness of coaching, upholding the integrity of the profession, and continually educating themselves with the newest research and practices. www.coachfederation.org

respondents have indicated that their organizations have strong coaching cultures. “Our study shows that organizations with strong coaching cultures have higher levels of innovation, employee engagement and retention than organizations that don’t,” Ruth says.

“Organizations with strong coaching cultures are great at completing large-scale strategic change; 59 percent can successfully address strategic change compared to 45 percent of other organizations.”

Integrate coaching into change management learning activities ICF and HCI asked respondents which learning and development activities their organizations offered as part of change management initiatives. Ruth admits they were surprised by the results. “Among 14 change management learning activities, the most frequent offerings were classroom training, e-learning and meetings with senior leaders,” Ruth says. “However, coaching activities — one-on-one coaching, team coaching and work group coaching with a professional coach practitioner — were rated among the most helpful in achieving the goals of change management initiatives.”

“Organizations with strong

coaching cultures have higher levels of innovation, employee engagement and retention than organizations that don’t.”

Organizations with strong coaching cultures are outperforming their peers in terms of change management initiatives. In the future, they’ll be better equipped to handle the new reality of work — one where processes and initiatives are in a near-constant state of change. When organizations use coaching at all stages of the change (planning, executing and sustaining) they’ll be better able to control any unforeseen change roadblocks, assuage employee fears and get everyone on the same page about the future.

To access the full report on coaching cultures and change management, visit https://coachfederation.org/research/ building-a-coaching-culture.

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Authentic ethics and compliance training is gaining traction and visibility in the corporate workspace. What does this mean for your company and how can you execute on it?

C

BY JAY TANGNEY

ompanies continue to face increasingly complex operational and regulatory environments in 2018.

Regardless of your business, how your employees navigate and decide complex issues will define how your company operates. Simply put, integrity is a “must have” to survive. Without a solid ethical foundation in both the C-suite and throughout operations, the hard reality is that your company is highly likely to fail and perhaps, fail with irreversible and draconian consequences, especially if aggressive and motivated regulatory and enforcement authorities become involved.

One result of this plain business reality is that companies and shareholders are increasing their focus on integrity-based ethical behavior. Civil and criminal investigations and cases have long been a business reality in the United States. Today, a new layer of moral scrutiny has been added as we evaluate fundamentals of respect in the workplace, and diversity and inclusion.

Yes, acting within the letter and spirit of the law and treating each other with respect at all times is the right and moral thing to do, and certainly for many leaders and shareholders that reason alone is enough. For those more financially motivated however, authentic ethical and respectful behavior mitigates risk and makes sense for the bottom line. Ethical behavior is in the best interest of your enterprise, and if you don’t believe that, pick up any major newspaper

and review how many companies are immersed in complicated legal investigations because of bad or illegal conduct by employees. Business in America is immersed in redefining what is OK and what is no longer tolerated, and this cleansing, along with a hard push toward diversity and inclusion, is itself the right thing to do and long overdue. This renewed vigor in mandating ethical conduct impacts all industries, and a deliberate and enforceable ethics and compliance training program is a prerequisite for your team and your business to succeed.

Revisiting Corporate Ethics — A Broader View Of course, ethical behavior starts with basic legal compliance. Your business must comply with the law. To achieve this very basic objective, employees need to understand and believe that compliance is important. Without that core belief, bad things happen, including civil lawsuits, criminal investigations, fines, penalties and even prison. To survive, it is fundamental that employees at every level comply with relevant laws and regulations, and that example should emanate from your chief executive and every member of the leadership team.

A well prepared legal and compliance team can ensure your company knows the law, and more importantly, can implement a robust but practical training program that includes the following essentials:

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1. Understanding and complying with laws and regulations that apply to your business.

2. Understanding and complying with your own internal policies.

3. Understanding when to call the legal team with questions.

Integrity-based ethical behavior runs deeper than compliance with the law. To thrive, employees should not only understand the fundamentals of legal compliance, but also the principles surrounding integrity-based ethical decision-making.

Today more than ever, this deeper dive is necessary, and the responsibility for creating this culture starts with the entire leadership team of your enterprise and cascades down. Your leaders need to be aligned with how people are treated in the workplace, and how complaints and problems will be investigated with objectivity and fairness to all, regardless of pay grade.

As a practical matter, this belief system manifests itself in a few ways: 1. The commitment to training employees to ensure they are treating each other with dignity and respect at all times.

2. Understanding that there will be a fair, objective and fact-driven process when problems do occur.

3. A 100 percent commitment to enforcement of your behavioral expectations. When an employee fails to adhere to your rules, change will occur.

In this advanced consideration of ethical behavior, training is a bit of a misnomer. Treating people with respect and fairness every day is not training, it’s more like breathing in today’s day and age. If your employees are not treating each other well and understanding why that is important, eventually your enterprise will be unable to breath and dysfunction will become your norm.

Listening to the truth is essential if a company sincerely seeks to implement and eventually enforce changes to behavior, policy and culture. To get to the truth, several questions need to be asked of employees in a safe and trusting environment: • How do people treat each other most of the time?

• Does that treatment change when things aren’t going well?

• Is there accountability when bad behavior does occur?

• Are your internal rules and policies applied evenly regardless of time at the company and level of responsibility?

These questions require careful reflection from your leadership team. If a company goes through this process, listens and understands, then fails to credibly act to change, even when those changes are hard and may require saying goodbye to valued employees, the enterprise will be in a far worse place.

Your leadership will also face major credibility challenges when it needs it most.

Determining Your Ethical Reality

To achieve the implementation of this culture and respect-based platform, the legal and learning teams are necessary partners across the company.

Those teams should consider how to get to the truth. Surveys, interviews and focus groups are a few examples of methods that can work. Regardless of what you choose, the participants in your study have to feel safe and free to speak the unvarnished truth.

Absent those fundamentals, you will not likely understand your reality and the rest of your process could be a waste of time.

The next step is for the team to understand and digest the data from your study to set the path forward on a road to an environment of respect and integrity. This starts with robust and relevant com-

To determine what needs to be done, a company, regardless of whether they are large and public or small and private, must understand the status quo of its culture. A hard look in the mirror is often easier said than done. This journey can be even more challenging when the truth about a company’s culture does not meet its own view of itself. It’s hard to hear that you may not be as wonderful as you believe, and it’s tempting to rationalize and explain away information that doesn’t meet your expectations with a variety of convenient excuses. An authentic understanding of your ethical reality is a hard but necessary first step, and this begins with a listening exercise.

44 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

If employees do not understand why treating each other well is important, dysfunction will become your norm.

Once these questions and others are asked by a full cross-section of employees representing all the constituents in your company, sincere listening and acting to implement necessary changes will create credibility as your company moves forward with ethical conduct.

What to Do — A Few Practical Thoughts

pany policies that are enforced fairly and evenly, with the backbone of a thorough, targeted and entertaining training program.

We all know that there is much information to share with employees, many whom are already under siege with email, meetings and other demands on a daily basis. How many times have you heard a negative comment about someone having to sit through another training session on a corporate policy? It’s a regular occurrence. In reality, the only way your training program will actually work is if people want to participate beyond just checking the box. Here are some steps to consider as you reflect on what you need to do: 1. Define the program’s business requirements.

2. Align the legal and compliance standards (i.e., document management, code of conduct, anti-harassment).

3. Identify cross-functional requirements (i.e., travel and expense reporting).

4. Align policies (i.e., conflict of interest, third party vendor rules, etc.).

Your training program will only work if people want to participate beyond just checking the box.

Once you and your team determine what you want to say to employees, the next step is think about how you will communicate it. Make no mistake, the delivery of the content, which includes who says it and in what medium, is every bit as important as the content itself. With the wrong messenger or the wrong medium, you are done before you even start. Here are several content distribution methods to consider: • Live training.

• Web based interactive training (i.e., podcasts, webinars).

• Facilitated focus groups.

• Inside experts.

• External speakers.

This is where the learning and legal teams need to come together in a focused collaboration to spread the gospel of ethical behavior, and to do so creatively and passionately. It can be extremely time consuming and sometimes costly to find ways to break through the onslaught of information clutter we face daily and drive critical compliance messages home. Doing so is time well spent and will eventually bring tangible results. To get there, you should 46 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

spend time identifying your best team of messengers. Who in the company has lived through a relevant event? Who has a story to tell?

If, for example, you are focused on rolling out a new code of conduct, find someone articulate who has direct experience with the topic, talk to them, and see if they’d be willing to tell their story. I have been fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to have been involved in many of these events over time, first as military officer and subsequently as both outside counsel and general counsel. In my experience, personal stories told the right way can be compelling and leave a lasting memory because they humanize and bring emotion to what can be an abstract concept. For example, I’ve worked on situations where employees made mistakes, most frequently in good faith without any intent to engage in misconduct, but simply didn’t know the law or the rules. Those types of stories about real people, real problems and real solutions can be compelling, and are far more impactful than a slide deck which cites the law or cases.

Another strong method to getting the word out is with outside speakers. While this has a financial cost, the correct outside speaker can have a dramatic impact on your employee listeners, will bring an objectivity to your topic, and can insert some fresh energy to your training platform with a level of credibility that can be inspiring to employees. Examples of people that can be effective in ethics and integrity include college and business school professors, retired judges, military officers, and sometimes even people who ended up on the wrong side of law enforcement cases and learned the importance of compliance after making mistakes.

Winning Hearts and Minds, Then Measuring Your Progress Much of this is straightforward, and sophisticated companies generally have some level of programming to show the world they are making an effort to promote integrity based ethical decision-making. Those that don’t sometimes learn the hard way that a proactive measurable compliance program is essential, and may even make a material difference if you are questioned about your commitment to ethical behavior in the event of an investigation.

The United States Federal Sentencing Guidelines provide important guidance to enterprises trying to understand how the Justice Department views this topic, and just how important a provable, objective and measurable program can be should you come under investigative scrutiny. It’s nice to say you believe in ethics and compliance, but can you prove it to a skeptical third party or even a federal prosecutor?

ETHICS continued on page 61

Great talent starts with great learning WORK, LEARN AND GROW TOGETHER WITH SABA TALENT MANAGEMENT Visit Saba.com to learn more about how we can help you meet the expectations of your learners and the needs of your business.

The Talent Development Company www.saba.com Š 2018 Saba Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Saba, the Saba logo, and the marks relating to Saba products and services referenced herein are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Saba Software, Inc. or its affiliates.

BY TAMAR ELKELES

48 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

To avoid the traps of the modern learning agenda, think social, mobile and global.

I

ncreased complexity, competition and change. Rapid technology evolution, disruption and speed.

Emerging markets and global growth. These are the big business challenges facing global organizations today. At the same time, learning and talent organizations are facing our own set of significant challenges.

• The future of work and developing people for jobs that don’t even exist yet.

• Creating a learning and talent ecosystem that maximizes growth and employee engagement.

• “Re-skilling” talent to drive business success.

Where do we begin?

These challenges provide us with not just an opportunity, but a big responsibili-

ty for all talent leaders today. For businesses to thrive in this changing organizational landscape, we must address these opportunities and take action. We are in a time of change and reinvention, individuals need to change in order for organizations to change. Ninety three percent of CEOs are in the process of changing their talent strategy, according to PwC’s 2017 “Annual Global CEO Survey. This is driving CLOs and talent leaders to evolve their work, products, services and mindsets to create talent plans that reflect the changes in today’s workforce. These plans go beyond learning and development and truly encompass the entire learning and talent ecosystem — from attraction to development to retention. We need to strategically influence the entire employee life cycle.

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The workforce today is increasingly mobile and that has significant implications for how work gets done and how we operate our learning and talent organizations. Forty three percent of U.S. employees currently spend time working from home and that number continues to rise, according to a 2017 New York Times article, “Remote Workers Work from Home.”

Delivering learning, connecting employees and building a learning culture is more complex than ever before. This distributed workforce and shift in the way employees literally show up for work makes online, mobile and virtual learning both a reality and the norm. Embracing mobility and this mobile workforce is the only way to engage learners and ensure career growth for all. New technologies, social learning and leveraging user generated content are essential. Think social, mobile and global.

Forty-three percent of people in the U.S. are now independent workers and over the next five years that will increase to be almost half of the U.S. workforce, according to MBO Partners’ 2017 “State of Independence in America” report. Ninety-seven percent of them have no desire to return to traditional work and by 2030 only 9 percent of the workforce will be fulltime employees, according to PwC’s “Workforce of the Future” report. This “gig” work is transforming the way we think about the workforce and the strategy we must use to develop and engage not only our employees but also the consultants, part time workers, temporary workers and gig workers who we interact with regularly. These workers are part of our talent ecosystem. They have important roles with our customers, our employees and our work infrastructure. Employment laws have not yet caught up to the realities that

HIGH IMPACT

LOW IMPACT

HIGH URGENCY

Do it now!

Do it later

LOW URGENCY

FIGURE 1: URGENCY IMPACT

Do it later

Never do it

Source: Tamar Elkeles

we are encountering with this new workforce. Companies like Uber, Lyft and Airbnb have an abundance of gig workers, both “drivers” and “hosts” aren’t employees of these companies. Due to current employment 50 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

laws, they cannot provide development to these workers, but these workers have a direct influence on their company brand, their customers and their business.

How can we “train” and develop workers who are not our employees? How can we manage co-employment constraints and alternative work models? As learning and talent executives we need to lead these important discussions and drive major workforce policy changes.

That is part of our agenda.

The employeremployee relationship has changed and so must our learning and talent organizations.

Seventy-four percent of employees believe it’s their own responsibility to update their skills rather than their employers, according to PwC’s workforce report. We don’t “own” learning or employee development. The employer-employee relationship has changed and so must our learning and talent organizations. We are facilitators of knowledge and information sharing across the organization but we cannot even begin to manage the massive amount of information or content that our employees seek or receive.

There’s too much input to manage today. The No. 1 place an employee goes to get information or “training” is not our LMS or learning catalog — it’s an internet search engine. The second place they go to get information is from another co-worker or friend.

When was the last time you referred to the user manual you received in the box with your mobile phone?

How did you learn to use that device? How do you find out about new mobile apps? Do you attend “training” or sign up for a class to learn how to install that app? An 8-year-old recently drove his 4-year-old sister to a fast food restaurant to get a hamburger.

When he was stopped by the police they asked him where he learned to drive. His answer was YouTube.

Think about the ways we learn today. Has your learning and talent agenda adapted?

On Facebook, user generated content has seven times higher engagement than brand generated content, according to Mary Meeker 2017 “Internet Trends” report. That means, if you want to encourage someone to use your product, having one of your customers post a picture or video about them actually using the product has more influence over future customers’ buying that product than if you post an advertisement about your product directly to potential

customers. Think about how that impacts our learning investment and agenda. Recommendations and communication about development opportunities from employees to other employees is a much more powerful marketing tool than any information coming directly from our learning or HR organizations. Find ways to encourage employees to share endorsements, reviews and communication about your programs, development opportunities, learning resources and you will get higher engagement and more customers. Have your employees make short video messages about the benefits of a learning program they attended, inspire your employees to share examples with others about how they used your learning resources. Use your employees as your marketing team and leverage them as learning ambassadors. If you want employees to engage in your learning opportunities, have the users do the talking.

While there may be some fear about robots in the workplace and them taking over our jobs, it is important to remember that we already work alongside robots every day. Robots provide opportunities for us to integrate new technologies into our work and in the workplace. Think about the dishwasher. Many of us have one and we use it to help us with a task that most of us don’t love — washing dishes. Before dishwashers were introduced people washed their dishes by hand. This dishwashing robot enables us to use our time differently and today we interact with it seamlessly. Having that robot didn’t displace everyone in a kitchen or a restaurant. It just changed their job. There are many machines that we work with daily that allow us to perform higher level tasks — the computer, mobile devices and calculators.

We need to embrace robots and find ways to enable them to enhance our work and allow us to do more strategic work that requires higher level thinking and communication. Nearly one third of today’s work can be displaced by technology, but social and emotional skills, as well as creativity and advanced cognitive capabilities are increasingly important for organizational success, according to McKinsey & Co.’s 2017 “Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained” report. That’s where humans add tremendous value, not by washing the dishes.

Artificial intelligence and data analytics are growing in both popularity and use within HR, learning and talent organizations. However, more data doesn’t necessarily mean more insights. Unfortunately, many people are not using the data they collect correctly and are not analyzing data to its full potential. The data you collect should tell the story, analyzing the data is just as important as collecting it. If used effectively, data should drive our decision making and influence our learning and talent priorities. As CLOs and talent leaders we need to focus on growing our own, and our employees’ “Insight IQ.”

The future of work, shifts in technology and new ways of working are leading the way for critical learning and talent transformation.

The future of work, shifts in technology and new ways of working are leading the way for a critical learning and talent transformation. The organization of the future is the most important global human capital trend today and 63 percent of companies already have a future of work program in place, according to Catalant’s “Reimagining Work 2020” report.

This transformation is driving five key priorities in our learning agenda: 1. From addressing business needs to enabling enterprise performance solutions.

2. From providing service to the organization to being strategic influencers on the business.

3. From training employees new skills to building sustained learning habits.

4. From providers of learning to being “architects of continuous development.”

5. From being a service provider to being a business and talent adviser.

Think about where you spend your time. Are you running the organization and operating the business or advancing the strategy and growing the business?

This new world of work requires CLOs and talent leaders to focus on advancing and growing the business. It’s a shift in thinking as well as doing. Employees and executives have new expectations and we are in a pivotal position to demonstrate leadership. It can be overwhelming when there’s already so much for us to do and so little time. Prioritize, assess what is urgent and what has the most impact, and ask yourself these two questions: What level of impact will the initiative have on the business? How urgent is the initiative to the achievement of a key business objective? Use this model as a guide to make decisions that can enable you to advance and grow.

Preparing for all of these changes requires a whole new level of thinking and an evolution in our ways of working. Fortunately, if we navigate this transformation successfully it will enable us to turn our workplaces into learning places. CLO Tamar Elkeles is the chief talent executive at Atlantic Bridge Capital. She can be reach at editor@clomedia.com.

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52 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Young workers tend to be the focus of development programs, but older workers also deserve to have their learning needs met.

BY JULIE WINKLE GIULIONI

T

oday’s workplace reflects unprecedented diversity. Organizations experience both the benefits and challenges of bringing together people from different races, with different sexual identities, who practice different religions, speak different languages, demonstrate different abilities and whose ages span the greatest number of generations ever to labor together in modern history.

Over the past several years, considerable time and energy have been invested in understanding and addressing the needs of younger workers. New platforms and approaches have emerged that better meet the working and learning styles and cadence of millennials. But, are we as concerned about older workers — and, more importantly, should we be? Consider these realities.

Demographic reality: The workplace is currently home to increasing numbers of older workers. Between 1960 and 2016, the World Bank reports that average life expectancy grew from nearly 53 to 72 years. According to Pew Research and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 18.8 percent or 9 million Americans 65 and older report working full or part time.

Biological reality: According to Lynda Gratton and Andres Scott, authors of “The-100 Year Life,” today’s 20-year-olds have a 50 percent chance of living to 100. Technological and medical advances allow people not only to live but also to contribute longer. All of this makes working longer — both in terms of number of years and later in life — the new normal.

Economic reality: Unemployment remains at historically low levels, resulting in a highly competitive labor market. Cities have begun offering cash payments to attract workers, and companies are taking extraordinary measures to enhance their employment brands. All of this conspires to perhaps encourage a new focus on previously undervalued resources and a move toward more inclusive hiring practices.

Competitive or workplace reality: It’s an uncertain and rapidly changing environment that most organizations find themselves navigating.

According to the research of Josh Bersin, the halflife of today’s technical skills is just two years. Organizations must routinely disrupt themselves; this is only possible when employees (all employees) are willing to engage in their own disruption through ongoing learning and skills development.

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Neurological reality: Science confirms that old dogs can indeed learn new tricks. Neuroplasticity describes the brain’s ability to continue to create new neural pathways and connections throughout life. In fact, there’s a multimillion-dollar industry dedicated to brain training and exercise that caters to older adults who understand the “use it or lose it” proposition.

These realities suggest that today’s baby boomers may be an under-used organizational resource and that understanding and addressing their ongoing learning and development needs could yield tremendous benefits. Organizations willing to make this a talent management priority will match longevity with learn-gevity and enjoy a powerful and sustainable competitive advantage.

Understanding the Older Learner Evolving research and literature strongly suggest that aging and the experiences of life that come with it can create a powerful, super-charged learning environment for older learners. In Chip Conley’s forthcoming book, “Wisdom @ Work,” he states that elders have a “vast storehouse of solutions embedded in their maturing brains that allows them to synthesize more information.” Essentially, they are primed and ready learners.

Research conducted by Zenger-Folkman suggests that as people grow older, their confidence grows, defensiveness shrinks and receptivity to feedback expands. This allows older workers to shift from what Jack Zenger and Joe Folkman refer to as a “proving mindset” to an “improving mindset.”

The more seasoned brain is better able to absorb next-level skills and nuances.

Additionally, the more seasoned brain is better able to absorb next-level skills and nuances. According to John Barrett, executive vice president at Aon, “For younger employees the game is fast; they don’t see the big picture. But for more experienced employees, it’s a lot slower. They know the endgame and where they’re going … so they can take in more and learn more along the way.”

To learn more about how people’s relationships with learning change over time, earlier this year my consulting company DesignArounds undertook an online research study, surveying 450 individuals within the U.S. and stratifying groups by 10-year age bands.

Subjects were asked to rate how important each of these qualities is in terms of their learning: 54 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

• Actionable.

• Active.

• Challenging.

• Detailed/procedural.

• Instructor-led.

• Personal experience-driven.

• Self-selected/directed.

• Short/chunked.

• Social/in groups.

• Structured.

We also contrasted today’s preference with their preferences early in their careers to gather quantitative data around shifts. Finally, we conducted qualitative analysis of text responses. Here’s what we found.

Some age-old/age-young truths: Surprisingly, the top learning preferences today, regardless of age, were nearly identical. While the rankings shifted by group, the top three out of four preferences for those 20 to 60-plus included: active, challenging, self-directed. This is good news for learning and talent development departments. While one size never fits all, it is reassuring to know that wildly different solutions are not necessarily required for different generations of learners in the workplace.

Powerful preferences: One of the most interesting aspects of the research is how strongly the 60-plus learner feels about their top learning preference. While younger learners certainly express an inclination, their commitment to that preference was fairly light or weak. However, older learners (60 and over) feel more strongly about and are more committed to their preferences. In fact, the top preference of an over-60 learner is 15.7 percent stronger than the preference held by those in their 50s, 7.6 percent stronger than those in their 40s, and 13.6 percent stronger than the preferences of those in their 30s and 20s.

Significant shifts: Within this study, we asked participants about how their learning preferences have changed over time, comparing today to early in their career. Predictably — given more time for change — the 60 and older learners express the greatest shifts.

The two most profound swings include: • Movement toward “self-selected/directed” and away from “selected/direct by others.” Older learners have a richer context for their learning. Unlike younger workers, they have a greater understanding of what they don’t know, and they definitely know what they are interested in learning.

• Movement away from “expert driven” and toward “personal experience driven.” While they remain eager to learn, older workers have frequently “been there and done that.” They have a lot to offer, but they also recognize that others do as well.

They are ready to share their experience and hear

the experiences of others to take their understanding and skills to the next level.

But, what doesn’t shift in terms of older learner preferences is equally as important as what does.

The research suggests no shift whatsoever in terms of the level of challenge older workers want to experience relative to their learning. Older learners are not ready to let up or let themselves off the hook; they still want to challenge themselves and grow over time.

Offer Age-Agnostic Development Opportunities Think about some of the most powerful development opportunities offered within your organization.

Are they equal opportunity in terms of the age of those who participate? Frequently, the higher-profile programs like high-potential and rotational experiences are where younger workers congregate. But, given longer life spans and working careers along with organizational needs, does that make sense today?

Aon’s Barrett thinks not. In fact, nine years ago he opened up his organization’s coveted (and primarily millennial-populated) talent and development program to an employee who was well into her 60s. When Anna raised her hand to participate, Barrett used it as an opportunity to make the point that this was not a “young” training program but a training program for those who were ready to contribute at the next level.

As Barrett described it, “She knew the organization, was well-liked and engaging — with good social skills, great attitude and appetite to learn — all things that can’t be taught.” He also recognized her as someone whose success could attract other more seasoned, senior employees to challenge themselves as well.

After two intensive years in the program, Anna was indeed a success. Her experience teamed with new knowledge and skills put her in a unique position to take on challenges that other younger colleagues simply were not prepared to meet. She took on a unique role, making a significant business impact. And the organization can reap the benefits of its investment in her for years to come.

Additionally, this changed the learning environment and culture within Barrett’s office. Other employees internalized the message that the organization cared, that learning wasn’t just for the youngsters, and that anyone interested in and capable of contributing would get the support they needed to grow and develop. Today, the program enjoys cross-generational participation and success.

Rotational programs might also be expanded to be more age-inclusive. Sometimes as people age, their family dynamics become less complex, allowing relocation to occur with greater ease and more enthusiasm.

Older workers don’t want to just be the sages, dispensing knowledge to their younger colleagues.

They also want to learn.

Older rotators take with them greater experience, institutional knowledge and in some cases better instincts and judgment as well, allowing for richer cross-pollination and higher-level learning. And the same thinking applies to internships.

Mentorship also benefits from an age-defying twist.

Older workers don’t just want to be the sages, dispensing knowledge to their younger colleagues. They also want to learn, making reverse mentoring and inter-generational reciprocation a powerful tool for supporting everyone across the generational spectrum in two-way learning.

Design With an Eye Toward Engaging Older Learners Making formal development programs available to older learners engages this critical population and leverages what they have to offer toward business results. But there are also steps that can be taken to ensure that all learning opportunities and events meet their needs as well. And the good news is that doing so will likely enhance the value to everyone regardless of age. Consider the following: • Engineering greater choice into learning experiences.

• Enhancing the level of active engagement.

• Creating challenging experiences.

• Personalizing learning.

• Drawing upon experiences.

• Allowing time for reflection.

Organizations need great talent. And great (seasoned) talent is available and poised to contribute to the meaty challenges facing businesses today. But this happens only if we support older workers to “move from being the wisdom keepers of the past to the wisdom seekers of the future,” as expressed by Conley in “Wisdom @ Work.” An aging workforce need not be a liability but rather a competitive advantage. CLO Julie Winkle Giulioni is co-author of the book, “Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go,” due out in its second edition in January 2019. To comment, email editor@ clomedia.com.

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Case Study

Seismic Shifts in Hiring

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

H

iring software engineers at a reasonable price has never been more difficult. Fully 86 percent of tech hiring managers and recruiters surveyed by Indeed say finding qualified talent to be a challenge, and more than half admit to hiring people who don’t meet job requirements out of desperation to fill these roles.

Techtonic Group was nearly one of these companies.

The 12-year-old full-service software development firm in Boulder, Colorado, used to offshore most of its development to Armenia, but in 2013 they decided it was time to bring the work back in-house. However, they quickly realized that even entry-level developers were very expensive and in short supply. “We thought that there has got to be a better way,” said Chris Magyar, director of Techtonic Group Academy.

So instead of scouring the country for developers, the company decided to build them in-house through an intensive software development apprenticeship program. “Most software development is learned on the job anyway,” Magyar said. By teaching the content and pairing apprentices with more senior staff, they could create the exact talent they needed.

Unlike boot camps, which require steep tuition and are open to everyone, Techtonic’s program would be highly selective, and the content would be designed specifically to meet the needs of its own development projects. “The idea is to train people who will add value for our clients,” Magyar said.

Colorado’s tech apprentice program In late 2016, Techtonic Academy was born. The company registered the program with the United States Department of Labor as part of the national apprenticeship system, making it the first government-recognized technology apprenticeship program in Colorado. Then they hired Kyle Brothis as the new CTO and head of curriculum to develop and teach the program.

Brothis and Magyar worked closely together in those early days to define the goals, content needs, and training strategy for new apprentices. “It has evolved a lot over the past two years,” Magyar said.

For the first cohort of 13 apprentices, Brothis created a five-week full-time training program for all participants. At the end, students were assessed on what they learned, and the best six were selected to participate in the full-time software development apprenticeship, where they worked on progressively more complicated tasks and client projects under the guidance of a mentor.

56 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

SNAPSHOT How a Colorado company built a software apprenticeship program — and now has more skilled engineers than it can hire.

After about six months of training, apprentices were hired as junior developers by Techtonic or a client.

The training came with a $5,000 tuition, but Magyar’s team secured grants to cover most of the cost through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which provides funding for workforce development programs. “In the first cohort everyone received funds to cover some or all of their tuition,” Magyar said. Once they became apprentices, they were paid $15 an hour, and when they were hired received competitive salaries.

The initial apprentices were all recommended by a local workforce development group, and Magyar vetted them with skills assessments, personality profiles and a few pre-class assignments. “We don’t require previous technical experience, but we do want to see that they have strong problem-solving skills and can absorb new content quickly,” he said.

Paid to learn Over time, Magyar and Brothis evolved the training content and the hiring process to improve the quality of the program for apprentices and the company.

The training now lasts 10 weeks and costs $10,000 (most of which is still covered by grants), and participants receive an hourly wage as soon as they start. The training is competency-based, covering HTML/CSS, Java, SOA Architecture, SQL and other languages. The classes include lectures, exercises, group projects, code reviews and unit tests, almost all of which is taught by Brothis. “Our goal is to train these folks to become engineers, not coders,” Brothis said. “So we cover all of the foundational skills they need.”

At the end of the 10 weeks all successful students become apprentices, doing pair programming at a single workstation with senior staff, and working under the guidance of mentors on actual client projects. “The clients love them,” Brothis said. Having extra junior staff working on their projects means they can clear out backlogs of tasks while the apprentices become familiar with project-specific requirements. “Our clients all want to hire them once they graduate,” Brothis said. “It is

what separates up from boot camps.”

While Brothis trains the current cohort, Magyar vets the next group. He now finds most candidates through ads on LinkedIn, Facebook and Craigslist, and receives applications from all types of backgrounds. “We’ve had baristas, construction workers and midcareer professionals. Some have college degrees, and some have their GEDs,” Magyar said. A primary goal of the academy is to attract underserved populations, including women, minorities, vets, and young people who don’t have the resources to go to college. Magyar noted that roughly 75 percent of every cohort are women and people of color.

Though applying to get in is just the beginning. “The vetting process has gotten a lot more competitive,” he said. The program still doesn’t require applicants to have tech experience, however, those who make it through the initial screenings are expected to complete 80 hours of prework, which includes writing an essay, standing-up a basic application, and completing coding exercises using self-paced tutorials. The finalists are then invited to an interview and one day on-site class to see how well they can absorb new material.

The prework ensures all selected candidates are fully committed to the process, and it creates a level playing field when they begin training, Brothis said. “We want them to come in feeling comfortable with the content and ready to dive deeper.”

From pilot to programmer Krystin Villeneuve was one of the first apprentices to go through Techtonic Academy. The former army helicopter pilot had picked up coding as a hobby, and considered signing up for a for-profit boot camp but she couldn’t afford it. Then she saw an ad for Techtonic Academy on Craigslist and submitted an application.

She made the cut and received a grant to cover half of her tuition. “There was no guarantee of a job, but it was worth the opportunity,” she said.

Villeneuve’s coding background made her one of the stronger students in her cohort, which benefited her and her team. She helped her group hone their coding skills, while they helped her in areas where she struggled. “It was amazing to see how fast everyone picked up new skills,” she said.

Once on the floor, she was immediately assigned to a billable project where she worked on applications under the guidance of a mentor. Within 90 days, she had proved she had the competencies to work on her own and was hired as a junior developer. Four months later she was leading her own projects and mentoring a new group of apprentices. “Everyone on our team is expected to mentor,” she said. “It’s part of our culture.”

An embarrassment of talent The academy has been so successful, Techtonic can’t hire all of its graduates, so they partner with clients and other tech companies in the region to develop new talent on their behalf. Clients can hire the apprentices at no additional cost after 1,000 hours of work together, and some do their apprenticeship at the client site. Recently, two apprentices did their work at a robotics company that partners with Techtonic, who hired them when they completed the program. They now both earn

“­Our goal is to train these folks to become engineers, not coders.”

— Kyle Brothis, CTO and head of curriculum, Techtonic Group more than $75,000 per year and have been extremely successful in those roles, Magyar said. “We find a lot of diamonds in the rough.”

Though getting here hasn’t been easy. Creating the academy took a lot of time and resources, and not every cohort was a perfect fit, Brothis said. “We hit some bumps, and it took us a while to work out all the kinks.”

Getting support from the Department of Labor and local workforce development organizations helped them shape the program, and to find early applicants and grants to support them, he said. But the company still had to invest a lot of time and money in developing the curriculum, vetting candidates and mentoring apprentices. “It took a lot to get over that initial hump.”

Now however, the program is so successful it is attracting new clients, which is generating new revenue.

Techtonic was also able to secure $2 million in funding from University Ventures and Zoma Capital to expand the program to serve more clients. “It’s been a really good business decision for us,” Brothis said.

Creating a quality apprenticeship program is challenging, Villeneuve noted. However, companies that think such programs are too resource intensive should consider the cost of not being able to fill entry technology jobs — and the work that goes undone because of it.

“Before I joined Techtonic, every ad I saw required three to five years experience and everyone was struggling to fill those jobs,” she said. “Now we have more trained developers than we can hire.” In an economy where tech talent feels impossible to find, that’s a problem most companies would be lucky to have. CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Business Intelligence

Mobile Learning on the March Mobile learning continues to make inroads into learning investment and delivery.

S

ometime in the last year, we crossed the mobile Rubicon.

The learning industry reached the tipping point when it comes to the use of mobile platforms and approaches for employee learning. It’s unlikely we will ever go back.

According to a survey of the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, a majority of CLOs (Figure 1) now expect to invest in content for mobile learning.

While this is only a slight uptick year over year (from 49 percent in 2017 to 52 percent in 2018), it is nonetheless symbolic of the yearslong trend in corporate learning.

The Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board is a group of 1,500 professionals in the learning and development industry who have agreed to be surveyed by the Human Capital Media Advisory Group, the research and advisory arm of Chief Learning Officer magazine. This survey was conducted in June 2018.

The trend is evident beyond just the intent to invest in content that can be delivered via mobile devices. A majority of survey respondents also report they plan to increase their use of mobile learning as a delivery method in the next year (Figure 2).

According to survey respondents, 55 percent of organizations plan to increase their use of mobile learning. Mobile ranked in the top four, just behind coaching and mentoring and self-paced e-learning as the learning delivery most likely to see increased use in the coming year.

The data from prior years of research show the slow fulfillment of mobile learning’s promise. In 2014, CLOs reported that only 12 percent of e-learning was delivered to mobile devices. Now that’s up to 76 percent. The reasons for that growth are scale and efficiency. More than half (54 percent) of CLOs re-

58 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

port a major driver of mobile learning is its ability to reach a large audience with few resources (Figure 3).

The second biggest driver (36 percent) is a close cousin to the first, cost savings.

While the ability to reach many people efficiently and cheaply is a powerful investment incentive, that belies the utility of mobile learning for purposes beyond simply expanding learning organizations’ reach.

That becomes clear when examining what organizations are developing or buying off the shelf for mobile platforms. As development becomes more driven by enabling learning in the flow of work, as analysts have argued, mobile learning is a significant tool.

According to survey respondents, half of organizations are investing in information resources or references followed closely by on-the-job support content and tools (Figure 4).

Apps, simulations and gaming follow behind, indicating that there remains room for experimentation and innovation in the use of mobile learning as an educational tool.

What are CLOs planning to use mobile learning for? Mobile learning is making inroads into a range of content areas from soft skills like leadership to hard technical skills (Figure 5). The fact that no particular core area is dominating mobile learning indicates that learning organizations are experimenting in many areas to determine how best to use this relatively new and rapidly changing modality.

The future of learning is here but the course is still being set. CLO Mike Prokopeak is vice president and editor in chief at Chief Learning Officer magazine. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

Figures’ Source: Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, N=500. All percentages rounded.

BY MIKE PROKOPEAK

FIGURE 1: PLAN TO DEVELOP OR BUY CONTENT FOR MOBILE PLATFORMS

Yes: 52% No: 48% FIGURE 2: CHANGE IN USE OF DELIVERY METHOD IN NEXT 12-18 MONTHS Increase

About the same

Decrease

65% 55%

56%

55% 40%

42%

33%

51% 40%

44%

67%

61%

57%

54%

49%

40%

33%

34%

28%

23% 5%

Mobile learning

2%

Coaching or mentoring

3%

Collaborative

Self-paced e-learning

Video

Simulations

15%

11%

7%

5%

5%

19%

5%

Instructor-led e-learning

Formal on-the-job training

FIGURE 3: TOP DRIVERS OF USE OF MOBILE LEARNING

Classroom-based ILT

Text-based training

54% 36%

36% 30%

28% 13%

Ability to reach a large audience with few resources

Most appropriate method for type of content being delivered

Cost savings

Corporate culture advocates mobile

Do not use this method of training

Other

FIGURE 4: WHAT IS YOUR ORGANIZATION DEVELOPING OR PURCHASING FOR MOBILE? 50%

46% 34%

29% 17%

Information resources/references

On-the-job support

Apps

Simulations

Games

FIGURE 5: EXPECTED DELIVERY METHOD BY CONTENT AREA Classroom-based ILT

Self-paced e-learning 67%

65%

Coaching or mentoring

48% 47%

53%

51%

39% 34%

42%

39%

44%

9%

Leadership development

20%

Core competencies

20% 11%

10%

8% 10%

Onboarding and new hire training

32%

31% 20%

16%

50%

40%

28%

26%

Business skills training

Mobile learning 60%

46%

12% 12%

Simulations

62% 55%

35%

Formal on-the-job training

Technical skills

13%

7% 9%

Compliance training

Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

59

ED TECH continued from page 28 was talking about my promotion. Nobody was advocating for me. No one was there to sponsor me.” Gluckman said people in the industry don’t think the challenges women face are because of their gender, but they are. “That’s what unconscious bias is all about,” she said.

The lack of confidence in women may stem from how girls are raised, Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani points out in her book “Brave, Not Perfect.”

Saujani says that society has deemed it appropriate to raise girls to be perfect and boys to be brave, which causes difficulty for girls later in life.

“We have to be perfect at everything,” Gluckman said. “We have to be great housemakers, a perfect wife and a daughter and a mother and we also have to be perfect at work. It’s not possible. That’s just too much pressure on us.”

She said the confidence issues that come from that are detrimental. But Gluckman said even when women do overcome imposter syndrome, even when they are confident and ambitious, they are not credible enough.

She said often, women have to prove that they can be as assertive and aggressive as men in order to be effective leaders, but when they do, they are seen negatively or viewed as unlikeable. “It’s a double bind problem in so many ways,” Gluckman said.

Entrepreneur Pam Kostka, for example, a woman profiled in Gluckman’s book, says she’s often penalized for her direct communication style. “Women are supposed to be more empathetic in their style, but I am more direct and logical,” she said. “Maybe I am that way because I had to be, in order to get my voice heard.”

According to a study by the Kapor Center for Social Impact, the number one reason employees cited for leaving the tech industry was unfair behavior and treatment. The study also found that women experienced far more unfairness than men. Miranda-Wolff said these “tech-leavers” often leave for misconduct or microaggressions specifically tied to their social identity.

Some challenges for women in tech are caused simply by the lack of women in the industry. “It’s always on old boys’ club,” Gluckman said. “Every time you go in a meeting, there are only men. It’s not inclusive.”

Miranda-Wolff added that women often leave the industry because they want to be promoted but don’t see any opportunities because they don’t have any women models to look up to.

Further, Gluckman said when men talk about their products they always refer to the user-base as male. “I was at a course at Stanford last weekend and every time the professor used an example about his users, he kept referring to them as men,” she said. “It’s almost like women don’t exist, like we don’t use any products, like we’re not consumers. It’s ridiculous. We use Google, we use Facebook, we use Twitter.”

Miranda-Wolff noted the same problem. “With 60 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

my Alexa, male engineers built her and they didn’t test her on female engineers, so she often doesn’t understand my voice,” she said. “If you’re built homogeneously, then the products that you produce don’t serve everyone they are meant to serve.”

Progress for Women Miranda-Wolff said her biggest takeaway from working in technology is that companies influence the environments they serve. “We want to give education access to all for a lot of these platforms [in ed-tech],” she said. “We need to have as many perspectives as possible, informing how these products get built.”

Jenny Dearborn, CLO at SAP, pointed out that the statistics around women in tech may not always be accurate. “Female executives in tech is only 11 percent and I know that I personally am counted as part of that 11 percent, which is bullshit because I was an English major and I’ve been in tech for 25 years, but I can’t program,” she said. “I’ve always been in education in tech, not in deciding what the enterprise software should be.”

She said often, women gravitate to the HR and L&D functions in tech companies, which may result in “better” numbers, but not necessarily accurate ones.

“Do we go for global numbers – which means we pack all the women in one functional area because that’s safe?

Or do we say we need equality across all functional areas? Is that fair? Does that let engineering off the hook?”

To help find a solution and improve conditions for women in tech, Gluckman said we need to stop asking women to “lean in.” Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg popularized the movement with her book “Lean In,” which suggests that success relies on individual initiative. “We are always saying, what can the woman do?”

Gluckman said. “We’re never asking the question: What can the men do? Or what can society do? Can we get the men to lean in? Can we get society to lean in?”

She said women can work on confidence and imposter syndrome, but men also need to be aware of the unconscious bias they harbor and organizations need to be held accountable for the progress of diversity and inclusion. It will take 217 years to end pay disparities and equalize employment opportunities for men and women, according to the most recent estimates by the World Economic Forum. Gluckman said most women are fighting for change, but without men fighting equally, progress can’t be made.

“I want the men to be with us and to walk arm-inarm with us through the struggle,” Gluckman said.

“When we’re creating this evolution, it’s not just for us, it is for them. It is for society. It is for the world, so we can make it a better place.” CLO Ave Rio is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

ETHICS continued from page 46 Not surprisingly, the truth of your commitment to ethics and compliance will be in your data, which is the work product of your overall program.

One way to objectively demonstrate just how focused and successful your compliance efforts are is to track every topic you train on, every time you do it. This, and asking employees to sign an acknowledgment that they’ve not only been trained but that they understand it, accomplishes important objectives. First, this process shows the scope and cadence of your program by articulating every topic you train on, how frequently you do it, and who received it, from the CEO on down. You will be able to quantify what you’ve done and what you’ve accomplished, which is often challenging in corporate functions deemed to be overhead. Second, this tracking mechanism allows you to demonstrate that any misconduct was not the fault of the company, that the company in fact trained on it, and made its expectations for employee behavior very clear. Importantly, this type of centralized process to capture the

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details of your program, even in a simple database, can demonstrate to your leadership just how valuable the training program the learning and legal teams implemented is to the overall enterprise. Along the way, you will be showing the value of the training team itself. All of this contributes to a return on the investment made by your shareholders.

A comprehensive and measurable ethics-based compliance program correctly implemented and tracked will accomplish much for your enterprise. The learning and legal team will become an even more credible resource for employees and, as a result, employees will be in contact more frequently for guidance. Along the way, your organization’s commitment to compliance will be clear, tangible and supported by objective data for employees. With that, risk has been mitigated, value has been returned to your firm and most importantly, you have done the right thing. CLO

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61

IN CONCLUSION

#MeToo in Mentorship

Highlighting new lessons in corporate learning • BY AMY LUI ABLE AND STEPHANIE NEAL

I

Amy Lui Abel is managing director of human capital research at The Conference Board.

Stephanie Neal is a research scientist at global leadership company DDI. They can be reached at editor@ CLOmedia.com.

n just 18 months, more than 400 high-profile executives and employees have been exposed by the #MeToo movement.

But despite the gains of the movement it has brought unintended consequences. About a third of male managers now feel uncomfortable working alone with a woman — more than twice as many as before.

And nearly half feel uncomfortable participating in common work activities with women, including mentoring them.

This consequence of #MeToo is occurring just as the value of mentoring women is clearer than ever: Our latest leadership research found that of the nearly 2,500 companies studied those with at least 30 percent women leaders — and at least 20 percent women senior leaders — have a major competitive edge. They have about a one-and-a-half times greater chance of experiencing sustained, profitable growth. They are also more collaborative, have higher-quality leadership, are more likely to experiment in pursuit of innovation and are faster-growing and more agile than their counterparts.

Why should these findings grab the ear of every male leader?

These findings make the clear case that organizations that shrink from getting more women into leadership may lose their competitive advantage to organizations that are better at leveraging top talent of both genders. Since men still hold 80 percent of senior executive roles (senior vice president and above), it’s not an option to simply have same-sex mentorships nor does it make the best use of matching talent.

Some executives may decide the only way to ensure they are being fair and avoiding any claims of impropriety is to step back from mentoring entirely. In fact, our study showed that one in three senior leaders have never formally mentored anyone. That approach is a big mistake, as the research also showed that a strong mentoring culture — for both men and women — is linked to better business performance. Organizations with a strong mentoring culture filled 23 percent more critical leadership roles than organizations that lagged on this front. They also had 20 percent lower turnover and 46 percent higher overall leader quality. Clearly, a reluctance to mentor could lead to a huge step backward not only for women but for the entire organization.

What steps can companies take to make mentoring a staple of their leadership development strategy?

62 Chief Learning Officer • November 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

First, companies must formalize their mentoring programs and have those programs include men and women. Formalized mentoring provides an opportunity to build strategic connections across the organization and connect early leaders with mentors who they

A formal document can help clarify what both the mentor and mentee expect to gain. might not otherwise seek out. By doing so, organizations can reduce the discomfort in employees of different genders or backgrounds seeking each other out.

Secondly, a formal document outlining a mentoring relationship can help clarify what both the mentor and mentee expect to get out of the relationship and what activities may be involved. These guidelines are not meant to detail every interaction but to ensure both people understand how the investment of their time will help accomplish clear goals. Those at the top should remember that they too have the chance to benefit from coaching a rising star. As just one example, more companies are now pursuing reverse mentoring. Under this arrangement, senior-level executives partner with junior high-potential employees. This promotes enhanced development and retention of key talent as well as bringing new perspectives to senior-level executives.

While formal mentoring should take precedent, not every mentoring relationship needs to be a long-term one-on-one commitment. Companies should encourage informal mentoring through open communication across the organization to build a stronger, more connected culture and improve cross-functional training.

The #MeToo movement shows no signs of going away. Count on many men continuing to fear their female colleagues will misunderstand their intentions to mentor them. If the issue remains unaddressed, then organizations — and equally importantly, the high-potential women who comprise them — can expect to fall behind. CLO

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