Chief Learning Officer - January/February 2019

January/February 2019 | CLOmedia.com

Texas Health Resources’

Daniel Gandarilla

Learning Through Cultural Immersion - Campari Group’s Language Training Space to Fail and Innovate - Your First Digital Steps - Building Learning Agility

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Burgers and Basics

L

et me set the record straight for those still in many an eager parent, I took it a step too far. When I doubt: Hamburgers are not made of ham. suggested he could try a hamburger next, he shot me We live in a politically divided time when fake news a look. “I might like beef but I’m not going to eat and alternative facts have regrettably become a com- ham,” he said. mon part of the lexicon. But on that basic culinary fact It was a great reminder to check my assumptions. It we should be able to agree. is called a hamburger after all. Identifying that small Yet even that kind of common knowledge isn’t al- misunderstanding may just end up saving us from ways common. It’s a useful reminder for chief learning years of dinnertime aggravation. officers as another year begins.

As a chief learning officer, you may think you’ve There will undoubtedly be many new develop- checked all the boxes. You’ve done a thorough needs ments in education technology this year, emerging ap- analysis, combed through all the relevant performance plications and exciting methodologies that engage data, meticulously surveyed the state of current skills learners and provide powerful potential opportunities and aligned with critical business priorities. But a for development. Technology is advancing at a dizzying small misunderstanding can torpedo all that effort. pace that is exhilarating to watch. Access to the world’s Even in the best-funded learning organizations entire collection of knowledge and expertise is at the where workforce development is central to business, tips of our fingers and learning organizations will chief learning officers have limited power to mandate march ever forward with new initiatives and programs. compliance or compel people to participate in learning. Hard power is scarce. There’s always a more urgent task and a higher priority for busy executives and frontline workers alike.

The ability to influence others is the chief learning officer’s secret weapon. You have to work through others and channel their energies, passions and interests.

That is the way it should be. Experimentation and The best do it so well that it seems effortless. But like a innovation are the currency of the learning economy. duck serenely floating in a pond, beneath the surface Those who are able to learn better and faster are the they are continually paddling. ones who will rise. For CLOs, failure to launch new They talk regularly to top leaders and worker bees approaches and refine old ones is a personal and proalike. In many cases, they will actually do the job fessional failure. alongside them. Those learning leaders invest time and Yet amid the pressure to continually innovate, it’s sweat to understand where workers struggle so when it important not to lose sight of the basics. comes time to solve a problem those workers know the I’m not talking about using agile development learning leader has their best interests at heart. techniques to design a course or evaluating the success Most important, they tell you the truth. They see of a program on the Kirkpatrick scale. It goes without you’re working with them rather than through them. saying that successful learning organizations should And because you’ve listened and invested time and enerexcel at the fundamentals of workforce education. gy in them and their challenges, they’ll give you an honI’m talking about a different set of basics: building est answer when the time comes. They’ll let you know good relationships and continually checking your asthat they didn’t know a hamburger wasn’t made of ham. sumptions. Which brings me back to the hamburger.

When it comes to relationships, it’s hard to have a A few weeks back, we had a breakthrough with my beef with that. CLO 6-year-old son. A vegetarian by practice if not principle, he avoided any kind of meat like it was a T-Rex on his tail. The sight of a chicken nugget heading for his plate would send him shrieking into the other room. Getting his growing brain a regular source of protein was a daily struggle. All that changed on Taco Tuesday of that week.

Mike Prokopeak We added a little ground beef to his heretofore Editor in Chief cheese-only taco and sure enough, he liked it. Like mikep@CLOmedia.com

Relationships are the center of the CLO role.

4 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

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CONTENTS J

anuary/F ebruary

2019 10 Your Career Mike Kennedy of the National Basketball Association on his career journey; Vi’s Judy Whitcomb talks cultivating talent outside the organization; and what people are reading these days.

40 Profile Status Quo? Not This CLO Sarah Fister Gale Texas Health Resources’ ambitious CLO, Daniel Gandarilla, is transforming the learning culture and tearing down silos.

60 Case Study The Language of Business Sarah Fister Gale Campari Group is using political articles and lifestyle magazines to help employees learn English.

62 Business Intelligence Disruption, Meet Strategy Ashley St. John To navigate ongoing change, CLOs are prioritizing strategic alignment.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY STEWART COHEN

8 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

THROUGH AL LEARNING EXPERIENTI

CULTURAL

N O I S R E CONTENTS IMM

January/F ebruary 2019

22 44

56 50

Features

Experts

Learning Through 22 Experiential Cultural Immersion

Alida Miranda-Wolff Is cultural immersion the next wave in leadership development and diversity, equity and inclusion?

44 50 56

14 IMPERATIVES

16 SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

Bend and Flex: Building Learning Agility

Ave Rio Help employees take on an entrepreneurial spirit by fostering a safe environment that allows for failure and innovation.

Ken Blanchard Mastering Organizational Leadership

20 ON THE FRONT LINE

Space to Fail

Bob Mosher It’s Time to Include the BME

18 LEADERSHIP

Alexandra Levit Success in today’s business world mandates a continuous, flexible approach to learning.

Elliott Masie The Learning Blockchain Emerges

David DeFilippo Learning From the Best and the Worst

66 IN CONCLUSION

Kelly Palmer Combat Content Overload

Resources

Your First Digital Steps David Woods Is your organization still at the start of the digital learning path? These easy steps will bring your training into the digital age.

4 Editor’s Letter

Burgers and Basics

65 Advertisers’ Index

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Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

9

YOUR CAREER

Career Advice from

Mike Kennedy LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT LEADER AND ASSOCIATE VICE PRESIDENT, NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION

What’s been your career path?

I started out with the idea that I was going to be a therapist. My graduate training was in cognitive behavioral psychotherapy and at the time I was working in mental health services.

I had the good fortune moving into a training capacity in that field.

Once my education was finishing up and I started getting in front of people to practice therapy, I had the harrowing realization that it wasn’t really well-suited to my temperament. Thankfully I had by then discovered that the training department for the mental health agency was something that I was very well-suited for. It took me a while to realize it, but my preparation to be a therapist was actually very helpful at stages of my career — for teaching me some diagnostic tools and Schoor DePalma Inc. 2000 – 2003: Training manager

Tiffany & Co. 2003 – 2006: Leadership and organization development specialist

2000 1995

10 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

2003

giving me the mindset to look more deeply for root causes, as opposed to just solutions, which has given me some differentiation in my field.

From there, I went into corporate life with a couple of smaller roles, in, for example, an engineering company. The more corporate part of my career really started with Tiffany and Co., where I did organizational development work, which was my first exposure to thinking that went beyond just training or even leadership development. That was a critical development stage for me as well. Then, six years with KPMG. I did several different jobs there, some in a learning consultancy practice, some running a training curriculum for the infrastructure part of that organization, and then part of my time was spent with audit learning and design.

Then I went to the NBA, where I’m going on my sixth anniversary.

How have your experiences helped shape you and prepare you for your role now?

Going all the way back to my early days in mental health, a bad day in that line of work is something that sticks with you. Every bad day that I’ve had in the world of learning and development is something that in many ways pales by comparison, and so it gives me the opportunity to put it into perspective. A friend of mine used to give me a hard time if I was late to a get-together because

KPMG Business School 2006 – 2012: Three associate director roles, ending in associate director of learning and leadership development

2006

PHOTO BY DAVID LUBARSKY

Mike Kennedy, learning and development leader and associate vice president at the National Basketball Association, shares his career journey and how he came into L&D.

NBA 2012 – present: Learning and development leader and associate vice president

2012 2019

I said I had something going on at work, and he would say with some sarcasm, “Oh, you’ve got a training emergency?” I would get very defensive about it and say, “You know, my job matters too.” I eventually realized that’s actually part of what I appreciate about the work that I do: that the bad days are very different than bad days for some other people, but also that a lot of my attention is devoted to strategic thinking and long-term projects.

SM

S E T I B ALL

stions. fire que id p a r ers our dy answ e n n e K Mike

What will the CLO role look like in five or 10 years?

The talent-first mindset is becoming more prevalent for the CLO and I think that’s really gratifying. Part of what I’ve brought to my role is more of a mindset toward identifying root causes and finding innovative solutions rather than just waiting to react to whatever problems are going on, and I think that’s a direction that the entire field has moved toward. Moving even further along those lines, we’re going to be much more involved in talent management. And even if CLOs don’t necessarily take over the role or the responsibility of talent management, I think there’s going to be much closer integration of those functions. In the future, the responsibility of the CLO, maybe first and foremost, is going to shift more toward not overseeing curriculums per say, but really having a line of sight to talent within an organization, how that talent is progressing through the organization, and what needs to happen to maximize the way that talent is deployed and strategically aligned with the needs of the organization. Five years from now, I think the CLO will be attending more to those questions than just questions of curriculum design, or competencies and lining up learning to competencies, or even trying to demonstrate return on investment.

What’s the most important career advice you can share with aspiring CLOs? Ask “why” more. That’s ultimately where I think we have been and can continue to make progress. Be less chained to some of the principles and theories that we’ve followed in the past, and look more closely at the science, being more critical in our thinking. Any CLO is obligated to be able to answer the question “why?”

The more that any aspiring CLO is getting comfortable answering the questions of “Why is that the choice that we made? What’s the data? What’s the science behind it?” Or at least, “What’s the principle that informs that?” That’s the single most powerful thing that we can do, both to be successful and to build credibility within our organizations. CLO Know someone with an incredible career journey?

Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you.

Send your nomination to Associate Editor Ave Rio at ario@CLOmedia.com.

The most important part of learning is: Learner values. If you can’t make the case that the learning merits attention, there’s no reason for the learner to commit.

The most overrated trend in L&D is: Gamification. The notion that all learners are motivated by competition is misguided, and even those who are find many of our “gamified” solutions laughable.

The most underrated trend in L&D is: Effortless access. Every extra click, every extra step, is a nuisance that we can’t afford. It’s easy to say that the learner should just power through. In a world where the learner will not (i.e., the world in which we actually live), we have to take responsibility for reducing friction.

Learning is essential to an organization because: Complacency kills. Market share doesn’t shift in increments anymore. It flows in waves. Devoting time to learning when things are going well is how organizations stay agile enough to respond swiftly to challenges.

The biggest misconception about our industry is: That we’re a luxury rather than a necessity.

I got into the L&D space because: Even small successes can have enormous impact.

Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

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YOUR CAREER

What Are You Reading?

Career Development’s (R)Evolution

By Beverly Kaye and Lindy Williams I appreciate how the authors resurface the “three stakeholder partnership” as a constant in the midst of enormous and widesweeping career development changes in organizations today. In my conversations with learning leaders, everyone seems to be looking for the next shiny object in terms of career development, while career development “constants” are right in front of them the whole time (they are just harder to change). To the authors’ point, companies owe it to themselves to spend more time focused on some of the basics: internal processes, such as better equipping managers, which in turn impacts the coaching outcomes we focus on in our work vis-à-vis the threestakeholder partnership model. This continues to show how increasingly important the manager role is in the employee experience and reaffirms the timeless value of coaching as a career development tool.

Soft skills training will become increasingly important in an artificial intelligence era, since, at the end of the day, it is still people who are running organizations.

— Nadia Nassif, founder and CEO, Springboards Consulting

The Black Swan

By Nassim Nicholas Taleb I am reading this for bringing more insight into our workshop on foresight. I am also reading “The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision” by Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi.

— Sahishnu Majumdar, AGM Training, ACC Limited

Humility is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age

By Edward D. Hess and Katherine Ludwig This book identifies the skills needed in the Smart Machine Age: critical thinking, innovative thinking, creativity and high emotional engagement with others. The book offers information about building these skills.

—M.J. Hall, learning performance designer and coach, content manager, and learning SME, Association for Talent Development Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What’s at the top of your reading list?

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

12 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

The Life of Patrick Henry

By William Wirt I find that biographies help me to understand history better. More importantly, it helps me to understand myself better.

Reading about the successes and failures of people who lived before helps me to understand that I’m not as far removed from some of them, which means that I could probably do more, better. It is always a challenge.

— Patrick Wraight, director, Academy of Insurance

Top of Mind Help Wanted: Cultivating Talent Outside Your Organization By Judy Whitcomb As chief human resources and learning officer, Judy Whitcomb oversees the human resources functions and learning and organizational development for Vi, a national developer, owner and operator of resort-like senior living communities.

ring. An employee’s ability to progress through the career ladder is not limited to a position being open but rather is tied to achievement of defined and demonstrated skills by role. Vi intends to expand community outreach to high schools and continue pursuit of apprenticeship programs.

With unemployment at a 30-year low, many organizations are struggling with attracting and retaining talent. Immediately and in the many years to come, chief learning and talent officers will need to shift their focus on cultivating talent internally to developing and executing on strategies externally.

While many organizations may have strategies and resources dedicated to college campus or trade school recruitment, a new focus on developing a talent pipeline through high school relationships and apprenticeships is essential. There is value in exposing high school students to career pathing and/or apprenticeship programs early on as there is potential to combine work-based, on-the-job learning with relevant technical education in the classroom. Students who participate in these programs may graduate with a high school diploma and real work experience and, in some cases, earn college credits and industry credentials. They also may start on a career path that continues after high school graduation.

Importance of Partnerships Learning and talent officers do not need to tackle the growing labor shortage challenge alone. They can, and should, leverage professional organizations.

Vi joined Argentum’s recently launched Senior Living Works initiative, which is designed to support recruitment, retention and training needed across the senior living industry. The initial launch included a website and recruitment engagement toolkit, with a range of resources to support connections with high schools, technical schools, community colleges and universities.

Talent leaders should also consider organizations such as the nonprofit Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. From developing career pathing software, to creating career and education advising programs for employees, to targeted consulting, CAEL works with companies across all industries to help them maximize their investments in learning and talent management.

We’re at the intersection of talent acquisition and talent development. While many learning leaders have developed leading learning solutions to increase productivity and sales, decrease expenses and accidents, improve quality and develop leaders, it’s clear the labor shortage isn’t going away anytime soon. Collaboration between an organization’s chief talent acquisition officers and learning leaders alongside their business partners is more important than ever. CLO

Strategies Leveraged Vi invests heavily in talent development with the goal of leveraging Vi’s commitment to learning as part of the company’s value proposition. In fact, many of Vi’s leaders joined the company in high school and have taken advantage of the company’s front-line management development program, tuition reimbursement program and certification programs to pursue careers in hospitality, nursing or general management. Nonetheless, with the growing challenges of hiring hospitality and healthcare talent, Vi has shifted efforts and strategies to cultivate interest in health care and hospitality careers among high school students.

Working with Vi’s culinary and nursing teams, Vi developed career ladders for culinary and entry-level nursing positions, which allow existing employees to drive their own career path by achieving specific skills through company-sponsored training programs and mentoAccording to

Judy

What is the biggest lesson you learned in 2018?

Judy Whitcomb Vi

Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What are you thinking about? Send your thoughts to Associate Editor Ave Rio at ario@CLOmedia.com.

The importance of failing fast and learning faster. With the competitive talent marketplace, there are many levers that drive results and success. Not everything needs to be perfect to execute. Leverage lessons learned and be tenacious.

Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

13

IMPERATIVES

The Learning Blockchain Emerges Blockchains focused on learning have great potential • BY ELLIOTT MASIE

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

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

uring the past 20 years, the learning field has evolved through a range of learning systems — learning management systems, learning content management systems, learning experience/record systems, curation collection systems and more. The hope was to build an enterprise system that would contain much of the content, record-keeping and transactions around learning. And it sort of works.

But a conversation echoes in my brain from a meeting many years ago. I was on a board with Eric Schmidt, who was then head of Google, and he asked why learning departments were trying to “stuff everything into a single system” (like an LMS). He was perplexed about why we didn’t just find a way to track the content or data that we needed — from a wide spectrum of systems — and call it up in real time when necessary.

We started to imagine a simpler LMS or a dimension of a talent system that could do some of the core tracking and access elements of corporate learning. But we recognized that the data and resources we wanted to use lived in a wide and open set of other systems: •C ontent in third-party licensed collections.

• Content in open-source areas (e.g., TED Talks).

• Certifications and assessments from external organizations.

•C ontext from internal or public social networks.

• Experiences from an employee’s previous employers.

•P erformance reviews from talent systems.

• Localization of procedures based on global rules and guidelines.

•R eal-time performance data and examples.

What if the learning department had the ability to securely and appropriately access a wide range of data and content — from almost any source — as long as access was authorized? Imagine if the learning system wasn’t a system or even an application programming interface integration but was instead the ability to safely access, use, track, analyze and reformat learning resources and development activities across an open chain.

Yes, we are talking about the potential use of the emerging technology of blockchains — focused on learning.

I was in Africa in September to keynote a learning conference, and my dreams for the application of instantly accessing resources across a global network became sharper and more exciting.

My colleagues from Rwanda asked whether there

14 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

was a taxonomy or numerical tagging system where every learning object, assessment and learning resource could be uniquely identified and accessed with appropriate licenses or authority. They were far ahead of me and my North American colleagues in terms of dreaming about a learning blockchain.

Employees can have verified access to their own learning records to shape a lifetime of learning.

The grocery industry has recently organized its own blockchain, which enables a box of lettuce to be tracked from its farm to the retail counter at a specific Walmart in less than three seconds. It requires a common and open tagging or numbering system that is then accessed by a range of commercial cloud computer processors.

Learning blockchains are being conceptualized and organized by a wide range of learning leaders, system companies, talent officers and global learning networks. The Masie Center is honored to be calling together a coalition to organize a fully open and secure model for a learning blockchain. Here are just a few images of what it could enable: • A leadership development program accesses the experiences of each learner, shapes content around their departments’ real-time challenges, leverages content from many open-source collections and tracks the impact of the program over 10 years — as the leaders evolve their careers.

• As an employee leaves a company, the learning blockchain can give their next employer a detailed perspective on that person’s content, readiness and experience — with their consent.

• Content from external resources (e.g., financial reporting) could be appended in real time to a learning program in development.

Our systems can be deeply enhanced as learning blockchains evolve. And our employees can have verified access to their own learning records to help shape a true lifetime of learning. CLO

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SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

It’s Time to Include the BME

The business matter expert: a new stakeholder • BY BOB MOSHER

I

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.

recently heard from a colleague who shared the following story with me. He was facilitating a design meeting to create a course for new managers. In the room were his traditional stakeholder subject matter experts. Two new managers also were invited in to listen.

According to my colleague, one and a half days into what felt like an amazing data-gathering exercise, one of the new managers spoke up. She said, “Although all of this information is amazing and will ultimately help me become an effective manager, my biggest concern is surviving my first 30 days without being fired or sued.

You just filled four whiteboards with tasks each of you do every day. I hope to get there someday as well. However, if this is the class you create for me, I’ll be overwhelmed by noon of the first day, and I won’t be able to use most of this anytime soon.”

The SMEs looked at each other and didn’t know how to reply. As far as they were concerned, everything they had been sharing was important for a new manager to know. What would they dare skip? Ultimately, they ended up starting over with the new manager leading the discussion and the experienced managers adding color commentary. They refined the four boards of content down to one and reduced what would have been three to five days of training to one to two days.

Does this story sound familiar to you? I bet it would to your learners. For years, our design models and processes have pivoted on gathering SMEs into a room to help us design our deliverables. Those SMEs continue to be valuable contributors, but this story introduces a new stakeholder, one who was instrumental in making my colleague’s new manager program successful: the business matter expert.

BMEs are the consumers of programs. They are the individuals who want to become an SME someday but have miles to go in their development and ability. They are also the ones we’ve been over-teaching for years and, as this story shows, overwhelming at the same time.

Introducing a BME into your design models can produce powerful results.

First, it will force you and your SMEs to rethink the word “important.” To an SME, all tasks are important, but to a BME, only certain tasks are critical. The rest can be learned later in the workflow where learning is optimal. Criticality is defined by the result of failure.

Tasks where the impact of failure is hurtful, destructive or unrecoverable must be taught.

16 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

This leads me to my second point: Using a BME will force you to design a true blended learning program that includes both training and performance support deliverables. For years our SMEs have been helping us design deliverables that over-teach. We have been overburdening our classes, e-learning and most every training deliverable we’ve ever built with too much content. A BME will force you to move the noncritical tasks to the workflow to be learned later. They know how much they can handle and will want support learning the rest when it’s time.

Using a BME will force you to design a true blended learning program.

Performance support is the tie that binds. It’s the missing link in a true blended learning solution. When married with training and introduced as a support tool, performance support allows the classroom to pare down a surplus of content to the most critical information.

Finally, using a BME will create a stronger relationship between L&D and your lines of business because you will pivot more on the true workflow than an assumed one. It has always amazed me how little we know about our learners’ workflow. We know what it should be, or ultimately could be, based on the SME’s view of the work, but that’s not usually the BME’s true workflow. Many SMEs have been removed from the workflow a BME tries to survive each day. Great sales reps become sale managers and are removed from the field.

Great employees become leaders and promote themselves out of the daily duties of a frontline manager.

These rock stars become SMEs. Unfortunately, most lose the new learner perspective. Adding a BME to your design mix will introduce you to the realities of the line of business in ways we haven’t been a part of for years.

SMEs are still an important part of our design process, but with workflow learning coming of age, as well as the incredible embedded learning technologies that can support it, we need to reorient ourselves around the realities of today’s workflow. The BME is the new stakeholder who must be a part of the process. CLO

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LEADERSHIP

Mastering Organizational Leadership

Leadership style should depend on an organization’s development • BY KEN BLANCHARD

J 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.

ust as leading a team is more complicated than oneon-one leadership, leading an entire organization is more complicated than leading a single team. Yet organizational leadership is worth mastering because an effective leader’s influence on an organization can bring people and systems together into a harmonious whole.

The first step in leading an organization is to diagnose the organization’s development level. The second step is to adapt your leadership style to that development stage. How do you diagnose the development level of an entire organization? The answer is to look at the organization’s results — the amount and quality of work accomplished in relation to the organization’s purpose and goals — and its relationships — the quality of interactions people have within and outside the organization.

There are four stages of organizational development: start-up, improving, developing and high-performing. Following is a framework for matching each stage with an appropriate leadership style.

In a stage one start-up organization, results are typically low because goals are new, and most people haven’t worked together before. However, relationships tend to be strong because when people come together to create a new venture, they are enthusiastic. At this stage, a directing style is appropriate. People look to the leaders to provide direction and get the organization moving.

In a stage two improving organization, results are

An effective leader’s influence can bring people and systems together into a harmonious whole. getting better as people gain skills, but relationships often decline as the difficulty of building a new business sets in. At this stage, a coaching leadership style is appropriate. People need leaders to provide direction and support, keep results moving in a positive direction, and deal with frustrations and growing pains.

In a stage three developing organization, results continue to improve as skills within the organization are strengthened and effective strategies are put into place.

Relationships are variable; people are working hard as 18 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

the organization becomes more creative and nimble. At this stage, a supporting leadership style is appropriate.

People are not yet fully confident and need encouragement from leaders to take initiative.

In a stage four high-performing organization, results and relationships are strong. People are working together with enthusiasm, leaders are emerging when and where they’re needed, and customers are raving fans. At this stage, a delegating leadership style is appropriate.

This does not mean there is no direction or support, but it is coming from individuals and teams throughout the organization. The focus for leaders at this stage is to cultivate new strategic challenges and opportunities.

Diagnosing an organization’s level of development can take some time. We’ve seen too many situations where new CEOs — wanting to make a quick impact — enter organizations and immediately go to their favorite leadership style rather than the one that is needed.

A good example is how Carly Fiorina entered Hewlett Packard with a “my way or the highway” leadership style. Relationships took a beating as the company lost several of its most talented, high-performing people. Instead of involving people in leading the change, Fiorina resisted delegating authority. Results declined, and she was asked by her board to resign.

When a leader enters an organization and adopts the right leadership style, the results can be close to miraculous. Consider Alan Mulally. The year Mulally joined Ford Motor Co., the company reported a $12.7 billion loss — the biggest in its 103-year history. Mulally began the tough climb back to profitability by adopting a coaching leadership style appropriate for an organization with low results and declining relationships. Understanding that Ford’s people would be the key to a turnaround, Mulally ate with employees at lunch and regularly conversed with secretaries and assembly line workers. Mulally and the company’s executives sat down with union officials and shared the books. The leadership team and union collaborated to reduce Ford’s employees from 100,000 to 45,000 through retirements and voluntary buyouts instead of involuntary reduction.

By the time Mulally retired in 2014, Ford had posted 19 consecutive profitable quarters.

The skills required to lead an organization are complex but the results can create an enduring legacy. CLO

ON THE FRONT LINE

Lessons From the Best and the Worst Learning from good and bad managers • BY DAVID DeFILIPPO

A David DeFilippo is chief people officer for Suffolk.

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

person’s connection with their direct manager is often one of the most important they have at work, and the quality of that relationship has an impact on their day-to-day satisfaction. In his book, “First Break All of the Rules,” author and motivational speaker Marcus Buckingham notably stated, “People leave managers, not companies.” In my regular review of employee attrition trends, this cause is typically among the top three reasons that employees vote with their feet for any given time period. How can the current and aspiring people managers of the world learn from those bosses who inspired them as well as those who demotivated them and diminished their contributions?

I’ve spent 30 years in the workforce and worked under scores of supervisors ranging from first-line managers to CEOs. The managers who I grew from the most did three things really well: They taught continuously, they provided regular feedback and they flipped the boss-employee paradigm.

I recall my first job as a high school Spanish teacher, where I showed up eager to learn the craft of teaching.

It was when my department head handed me the Spanish I and II texts and said “good luck” that I realized I was going to figure out this new vocation on my own.

Contrast that experience with one I had several years later when I was learning my first corporate role in an operational position. In that instance, my manager taught me how to do my job while working by my side, demonstrating the aforementioned continuous teaching. He said, “I am going to teach you how to do this job by using the tell-show-do model,” which meant he would explain the task, then demonstrate it, and finally I would give it a try, which ultimately led to — you guessed it — providing regular feedback.

While performing new tasks, feedback is an invaluable part of the learning and mastery process. As I advanced in my career, regular reviews by my managers to continuously sharpen my skills have been an instrumental development resource. For example, some years ago when implementing a significant cultural change, I presented a plan to my then manager who said to me, “This is an aggressive plan and moving in the right direction, but the timing of these changes will be too much for the organization to absorb. Let’s find a way to achieve the same outcomes but pace ourselves.” This feedback was one of those life lessons that spoke to my own impatience

20 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

and high standards. I still think about it today; it was a significant contribution to my development.

Building on these first two manager practices, I found that with my best managers the manager-employee relationship and experience was fundamentally different. Those managers flipped the boss-subordinate model and made me believe that their role was to serve and help me. I remember this specifically with a manager who continuously asked me, “What can I do to support you?” This question made me feel supported and also motivated me to solve issues on my own and come back with solutions.

Feedback is an invaluable part of the learning and mastery process.

Conversely, I learned equally valuable lessons from those superiors whose habits I committed to never repeat. These include providing vague feedback, constantly cancelling meetings and being a know-it-all.

In the case of feedback, I have found that carefully scripted and vague descriptions of how to improve are confusing and simply not actionable. The best advice I can give is to just say it, don’t overthink it — your people can handle constructive feedback.

Admittedly, I am a stickler for being organized and managing a schedule. Not keeping to a daily and weekly meeting schedule is disrespectful of people’s time and has downstream impacts on others’ calendars.

I use the first two days of the week to hold direct report one-on-ones and team meetings that are treated as sacred and therefore never moved.

Last, reporting to a manager who has know-it-all tendencies is demotivating and reduces the opportunity to create solutions and learn collaboratively. As a result, I have practiced the use of listening and questioning skills to facilitate real-time problem diagnosis and reflection to foster self-sufficiency among my team members.

Similar to those moments when we hear ourselves borrow a line from our parents and think, “Is that really me?” we can learn from both our best and worst managers to hone the skill of leading and managing people. CLO

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e ersion th m im l a r ip Is cultu leadersh in e v a w ersity, next iv d d n a t en developm clusion? d in equity an

22 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

BY ALIDA MIR ANDA-WOLFF

D

iversity and inclusion is one of the most pressing issues facing companies today. But after years of rolling out initiatives that reap few to no rewards, diversity fatigue is setting in.

The numbers in Atlassian’s “State of Diversity and Inclusion in U.S. Tech” show just how much diversity fatigue is affecting the tech industry. While 80 percent of the 1,900 respondents surveyed agreed that diversity, equity and inclusion was important, individual participation in related initiatives fell by as much as 50 percent, with more than 40 percent of respondents believing their companies needed no improvement despite fewer than 30 percent of underrepresented groups experiencing representation, retention and a sense of belonging.

There are many reasons for burnout.

Diversity programs are often introduced into companies that are struggling with representation already, which means filling diversity slates takes longer and requires Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

23

more investment. Plus, while D&I is largely viewed by companies as valuable, leaders aren’t held accountable to progress the same way they are when it comes to earnings.

But perhaps the biggest reason for burnout is the simplest: The existing programs aren’t working.

Focused more on quotas, multiyear program rollouts and company restructuring, many of the diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in play today are missing the point.

Ultimately, creating inclusive environments that foster diversity comes down to understanding and appreciating individuals as full-fledged people rather than categories, which leads teams to support and fight for equity in ways that combat fatigue.

What Is Diversity Fatigue, Anyway?

Diversity fatigue is a term that first emerged in the 1990s when equal opportunity became a major initiative among corporations. According to a 2017 article in The New Yorker, “The Year in ‘Diversity Fatigue,’” the term was used to describe the feelings of stress and exhaustion associated with trying to recruit talent from diverse pools and create opportunities for more diversity within companies.

Over time, the term was co-opted to describe many different situations. These situations were as wide-ranging as resistance against political correctness, feelings of being overwhelmed by the amount of work left to be done around diversity, and general disappointment in a phenomenon of “all talk, no action.”

Today, diversity fatigue is often used to describe all of the above, but it is most clearly associated with the amount of energy, time and resources it takes to solve complex problems around diversity, equity and inclusion, which makes it harder to stay committed to initiatives in the long term.

As diversity, equity and inclusion have become hot topics across U.S.-based and global companies alike, diversity fatigue has emerged as perhaps the most often-cited opponent of progress, with more and more leaders looking for ways to combat it.

— Alida Miranda-Wolff

24 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

What We Can Learn From Cultural Awareness Cultural awareness is a familiar term in global companies. In these companies managing employees across continents, cultural awareness means understanding that people from different cultures and backgrounds react differently to varying styles of communication, management and motivation, according to Lauren Landry’s “The Importance of Cultivating Cultural Awareness at Work.” Consequently, they need to understand those around them, and then cultivate collaboration, recognition and appreciation strategies to deepen relationships.

One of the key ingredients behind success in cultural awareness is exposure. The more employees collaborate across differences and cultural divides, the more trust and appreciation they build.

Yet so many companies don’t cultivate cultural awareness or the conditions for people to collaborate across their differences. Silos develop, even in the same four-walled offices. Even if silos don’t develop, many companies haven’t achieved critical mass, so employees don’t get the exposure they need to practically see how to solve for D&I outcomes. This leads to the phenomenon Atlassian uncovered among tech workers: Employees don’t think there’s a problem because they’re not close enough to the problem to see it.

However, there is an opportunity for elements of cultural awareness to be introduced to companies of all stripes in the form of cultural immersion. Through cultural immersion, leaders and employees not only learn the foundations of diversity, equity and inclusion, but can often apply them in real-life settings unfamiliar to them.

A Path Forward Through Experiential Learning The case for exposure as a means of reaching diversity, equity and inclusion outcomes has held strong long before the term “DEI” existed.

In the aftermath of World War II, Harvard sociologist Samuel Stouffer found that white soldiers who fought alongside black soldiers as equals were more likely to view their counterparts as fellow soldiers, reducing bias. White soldiers who fought in segregated troops, however, did not view blacks any differently than before they fought in the war.

It turns out that working toward a common goal together in a real-life setting has a much greater impact on change than discussing thoughts around diversity, equity and inclusion in a classroom.

This is the same argument about the effectiveness of experiential learning, which has come to the fore

Cultural Immersion Resources For organizations that don’t have the time or resources to build their own in-house cultural immersion initiatives, there are many for-profit and nonprofit organizations that offer programs and experiences geared at achieving the same outcomes in which employees and teams can enroll.

The Hunger Project This Australia-based nonprofit organization works to create holistic, self-directed paths to fighting hunger in developing countries across Africa, South Asia and Latin America. As part of its efforts, it hosts corporate leadership development programs geared toward building business competencies through immersion in the communities the organization serves. thp.org.au Ignite Journeys Ignite Journeys hosts leadership development experiences for both corporations and individuals looking to build skills across communication, emotional intelligence, and diversity, equity and inclusion through immersive experiences in Mexico, Nicaragua, Tanzania, rural Appalachia and urban Chicago. experienceignite.com Reality Reality is an invitation-only collection of leadership and social impact-related immersive experiences focused on broadening perspectives by bringing people together in Israel. Depending on whether participants are in social goods, tech, venture or one of the seven other fields Reality supports, they have opportunities to join different tracks. schusterman.org/jewish-community-and-israel/ signature-initiatives/reality-experience Upwardly Global This nonprofit organization is focused on helping immigrants and refugees succeed. Unlike other programs that bring professionals to new locales to experience immersion, Upwardly Global partners to bring their job seekers to companies with the goal of providing a service-based experience around mock interviews and practice networking that benefits both their constituents and company volunteers. upwardlyglobal.org

— Alida Miranda-Wolff 26 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

as one of the best forms of adult learning precisely because of its emphasis on exposure and application.

This is what cultural immersion is meant to do — achieve cultural awareness through experiential learning.

Creating Deeper Bonds One organization that has harnessed the power of cultural immersion to drive DEI outcomes for itself and its corporate partner organizations is Upwardly Global, a national nonprofit that helps recent immigrants and refugees return to their professional fields in the United States through career coaching and corporate connections.

According to Rebecca Tancredi, Upwardly Global’s national vice president of partnerships, organizations like Accenture, Starbucks and WeWork partner with the organization because it offers access to diverse pools of talent they wouldn’t have access to otherwise, as well as opportunities for employee engagement through service programs.

“A lot of companies understand that their employees are happier if they engage with service,” Tancredi said. “For these professionals, they can help our job seekers learn to interview in the U.S. style in a way that uses their professional selves.”

The experience of volunteering often leads to hiring, with volunteers learning that many of the tools used to screen out applicants, such as searching for well-known schools and companies or flagging gaps in professional experience, screen out refugees and asylees who are otherwise qualified for the roles.

“Refugees are always going to have a gap in their résumés,” Tancredi said. “If you screen them out, you’ve lost the ability to consider that pool of talent.”

Upwardly Global’s experiential programs aim to create opportunities for companies to learn more about job seekers face-to-face through practice interviews and speed networking events. With a goal of 100 corporate events this year, the organization hopes volunteers learn more about different cultures while job seekers understand what U.S. employers expect from them, regardless of whether hiring decisions are made.

Tancredi says exposure does lead to many hires, though, including in Upwardly Global’s own offices, which have hired job seekers from Peru, Iraq, Benin and Colombia, among other countries.

Designing Cultural Immersion Initiatives When it comes to cultural immersion, there are many misconceptions.

Perhaps the most common is that it is prohibitively expensive to engage in cultural immersion because it requires taking employees to other countries to expose them to people of different cultures or backgrounds. Yet, immersion can take place in the local community or even by bringing people into a company for a daylong program that allows teams to develop rapport and relationships with those unfamiliar to them.

Regardless of the approach, cultural immersion initiatives should be designed with three steps in mind: priming, experience and action.

IMMERSION continued on page 64

Agile HR Is Here Now. Is Your Organization Ready?

“Agile” isn’t just for tech anymore. Are you leading the charge for agile HR, or taking a wait-and-see approach? Find out how HR leaders in major firms from IBM to Cigna to Bank of Montreal are innovating agile talent practices to meet the swiftly changing needs of today’s business.

Agile practices have spread from technology into product development, manufacturing, and marketing, and now into HR. Many human resources executives and chief learning officers are faced with moving away from their familiar rules- and planning-based approach toward a faster, participant-driven model. Is your HR organization on board?

In the recent Harvard Business Review article “HR Goes Agile,” Wharton’s Peter Cappelli and NYU’s Anna Tavis discuss how the agile methodology affects a wide range of industries. Cappelli is the director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, and his thought leadership has been widely published, including in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the Atlantic.

Teams: They’re Taking the Helm

While traditional HR focused on the individual, today’s management and talent systems are becoming more team-focused. Employee groups are creating and revising their goals as new information arrives. That means your HR organization needs to adapt to: • Multidirectional feedback: Peer feedback is essential to course corrections and employee development in an agile environment.

• Frontline decision rights: Organizations are empowering employees to operate more independently. To facilitate that—and help senior leaders relinquish some of their decision-making—Bank of Montreal embedded agile coaches in business teams.

Here’s a look at some of the findings.

Performance Appraisals: “Annual” Is So Last Year

Many firms have dropped annual performance reviews in favor of frequent assessments, often conducted project by project. You’ll find this new approach cropping up across industries, at GE, IBM, Pfizer, Cigna, The Gap, OppenheimerFunds, and P&G, to name a few.

Johnson & Johnson invited its businesses to try out a new continual-feedback process for three months using a customized app. Employees, peers, and bosses could exchange comments in real time. By the end of the pilot, participation had jumped from 20 percent to 50 percent.

Coaching Skills: A Must for Managers

Getting supervisors to replace judging with coaching can be a challenge “because it undercuts their status and formal authority,” Cappelli and Tavis note. Yet effective coaching is key for agile HR. Supervisors at Cigna undergo coach training designed for busy managers. It’s reportedly stimulating the kinds of open conversations that companies want supervisors to have with direct reports.

• Complex team dynamics: Today, supervisors must promote healthy group dynamics. At Cisco, a platform called Team Space helps the firm identify the bestperforming teams so managers can emulate those principles in their own groups.

Other aspects of HR—including compensation, recruiting, and succession planning—are also undergoing massive shifts as companies test out innovative approaches.

“The agile methodology is being adopted pretty quickly,” observes Cappelli. “The challenge—if HR does not move to adopt it—is that we will have HR practices out of step with the needs of the organization. At some point this can become a career-threatening challenge.” It appears that the pressure is on to embrace agile HR.

Learning and Development: What Do Employees Really Need?

Today’s L&D must bring new skills into the organization faster than ever before. New approaches involve using data analysis to identify the skills people need for particular jobs and making training recommendations

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Peter Cappelli, DPhil George W. Taylor Professor of Management; Director, Center for Human Resources, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

tailored for individual employees. IBM, for example, uses artificial intelligence to examine employees’ prior and current roles, expected career path, and alreadycompleted training to generate recommendations.

Wharton Executive Education offers a range of leadership development and business acumen programs for organizations to help executives learn, evolve, and make an impact:

Given today’s agile environments, how do you ensure that your leaders and managers are up to the challenge? Your people need to undergo learning and development that shifts their mindset from yesterday’s static, hierarchical business environment to a team- and project-focused approach for which “nimble” is the word.

At Wharton Executive Education, we help mid-level managers to C-suite executives understand and adjust to the idea of constant change so they’re prepared for any business challenge.

• Custom Programs: Let us design learning experiences that reflect your organizational strategy and corporate culture.

Peter Cappelli, who teaches in Wharton Executive Education’s custom programs designed for organizations, notes that Wharton’s faculty begin with the understanding that the world is a highly uncertain place. “And rather than just assuming that away—which is what you see in many other programs—we start with the assumption that there’s uncertainty and move to the idea of managing it.”

• Open Enrollment: Send small groups or cross-functional teams to Wharton for an immersive learning experience.

• Online Learning: Bring Wharton’s world-class business education in-house to reach a wider audience within your organization.

Cappelli observes, “The learning that you get here [at Wharton] makes sense. It’s not theoretical; it’s based on what we see going on in the world.”

Yes, You Need a Talent Management System In an era of talent scarcity, employer separation from the crowd is essential to compete.

By Adina Sapp With only 0.87 workers per available position,1 it’s likely that you must recruit internally to find the right candidate.

This has clear implications for the talent management (TM) capabilities of your HR system.

Many large organizations have invested in a one-sizefits-all HR generalist system with the aim of satisfying all HR needs. But recent research suggests 39 percent of organizations don’t believe their HR systems provide enough data to make talent decisions.2 The problem is that many of these systems neglect the TM cycle, both in design and in practice. Mike Bollinger, global vice president of thought leadership and advisory services at Cornerstone OnDemand, points out that specialist TM systems aren’t necessarily better than generalist systems; they simply serve different purposes.

“We’re in an era where the talent specialist is crucial to business,” Bollinger says. “When you think about the fact that core HR systems are required to be deep in payroll, benefits, workforce management, statutory requirements and country localizations, you understand that inattention to the other areas may sneak in.”

Generalist systems have merit, of course. They can satisfy compliance requirements and provide a broad set of data.

What they lack is depth of function and the ability to keep up with the fast-changing skills environment. In essence, they exist to collect broad sets of data which may or may not reflect the development needs employees crave.

“We’re in an environment of a global skills shortage,” Bollinger says. “The environment people operate in, and what they’re expected to know and do, is constantly Department of Labor, U.S. Jobs Report August 2018 2018 Workforce State of the Industry Survey.

3 World Economic Forum “Future of Jobs Report 2018” 4 The Fosway Group, “Claiming the high ground” 2017 5 2018 Workforce State of the Industry Survey.

6 Gallup, “State of The Global Workforce, 2017” 1 2

changing. The World Economic Forum says that by 2020, 42 percent of core skills will be atrophied, and it will take 101 days of learning just to keep current.3 That’s nearly 10 percent of the total time each employee works. That’s why large organizations need a unified TM system — to focus on the diminishing longevity of core skills. Where TM applications in generalist systems tend to be underserved or don’t advance quickly enough, specialist systems are focused on creating the system of engagement needed in the flow of work.”

“Workplaces may strive for a modern system,” Bollinger continues, “but it takes several years to put the classic core HR system in, just to yield similar results. A TM system can go in much faster and provide a compelling cost to value4 (a more accurate term than time to value), sometimes as much at 50 percent less cost.” This allows organizations to retain focus on the TM imperative, while also avoiding the risk to operations a core replacement presents.

Getting Buy-In Forty-seven percent of organizations have no plans to invest in TM systems over the next year, but talent leaders know it is necessary for employee engagement.5 As with all strategic investments, the important thing is to draw a straight line between what the business is trying to accomplish and how the purchase will get them there.

The best narrative focuses on loss reduction. Recent research found 85 percent of employees aren’t engaged or are actively disengaged at work. The economic consequence of disengagement is approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity.6 Employees won’t stay forever (especially not in this competitive environment), but they will stay longer and be more productive if they’re

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happier, even in transfer situations. Using TM to create the right employee environment translates directly into measurable financial impact for the business.

Employees also share their experiences with others, which is another reason to focus your narrative on loss reduction. Glassdoor notes that people are likely to share a good experience with three people, but will share a bad one with 10 or more.7 “Focus on the costs you can quantify: high-performance turnover and the impact to the organization from a sales and cost perspective,” Bollinger advises. “We believe at Cornerstone that learning sits at the center of all things development. The employee is really looking for their employer to lead that investment, helping them with a sense of purpose and professional growth.”

Many leaders are concerned with the question of what to do about the risk of investing in employees who might leave as soon as they get their certs. “But that’s the wrong question,” says Bollinger. “The agility 7

Glassdoor, 2015 “The Cost of a Disengaged Employee”

of the organization is dependent on the individuals themselves. Ask instead the cost if you don’t provide engagement and learning opportunities.” If you focus too much on the false economy of cost of the system, you put yourself at risk of not executing against the business needs, Bollinger concludes. That is the investment you can’t afford NOT to make.

Learn more about investing in employee development, growth and engagement at cornerstoneondemand.com.

Why Corporate Culture is Hard How to ‘Walk the Talk’ of a Values-Focused Culture

By Shiva Rajgopal, professor of accounting and auditing and vice dean of research at Columbia Business School

For more than 10 years, my colleagues and I have been surveying CEOs and CFOs, exploring the financial and accounting challenges faced by today’s companies, large and small. And even in the context of issues such as financial reporting or disclosure or earnings management, many CEOs or financial executives would tell us, unprompted, “It’s not in our culture to do X,” and “It’s not in our culture to do Y.” We thus began to realize that culture is universally important, but nevertheless, we hesitated to launch a study of the topic for several reasons. First, it’s a difficult topic to capture: it’s hard to define — it means different things to different people — and hard to measure.

Second, the topic is not part of the competitive advantage of our accounting and auditing discipline and might be better left to management strategy specialists. Finally, corporate culture is seen by many in my field as unscientific because it is often used as the residual claimant: in other words, if I can’t find some other reason to explain, for example, why banks fail, I might claim its culture as a culprit.

Despite these concerns, I decided along with three colleagues from Duke University and NBER, professors John Graham, Campbell Harvey, and Jillian Popadak, to conduct an in-depth survey of the concept of culture from the perspective of CEOs and CFOs. We began with a set of in-depth interviews with 18 corporate executives to identify the major questions and themes we wanted to cover in the survey. We then surveyed more than 1300 executives in major firms.

And what we discovered was that financial executives see corporate culture as vitally important to organizations — but it takes a lot of hard work to get it right.

The Vital Importance of Corporate Culture More than half of the senior executives we surveyed said that corporate culture is one of the top three drivers of firm value. And 92% said that improving their culture would increase their company’s value.

These are striking numbers. It’s important to emphasize that we were not talking to HR professionals or consultants who would quite naturally be predisposed to believe in the importance of their work. We were talking to CFOs, comptrollers, treasurers, and others related to the financial function.

These ‘hard numbers people’ recognized the vital importance of corporate culture. They recognized that half the time, firm value and performance is linked to how you organize the goals for your division and your company and how you motivate people to get to those goals. It’s knowing how to make sure there’s not too much backstabbing or knowing how to run meetings so that they’re productive and focused. And increasingly, in a service-oriented world, as opposed to a manufacturing or industrial world, motivating executives to pull together towards a common purpose is even more critical than ever.

“The heart of culture is in the informal elements that are not written down or codified: specifically, the company’s values and norms.”

Unfortunately, while nearly every respondent said that improving culture would improve firm value, only 16% said that their culture was where it should be. And this very low number came from senior executives within the firms.

Focus on Values and Norms So how can we turn this dismal statistic around? To begin with, we need to evaluate how culture is defined. The study of corporate culture often focuses on the formal policies that define the culture, for example: corporate governance; hiring, firing and promotion policies; and incentive compensation.

However, as we learned from our respondents, the heart of culture is in the informal elements that are not written down or codified: specifically, the company’s values and norms.

Examples of a company’s key cultural values that emerged from the survey and interviews included: integrity; adaptability; collaboration; customer orientation; results orientation; detail orientation; and ‘community’ (e.g. partnership with the community, respect for diversity, and social responsibility). Examples of cultural norms included: agreement about goals and values; coordination among employees; trust among employees; comfort of employees in suggesting critiques; decision-making that reflected longterm thinking; and willingness to report unethical behavior.

In order for a culture to be effective, the respondents agreed,

the company’s formal institutions have to align with and support these informal elements. In many firms, however, there is an apparent disconnect between informal values and norms and formal practices and policies. We heard consistent complaints from our respondents that their companies were not implementing their stated values in practice.

Walking the Talk Is Not So Easy Of course, walking the talk can be easier said than done.

Take promotion practices, for instance. You may have a star trader in an investment bank or a fantastic coder in a technology firm. This employee is difficult to manage, de-motivates others, and has trouble collaborating — but he is incredibly productive. How do you evaluate this person at the end of the year? Do you look to promote or ‘manage out’ this person?

Situations like this one that get played out every day in large companies. In addition, managers, by and large, have short horizons. They don’t intend to stay in the firm for 15 or 20 years, and many incentive plans only reinforce this short-termism.

Shiva Rajgopal is the Kester and Byrnes Professor of Accounting and Auditing at Columbia Business School and vice dean of research. Professor Rajgopal’s research interests span financial reporting, earnings quality, fraud, executive compensation and corporate culture. His research is frequently cited in the popular press, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg, Fortune, Forbes, Financial Times, Business Week, and the Economist.

Learn more at gsb.columbia.edu/execed.

Closing the soft skills gap

Recent Bellevue University research shows soft skills assessment needs leader investment and objective evidence

By Tim Harnett Soft skills are critical for business success. They have the power to deliver substantial returns — a recent MIT and Boston College joint case study found an in-house soft skills training course brought a 250 percent return on investment.1 Yet there’s a commonly held belief that soft skills are non-measurable,2 which might hinder efforts to incorporate soft skills training into other initiatives.

Learning leaders are convinced of the need to develop soft skills at their organizations. How do they go about it? To discover the answer to this question and more, Bellevue University partnered with Chief Learning Officer magazine for the Making the Business Case for Soft Skills survey. While full survey results will be published in a forthcoming white paper, here’s a snapshot of what nearly 600 learning leaders told us about the state of soft skills at their organizations.

There’s a widening gap between the soft skills employees have and what organizations need

On the survey we asked respondents to identify skills at their organizations in the following areas: soft skills, 3 technical skills4 and functional skills.5 Learning leaders are almost three times more likely to report a substantial or critical skills gap in soft skills compared to either technical or functional skills (Figure 1). Also, 31 percent of respondents say the skills gap for soft skills has been widening over the past two years. For these organizations, something needs to change.

Soft skills

63% Technical skills

21.3% Functional skills

19.4%

Figure 1: Substantial/critical gaps between employee skills and organizational needs

Some organizations are ahead of the curve in their adoption of soft skills initiatives

On the survey, we asked the question: “How satisfied are you with the current learning solutions your organization uses for soft skills?” Learning leaders self-reported that some of them are in the vanguard when it comes to soft skills adoption and assessment. Are there any noticeable differences among vanguard members? We compared the answers of the 26 percent of respondents (who we’ll call soft skills leaders) who are either satisfied or very satisfied with their current solutions versus the 74 percent either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied about their current learning solutions (soft skills starters). According to the data, leaders have several different approaches from the starters, which lead to better measurement outcomes and a better business case for teaching, investing in and applying soft skills.

Objective metrics help make the business case for soft skills

For soft skills leaders, integrating training into learning initiatives isn’t enough. To be successful with soft skills training, organizations identify metrics and objectively measure program effectiveness. Currently, many assess soft skills abilities in subjective ways — through selfassessment, survey questions or customer complaints.

Such data points are unreliable for truly measuring employees’ soft skills. Organizations need better data points.

While the data show there are no universally used models or tools for soft skills evaluation, it’s important for organizations to commit to gathering data as a start.

Among leaders, nearly 90 percent gather some data related to soft skills, compared to only 64 percent of starters. Soft skills leaders are also more likely than starters to use objective metrics to assess the efforts of soft skills.

Walsh, D. (2017). “Soft Skills Training Brings Substantial Returns on Investment.” MIT Newsroom.

Doepke, P. (2018). Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills (and How to Use Them on Your Resume). Jobscan.

3 On the survey, soft skills were defined as skills related to communication, teamwork, collaboration, work behavior, problem-solving and critical thinking.

4 Technical skills were defined as skills related to technology and hands-on performance including programming, mechanical equipment or tools.

5 Functional skills were defined as skills related to industry and organizational knowledge, English, math and computing.

1 2

Real Learning for Real Life

For more than 25 years, Bellevue University has pioneered real-world solutions for workforce attraction, retention, engagement and agility. Talent-forward companies partner with us to assure their employees have the knowledge and skills needed to compete in the 21st century.

Download case studies and white papers here: CorporateLearning.com.

Metrics related to productivity and formal assessments can objectively test how employees use soft skills, while manager ratings provide a more unbiased opinion of employees’ soft skills than asking employees to evaluate their own performance. Leaders are two to three times more likely to use these more objective methods than starters (Figure 2).

Leaders Productivity metrics

25%

Starters

11% Manager ratings

44% 18% Formal assessments

27% 7%

The importance of soft skills cannot be overstated.

Training ensures soft skills become an important part of an employee’s toolkit, which will help organizations meet their business goals. To achieve success with soft skills initiatives, L&D leaders should build soft skills development into other types of training. Just having training isn’t enough, either; effective measurement with metrics that go beyond anecdotal evidence of soft skills mastery should be in place. Objective metrics will better position L&D leaders to make the business case for soft skills to senior leaders, helping to ensure buy-in and budgetary priority for soft skills training. Organizations satisfied with the outcomes of their soft skills training recognize this, and their measurement efforts have enabled many of them to make the business case for soft skills to their leadership team.

None

12% 46%

Figure 2: Metrics used to track soft skills

Learn more about Power Skills at CorporateLearning.com.

To read the full results of this research, download the whitepaper at download.clomedia.com/making-the-business-case-for-soft-skills.

Transitioning from managing process to leading people

By Tim Harnett

Organizations today are being increasingly judged on their relationships with their employees as much as by their ability to produce goods or services.1 As we move further into the next industrial age, tools and processes will become less important than how leaders interact with their people. Poor communication accounts for an average loss of $62.4 million per year at companies with 100,000 employees and $420,000 per year at companies with fewer than 100 employees.2 The need for leaders to have superlative communication skills is one factor in the rise of the demand for more and better soft skills among leaders. Soft skills development has emerged as one of the biggest needs in companies today, according to Richard Richards, champion of presence: leader, individual and virtual for Ariel. “There’s been a shift from people managing organizations to leading people. Managing may be more focused around processes, while leading inspires people toward a common strategic vision or organizational goal.”

Going forward, soft skills training and development will be a crucial part of leadership development. But how can organizations provide leaders (especially new leaders who will replace retiring workforce members) with soft skills training and development?

Invest in developing your hi-pos’ soft skills

Recent research identified a lack of applicant soft skills as one of the top drivers of the talent shortage.3 As organizations look inward to develop a talent pipeline, they’ll need to build out employees’ soft skills abilities.

Formal assessments and leader observations can identify how employees feel about how they’re being managed. Once they establish a baseline, organizations

can identify skills gaps among the high potentials who will be called upon to lead.

Younger workers want insight into how their role impacts the organization, making transparency a critical leadership tool for the next generation of leaders. “Don’t shield your workers from the inner workings of the organization,” Richards cautions. “Employees want to feel accomplished and know where they fit into the larger business context. This comes through transparency and relationship building, with leaders who see employees less as people who need to be managed and more as people who need to be envisioned and empowered.”

Follow through once the training is over

Deloitte’s latest Human Capital Trends report identified the rise of the social enterprise — and noted organizations have the responsibility for investing in their own employees.4 Soft skills training is one such investment, but organizations need to follow through to ensure that skills transfer happens on the job. “Training is only 20 percent of the equation,” Richards says. “Without organizational support to develop employee soft skills, there won’t be any improvement later on.” Training reinforcement is a must to ensure soft skills are being put into practice.

It’s also important to adapt leadership competency models to reflect the need for soft skills development.

“If soft skills competencies aren’t measured anywhere, how can they be evaluated?” Richards asks. “How will you know learning transfer is achieved if it isn’t documented? If organizations want their culture to adapt, then including soft skills development in competency models too is a good place to start.”

2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends — The rise of the social enterprise.

Grossman, D. (2013). “The Cost of Poor Communications.” Society for Human Resource Management.

3 Manpower Group. 2018 Talent Shortage Survey.

4 2018 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends — The rise of the social enterprise.

1 2

Don’t neglect your employees’ virtual presence

Telecommuting has exploded in popularity recently: since 2005 regular work-at-home opportunities have increased by 140 percent.5 As organizations move from conducting business physically to meeting and communicating virtually, it’s important to recognize how soft skills apply to an employee’s virtual presence. “Think about all the ways you prepare to meet someone face to face,” Richards says.

“Are you doing those same things for a virtual call? Soft skills are just as important in the virtual world as the physical one, if not more so. The opportunities for distraction are greater online and there’s a tendency to be very transactional in the virtual space. Employees need an empathic virtual presence to better connect with other humans.” After all, 5

what is the virtual equivalent of a warm handshake (or appreciative pat on the back)?

“The only way to teach soft skills is to engage the participant emotionally and experientially,” Richards says. “To engage your employees, your training programs should engage the heart as well as the mind.” Coaching and developing employees so they have a better understanding of the role they play in the organization will be crucial in the coming years.

Organizations should focus on soft skills development for this reason — starting at the top.

To learn more about how Ariel can improve soft skills among your workforce, visit www.arielgroup.com.

Global Workplace Analytics (2018). Telecommuting Trend Data (Updated July 2018).

Ariel develops powerful and authentic communication skills to drive better performance for leaders and teams.

Our integrated suite of programs are delivered via classroom, virtual classroom, and a digital offering to provide flexibility in learning.

Whether you need to develop your next generation of leaders, connect global teams, or keep your workforce engaged and motivated, we can tackle your most pressing business challenges to ensure that your teams write, speak, lead, and sell with impact and emotional intelligence.

Contact us at info@arielgroup.com or 781.761.9000.

Talent Activation

Turning Potential into Performance

By Adina Sapp Despite research from the DeVry University Career Advisory Board’s 2018 annual survey showing that 77 percent of L&D experts feel their organizations are doing a good job of developing the workforce, the persistent skills gap and high rate of employee disengagement across the industry says otherwise. So, what’s missing?

In keeping with its commitment to providing workforce solutions and forming employer education partnerships, DeVryWORKS, the employer partnership team of DeVry University, put together a panel of learning leaders to explore this topic in a discussion titled Activate Talent and Unleash Potential. The intent was to provide tangible strategies to activate your talent, trigger improved performance and energize your business growth trajectory.

The panel agreed that the problem of the persistent skills gap and disengagement arises from multiple external and internal factors, such as the continued evolution of the marketplace and the shorter value duration of educational degrees. “The marketplace has continued to evolve, and our learning methodologies really haven’t,” said Monica Guillory, director of HR and workplace inclusion at RRD. The reality is that employee motivation takes a lot more than checking the box of annual training, and current training methodologies aren’t filling the skills gap. As Joe Mozden Jr., vice president of DeVryWORKS put it, there are three primary reasons talent activation hasn’t “popped” enough to fill the skills gap for many organizations: don’t understand the difference between training 1 They versus talent activation. make learning optional (which is fine in the 2 They long term, but not initially).

3 They succumb to perceived budget limitations.

Training Versus Talent Activation

The panel discussed multiple strategies and methodologies for deliberate and effective talent activation. The important thing to note is that talent activation is not the same thing as training. “The concept of talent activation moves away from training, which is a one-time event, and asks how you create engagement for an employee through their entire employee lifecycle, from hiring, to onboarding, to developing and learning,” Mozden said.

It’s essential to create engagement points along the way, recognizing that employees may not always feel like they want to be engaged, but they can still be highly productive and engaged in the company. Talent activation is not a one-time thing; it should go through the lifetime of the employee.

Employee Buy-in

While many organizations make learning optional, Mozden advised that this may not be the best approach, at least in the early stages of creating a learning culture.

But there is a balance: leaders are responsible for creating a learning culture and employees are responsible for learning. “HR and leadership will be there for you, but at the end of the day you own your own career,” said Casper Moerck, head of learning technology – Americas at Siemens. You can motivate your employees through a variety of techniques, but they are responsible for their own careers. That is why it is so important to hire mindsets, not just skill sets, Guillory advised.

Mozden, who coaches his clients on leveraging talent activation for competitive advantage, pointed out that figuring out the prescribed approach is the other side of the freedom of the “own your career” perspective. It’s also essential to bring the learning to the employee; the university model is not always appropriate in the workforce.

Learning leaders have a lot of power to influence the corporate culture. “Every chance there’s an opportunity to speak to your team or organization, incorporate that language about talent activation. Integrate into the fabric of the organization by the actions and words you use that this is a valued activity

At DeVryWORKS, we understand that some of the biggest challenges for any business are related to the workforce—hiring skilled people, retaining strong talent, and developing the leaders of tomorrow. DeVryWORKS seeks to truly understand your company’s talent strategies and goals, so we can help you build a brilliant workforce and drive success across your organization. Look to us as the resource you need to support your talent development, skills gap training and talent acquisition initiatives. devryworks.com

for the organization. That has a lot of strength in permeating throughout the organization,” Mozden said.

Executive Sponsorship

Talent activation is a calculated strategy with observable results. This is the message you must bring to the decision-makers to ensure that budget is allocated appropriately. “The organizational strategy and what the business wants — those are the organizational learning objectives,” Moerck said.

“Talent activation moves away from training (a one-time event) and asks how you create engagement for an employee through the entire employee lifecycle.”

—Joe Mozden Jr., vice president of DeVryWORKS

“Talent hiring is the immediate crisis, and the cost analysis of that versus upskilling current employees is the way to show executives that talent activation is valuable. Talent activation is not quick to measure; it takes years. So, you need to look forward to those metrics while also solving the immediate problems and showing metrics for what’s happening now.”

The ultimate goal is to solve the biggest talent crises that we’ve seen in years. You might not be able to hire the skill set you’re looking for, but you can create it.

To view the panel discussion Activate Talent and Unleash Potential, visit event.clomedia.com/activate-talent-andunleash-potential-stream.

To learn more about DeVryWORKS, visit devryworks.devry.edu.

Profile

Status Quo? Not This CLO Texas Health Resources’ ambitious CLO, Daniel Gandarilla, is transforming the learning culture, tearing down silos and saving millions of dollars in the process.

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

D

aniel Gandarilla was always drawn to the idea of helping people — though he wasn’t entirely sure which path to follow. He began his college career studying psychology but switched to education. After getting a master’s degree, he taught middle school and high school, volunteered with the Red Cross, and spent time in Mexico City teaching English to American Express executives.

He didn’t find his true calling until he returned from Mexico and was promoted to director of student activities at the school he was teaching at during the time. That’s when he realized he wanted to build a career in educational leadership. “I loved it,” he said.

So he went to Texas Christian University’s Neeley School of Business to pursue a dual Master of Business Administration/doctorate in education — and it changed his life.

In his first year, Gandarilla landed a summer internship at Procter & Gamble’s corporate university, and the following year, he met the now former chief learning officer at Texas Health Resources in Arlington, Texas. “He heard about the internship I did for P&G and said, ‘Come work for me,’ ” Gandarilla said. In 2012, he was hired as an organizational design consultant and was quickly promoted to manager and director. By 2015 he was the new vice president and CLO. “We are creating a new vision of the employee value proposition at Texas Health and Daniel plays a key role in making that new vision a reality,” said Michelle Kirby, executive vice president and chief people officer. “I have no doubt he is up to this task.”

Texas Health Resources is one of the largest faith-based, nonprofit health care delivery systems in the United States and the largest in North Texas in terms of patients served. The organization serves patients in 16 counties through 29 hospi-

40 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

tals, all owned, operated, joint-ventured or affiliated with the system. It employs roughly 25,000 people and has more than 6,000 physicians with active staff privileges.

Gandarilla’s rapid evolution from consultant to leadership required him to mature quickly into a leader who can command the respect and loyalty of his teams. Kirby noted that he faced some unique challenges early on. “As a first-time chief learning officer, Daniel has had to persuade people to see him differently,” she said. Like most first-time leaders, he

“No one gave me the directive to blow everything up, but challenging the way things are done is how you figure out what’s best for the organization.”

— Daniel Gandarilla, vice president and CLO, Texas Health Resources had to figure out how to convince people to follow him. “Some people make this transition successfully and others do not,” she said. “Daniel has been very successful stepping up into this role and after two short years, the organization cannot imagine a more suited CLO.”

A Single Source for Learning One of the first initiatives Gandarilla launched as CLO was the Education Advancement Program, an overarching project to streamline learning and increase quality and access to training for Texas Health employees. This organizationwide change effort set the tone for Gandarilla’s leadership. “My approach is

PHOTOS BY STEWART COHEN

Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

41

Profile to look at every problem through the lens of who is involved and what education is appropriate to help them improve their performance,” he said.

He used this philosophy to determine where and when to merge learning programs and eliminate redundant content, and it drove the decision to centralize all instructional design and delivery within Texas Health Resources University, or THRU, which now oversees all training for the organization. “We saved $2 million in year one from that initiative alone, which has allowed us to implement new programs,” he said.

The centralization caused significant disruption in the organization because it took training oversight and resources away from the individual hospitals and clinics and funneled them to THRU. But Gandarilla made sure each facility saw value in the transition, said Asia Wellington, manager of learning and leadership development. Previously, each hospital had one or two resources to manage all learning. To balance the loss of those re— Jennifer Chavez, associate sources, Gandarilla created chief nursing officer, Texas regional “pods” made up of Health Resources a learning technology coordinator, learning development consultant, clinical educator and an academic liaison to address all of the needs of the facilities in each region. “It made them feel like they got more overall value by giving up those resources,” Wellington said.

This is the kind of innovative thinking that has won Gandarilla fans across the organization, said Kirby. She noted that he is especially good at collaborating with stakeholders across the organization and listening to their needs before suggesting solutions. “Additional training is not the answer to every problem, and Daniel knows how to work with leaders to help them think through other alternatives,” she said.

“He just wants to help people do their jobs confidently and competently.”

cians. He also led an effort to create an online career development portal for employees, revamped the employee orientation program, and created a learning and education cabinet chaired by executives to involve leaders in determining the direction that the learning organization will take going forward. “We laid out the things we want to do, focusing on how we can use technology to improve targeted education,” he said.

He is now working on a pilot project to use data-driven analytics to help employees customize their learning paths, as well as rethinking the organization’s approach to mandatory training so they can provide the necessary education without wasting employees’ time. “The data shows that healthcare professionals spend 80 percent of their time in required training,” Gandarilla said. He wants to clean up that process so employees can still meet their certification requirements but in fewer hours, allowing them to spend more time improving their skills and adapting to the transforming health care environment.

Gandarilla now refers to himself as the “Chief Time Enforcement Officer” and is looking for every opportunity to streamline the training workflow for employees. In one simple example, he eliminated a mandatory annual 15-minute video on dealing with an active shooter for any of the 25,000 employees who already viewed it, replacing it with a much shorter summary. “It saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, and thousands of hours of their time,” he said.

Training With Dummies In his three years as CLO, Gandarilla has also helped expand several of the organization’s leadership training programs, including Physician’s Lead!, which provides leadership training to Texas Health physi42 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Daniel Gandarilla, vice president and CLO of Texas Health Resources, looks for every opportunity to streamline training workflow for employees.

He’s also deployed artificially intelligent mannequins that provide simulated lifesaving scenarios and automatically report results back to the trainee and to the regulatory bodies. “Employees used to have to take a mandatory life-support class every year,” he said. Now they can demonstrate their skills on the dummy, get immediate feedback and continuously renew that certification without attending a formal class.

Gandarilla is currently exploring how THRU can bring accreditation processes in-house so employees can receive ongoing certifications more simply and in less time than it would take to complete the programs through accrediting bodies or external universities. “It’s all about disrupting the traditional ways of thinking about training,” he said. “No one gave me the directive to blow everything up, but challenging the way things are done is how you figure out what’s best for the organization.”

Quiet Disruption Gandarilla may have disruptive ideas, but his colleagues repeatedly point to his quiet and collaborative nature. “People respond very well to his gentle style of leadership and humility,” Kirby said. “People feel like their voices are being heard and valued.”

Jennifer Chavez, associate chief nursing officer, agrees. Chavez began working at Texas Health as a patient care technician when she was just 17 years old and has worked her way up through the organization, taking every training and leadership program available to her. She currently works closely with Gandarilla, who she views as a mentor and peer.

Chavez first began working with Gandarilla when he was the sponsor for a cross-department team of leaders working on a knowledge management analysis project. Like Kirby, she admires his “lead from beside” approach. “Many leaders in health care have a hierarchical presence and ‘power over the people’ attitude, but not Daniel,” she said. “He has the perspective to step back and look at us as individuals so he can leverage the strength in the group.”

She also appreciates his willingness to immerse himself in the organization. She recalls calling him with concerns that some changes in the way patient care was being delivered weren’t being adopted across the nursing staff. He turned up a few days later and sat through three focus groups of nurses to figure out what the problem was and how it could be addressed. He never criticized anyone or identified fault, Chavez noted. He just went back to his office and implemented some changes as part of the broader process improvement effort. Then he checked back in with Chavez a few weeks later to see how things were going.

“It’s all about disrupting the traditional ways of thinking about training,” Gandarilla says.

“He never said what actions he took, but I saw the positive change,” she said. Nurses were happier, and key performance measures around catheter-associated urinary tract infections, central line-associated blood stream infections and sepsis mortality all showed consistent improvement. This is one of many examples of his nonpunitive approach to problem solving, she said. “He just wants to help people do their jobs confidently and competently.”

Prescribing Change While Gandarilla is often in disruption mode, looking for the next opportunity to improve learning delivery, he is surrounded by a team of leaders who keep him grounded and help him focus on the best next problem to tackle. “He is a change agent, the kind of leader who gets in front of an issue and is always looking for a way to do things better,” Wellington said. “We provide the balance to make sure he can deliver those plans.”

Kirby added that leaders like Gandarilla are vital to organizations that want to evolve the learning culture so they can deliver more value to the business while helping employees develop the skills they need for the future. “Health care in general is in a state of constant change as we reimagine the future of health care and how we will survive,” she said. “Daniel appreciates and understands that reality and does his part to ensure that THRU remains relevant to the organization’s mission, vision and strategic objectives. These leadership skills and acumen are extremely important to be a successful CLO.” CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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43

Bend

& Flex:

Building Learning Agility

BY ALEX ANDR A LEVIT

A

former manager once told me I had the ability to quickly assimilate information, that he could tell me how to do something and I would then apply that knowledge to a variety of different situations. I now see this feedback as the ultimate compliment, for my manager felt I had learning agility.

Learning agility is openness to new information and the ability to gain and apply insights derived from this information. People with this trait often follow a nontraditional path and can develop professionally from an array of diverse experiences. Learning-agile people aren’t perturbed by shifts in direction.

They are focused on the end state and are will-

44 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Employees can no longer master a single skill set and expect to skate by for the rest of their careers. Success in today’s business world mandates a continuous approach to learning.

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45

ing to put themselves out there. When they fall, they get back up. They take risks and often receive commensurate rewards.

Consulting firm Green Peak Partners collaborated with researchers from Teachers College at Columbia University in New York to assess the value learning-agile individuals bring to their organizations. Their study found that private equity-backed C-suite leaders who ranked high for learning agility on an assessment test also outperformed less agile peers as measured by revenue growth and “boss ratings” issued by their boards.

Companies talk a good game when it comes to innovation, but it can only happen when prioritized by senior leaders.

Why is learning agility especially critical today?

In their book “The Future-Proof Workplace,” Linda Sharkey and Morag Barrett wrote that in the past education could be described by “I,” or deep knowledge and expertise in one area. But the shape of the future-proof learner is better represented by a truncated “T” because a single area of expertise simply doesn’t work in an increasingly complex workplace.

Rather, employees must be more flexible and possess knowledge across disciplines. “Today’s car mechanic is a great example of the new ‘T’ learner, with a deep knowledge of mechanics, in addition to engineering skills to support the electronics now added to the car’s design,” they wrote.

Emphasize Core Actions of Learning-Agile Individuals Learning-agile employees have honed specific habits. Teaching and encouraging your team members to practice these habits, which follow, will build agility capital on your team.

First, challenge preexisting mindsets. Be open to new ways of doing things. Pay attention to the processes and examples your team is using to address issues.

Always ask: What are 10 different ways I could approach this? You might not actually execute all the ideas you come up with, but you shouldn’t dismiss anything out of hand.

Look for the common thread. What aspects of your current projects are similar to projects or challenges you’ve faced before? For example, if a current marketing campaign isn’t working as intended, 46 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

could the problem be like last year’s technology implementation, in which you didn’t do enough advance audience research?

Reflect on the past. Explore what-ifs and alternative histories for projects in which you’ve been involved.

Never pass up an opportunity for genuine feedback, asking, “What are three or four things I could have done better?” Make sure the question is open-ended but specific so that you can act on what you learn.

Take more risks. Look for stretch assignments where success isn’t a given. These might involve new roles, new parts of the company or new geographies.

Avoid getting defensive. When a risky project fails, don’t scramble to cover your tracks or look around to see who you can blame. Accept that you’re fallible and acknowledge the misstep. Capture the key learnings and make a conscious effort to take a different path next time.

Finally, don’t unconsciously put down learning-agile teammates. Individuals with learning agility constantly challenge the status quo and may appear rough around the edges to more diplomatic, laissez-faire colleagues.

However, their value is undeniable and the more of them we have working for us at all levels, the better off we’ll be.

Encourage Acquisition of Diverse Expertise Learning agility isn’t just a mindset. It also helps to provide a wider bench of skills from which to draw. Fortunately, it’s only getting easier to get a more generalized education or train a specific new skill without a lengthy degree-seeking process. Thanks to the rise of MOOCs, employees may not even need to leave their desks.

For example, hedge fund manager Salman Khan launched The Khan Academy as a series of YouTube video lectures intended to teach mathematics to his young relatives. Now, the academy houses thousands of videos on everything from graphic design to physics, most only a few minutes long. Udacity offers nanodegrees, which provide training and certification in technical subjects and skills (cybersecurity, software engineering and so on) and take six to 12 months to complete. Surprisingly, many of the best MOOCs are free. Computer scientist Sebastian Thrun taught an artificial intelligence course to Stanford students while also offering it as a free MOOC. More than 160,000 people signed up.

We as leaders need to prompt our people to judge for themselves which coursework is most appropriate at a given time because the future work world demands that individuals seek out and participate in self-directed learning. If your teammates need a model for this, they need only look to many of today’s grade school students.

The popular private education method founded by Ma-

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ria Montessori in the early 20th century teaches children to follow their curiosity rather than direct instructions.

Even in state school classrooms, the flipped classroom model is taking hold. Using this method, children use digital resources to master a subject on their own, and the instructor facilitates a discussion afterward. In this way, children can learn at their own pace and focus on the material that promotes the most interest and utility.

Whether it’s offering a company-developed course, tuition reimbursement, an extra hour to do a MOOC or a stretch assignment with another department, work with each of your employees to devise a learning and development plan that makes the most sense for your team and for them as individual careerists. Keeping the agility concept in mind, the plan should be updated routinely to keep pace with changing goals and new skill requirements.

Foster Intrapreneurship Leaders should also institutionalize intrapreneurship to increase learning agility. Intrapreneurship is the practice of entrepreneurial strategies within the context of, and leveraging the resources of, an established organization. Many companies have come up with creative ways to incorporate intrapreneurship into everyday operations.

The Microsoft Garage resides in Bill Gates’ old office and serves as a space for employees in any role to work on innovative projects. Coca-Cola’s startup weekends and incubator programs prompt staff to develop and pitch ideas that will take the company to the next level. Stock photography company Shutterstock hosts an annual daylong hackathon during which employees present demos for new tools that will improve the customer experience. Two tools that are now used routinely — Spectrum (color search) and Oculus (data analysis) — were initially unveiled at the hackathons and integrated into Shutterstock’s core business.

Companies talk a good game when it comes to in-

Communicate to your staff that they should feel free to tinker. novation, but it can only happen when prioritized by senior leaders. Your first strategy here is to establish an in-person committee dedicated to coming up with one new revolutionary process or service a month. Give each of your employees an occasional afternoon or full workday to work on passion projects that will drive the business forward.

Recall the risk-taking nature of the learning-agile 48 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

individual, and reward experimentation. If you insist that your people always adhere to existing policies and procedures — staying in budget and staying in line — your organization will suffer in the long run. Communicate to your staff that they should feel free to tinker. Incentivize employees to take risks and launch new initiatives, and make sure they know that if an idea fails, their careers will go on.

Practice Hands-Off Management You can also promote learning agility by imbuing your team with greater independence. Self-managed teams are licensed by a senior leader to operate independently and are given the resources necessary to meet predetermined business objectives.

One of the reasons workers like startups so much is that being on a smaller team means they can cut through less red tape to do their jobs. Self-managed teams employ the same concept of team ownership (i.e., action can be taken without the extra step of seeking approval within a traditional hierarchy).

Self-managed teams use regularly scheduled meetings to ensure members are on the same page in terms of the best way to move forward. They gain consensus on a small scale and then quickly proceed, avoiding problematic situations like receiving conflicting marching orders from different executives and remaining in a holding pattern until some piece of essential communication trickles down the line.

A few years ago, shoe retailer Zappos got the world’s attention when it jumped into the most extreme version of self-managed teams. The company obliterated its hierarchy, getting rid of all titles and inviting employees to organize into “circles” working toward the same goal.

Because working with other teams is so easy, Zappos workers are more likely to expand their skills and acquire cross-functional expertise. The company even institutionalized this idea with the launch of the Role Marketplace, an internal job board that lists specific tasks other teams need completed. The Role Marketplace saves Zappos money in recruiting and contracting costs and gives individual employees the opportunity to spread their wings if their current workload is light or they are jonesing to try something new.

By participating in another team’s project, an employee might earn a badge that showcases their newfound experience. Once you have a badge, it’s easier to be selected for another project with that group because you’ve proven you’re qualified. And, as you’ve likely guessed, this process results in greater learning agility all around.

LEARNING AGILITY continued on page 65

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50 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Learning leaders can help employees seize the entrepreneurial spirit by fostering a safe environment that allows for failure and innovation.

I

BY AVE RIO

n 2007, two designers struggling to pay bills had an idea to rent out three air mattresses on their living-room floor and cook breakfast for their guests. The idea struck during a design conference in San Francisco when the city’s hotels were fully booked. The two men created a website, Airbedandbreakfast. com, and charged $80 per night.

The designers, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky, decided to target conferences, aiming to have locals list their rooms for conference attendees to book. Next, they attempted to take the idea to the South

by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, but the idea flopped. Only six people put up listings and just two people booked them — one being Chesky himself. In an interview with National Public Radio host Guy Raz in the podcast “How I Built This,” Gebbia said this failure was “completely demoralizing.”

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Gebbia and Chesky sought feedback from guests and discovered that people found exchanging money in person awkward, especially inside a home. Taking the feedback, Gebbia and Chesky decided to bring the transaction online, allowing people to seamlessly pay with a credit card. Suddenly, the two realized they had a business model — a 3 percent service fee from hosts to cover the cost of processing payments online and to help operate the Airbnb platform, as well as a 6 to 12 percent guest service fee from bookers. Today, Airbnb is the preferred lodging experience for millions of people around the world and has expanded into a multimillion-dollar business.

Raz summed up this lesson as “failure is your friend” in his keynote at the Chief Learning Officer Symposium in Houston last October. Through interviewing entrepreneurs for his podcast, Raz has unique insight into the minds of the most successful entrepreneurs. But lessons from entrepreneurs can be extended outside the entrepreneurial field and into the world of learning and development. Learning leaders can nurture and support an entrepreneurial mindset inside organizations by creating a culture that supports failure, problem-solving and innovation.

Supporting Failure At this past CLO Fall Symposium, Raz said Airbedandbreakfast.com’s failure at South by Southwest, and the feedback that came from it, led to the single most important innovation that transformed Airbnb into the biggest online marketplace for arranging and offering lodging.

Incremental adjustments may ultimately yield greater, more sustainable results than radical, sweeping change.

Raz said learning leaders need to give people the space to be confident by giving them the space to fail.

He said anything can be learned, but not instantly — it’s a matter of giving people the space and time to ruminate before they can get good at something.

Raz does this on a small scale at NPR for his three podcasts. They have a rigorous, competitive internship process, supporting two interns at a time. He said it takes about a year and a half of “hand holding” for someone to be ready to do one segment of the “TED Radio Hour” podcast on their own.

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“It’s a lot of time and investment,” he said. “We give them a lot of time and space to screw up, but we always have a safety net under them. They might screw something up, but it’s never going to be catastrophic. It’s never going to destroy the show.”

Matthew Harris, co-founder of Patheer Inc., a talent development and analytics platform, said he identifies with the lesson about failure through his experience as an entrepreneur. “Failure is your friend because you get to learn what doesn’t work and then you can move on and try a different solution,” he said.

Scholley Bubenik, author of “People Power: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Managing Human Capital,” said the most important way to dig out of failure is to problem-solve. “I look at failures as opportunities,” she said. “When something doesn’t go the way I expect it to, I think about what I learned from it and how I could modify it or make changes to be successful.”

She agreed that employees need opportunities to fail and to solve problems in the workplace. “If you don’t make mistakes and you don’t fail, sometimes that means you’re not changing,” she said. “If you’re not changing, you’re not growing and you’re not learning.”

Fostering Internal Innovation Traci Wilk, senior vice president of people at The Learning Experience, said learning leaders can nurture and promote an entrepreneurial mindset inside organizations by acting as servant leaders. “Leaders have the responsibility to role model and influence others to act in ways that bring out the best in people,” she said. “In my experience, the majority of learning leaders are naturally focused on the needs of others and helping them to develop, seeing this as the route to both personal and organizational success.”

When learning leaders use their influence to demonstrate the impact of these principles on retention, engagement and business results, Wilk said they shift traditional notions of leadership and better prepare companies to face uncertain futures.

Harris added that part of learning leaders’ support of internal innovation involves staying open to what people want to learn. “If you have someone in marketing who wants to learn programming, take advantage of that,” he said. “They could become a good programmer — or maybe it fails, but at least you took a shot and you kept someone engaged at your company.”

He said the more open learning leaders are to giving people the ability to learn different things, even if those things aren’t related to their careers, the more engaged the employee will be and the more opportu-

nities they will have. Rather than leaving the company, Harris said this could provide the employee with an opportunity to move departments within the company. “Giving people the freedom to learn is what starts the entrepreneurial spirit,” he said.

Those who already have an entrepreneurial spirit have an exceptional desire to learn and CLOs need to support that, Harris said. “As an entrepreneur, you have the rebellious spirit of wanting to do something completely different and new,” he said. If learning leaders don’t support this creative attitude, Harris said there is a missed opportunity for internal innovation.

“The more you learn, the quicker you’re going to succeed,” he said. “If you give people that openness to learn, they are going to be more open with you in terms of what they want to learn and where they want to go.”

Bubenik added that nurturing internal innovation starts with looking within the organization to see who exhibits entrepreneurial traits and working with the human resources department in recruiting to ensure the company is hiring people with entrepreneurial mindsets.

Bubenik said innovative employees can be found throughout the organization. “Everywhere, from the person doing the basic job — hands-on on the manufacturing floor — up to the people who are in the executive roles,” she said. “Often, it is those people who have their hands in the work that can see innovation a little bit more clearly because they are actually doing the work.”

Teaching Leaders to Listen If an organization is too rigid, Bubenik said it’s hard for learning leaders to build an entrepreneurial culture. She said a big part of a CLO’s role is to train management on how to support that culture. She said to look for examples of leaders who have been successful risk-takers and who support the development of their people. “Engage those leaders in helping you develop programs that can mirror what those individuals are doing,” she said.

Since developing coaching and mentoring programs is so vital in bringing out internal innovation, Bubenik advises bringing in an outside person to coach managers in mentoring to in turn create a program and platform for managers to subsequently coach employees. “Managers are not always the best at taking the time to have one-on-one meetings with employees to ask them for their ideas, to give them feedback,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t clearly see the importance of developing their employees except when it’s the annual review time.”

NPR’s Raz doesn’t have that problem as a manager. He believes successful leadership is about listening to people. He said he tries to be disarming by

making himself available to talk to his co-workers about anything. “Every week I make sure that I’m asking every single person how they’re doing,” he said at the CLO Symposium. “Is there something you want to work on? Is there an idea you have? Do you feel challenged?”

Raz said he doesn’t want to overwhelm his employees, but he wants to make sure everyone feels motivated and committed.

Bubenik said when learning leaders develop programs that encourage creativity and serve as a platform for managers to be engaging in this way, it can spark innovation and creativity. She said the most important part of leadership development programs should be teaching leaders how to have a leadership attitude. “You are going to focus on developing strong relationship skills, you’re going to invest in your people, because that’s what leaders do,” she said. “Managers manage people and leaders develop people.”

“Managers manage people and leaders develop people.”

— Scholley Bubenik, entrepreneur and author Wilks added that taking a traditional, authoritarian leadership approach can harm employee morale and hinder creativity and innovation, ultimately stifling growth. “Leaders don’t necessarily need to carve out discrete time to focus on these areas; rather, they should infuse these concepts into everything they already do,” she said. “This may include taking a fresh approach to a recurring problem or building in retrospective activities once an initiative has been implemented.” She said incremental adjustments may ultimately yield greater, more sustainable results than radical, sweeping change.

Measuring Success Few would argue against having an entrepreneurial approach inside an organization, but the reality is that few companies focus on supporting this type of internal entrepreneurship. By nature of hitting sales goals and revenue expectations, it can be hard to step aside and make time for proper intrapreneurship and innovation. But Bubenik argues that focusing on intrapreneurship will help the company’s bottom line in the long run.

“A work environment that fosters intrapreneurship and innovation typically has a high level of SPACE TO FAIL continued on page 64 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

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I

n the pursuit of business success and bottom-line results, joy is an attribute that can often seem trivial or unimportant.

But the irony is that joy originally evolved to motivate our early human ancestors to pursue goals, and psychologists are beginning to understand that rather than being a distraction from success, joy actually fuels it.

CAN YOU DEFINE JOY? WE TEND TO CONFUSE IT WITH HAPPINESS AND/OR POSITIVITY. The words joy and happiness are often used interchangeably, but from a scientific perspective, they actually have different meanings. Happiness is a kind of broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time. It’s complex and is influenced by a range of factors, from how fulfilled we are at work to the strength of our relationships to our genetic set point.

But joy is simpler and more immediate. Joy is an intense, momentary experience of positive emotion, one that we can recognize by certain telltale expressions and sensations: smiling and laughter, and sensations of lightness or warmth, or a feeling like you want to jump up and down. I find this distinction important because while it’s sometimes hard to know if we feel happy, small moments of joy are much more accessible to us, even in difficult times.

HOW DID YOU STUMBLE UPON THIS LIFE CHANGING IDEA — THAT JOY ISN’T JUST A FLEETING INTANGIBLE FEELING? HOW DID YOU END UP ON THE PATH TO BECOME A “JOY EXPERT”?

I was in my first year of design school when a professor told me that my work inspired a “feeling of joy.” This was perplexing to me because I hadn’t set out to evoke joy at all. I wanted to solve serious problems with my designs, and joy seemed light and fluffy — beside the point for me. But at the same time, I was intrigued, because I’d always thought of joy as this intangible, elusive feeling, and I’d always been made to feel that we weren’t supposed to find it in material things. So I began to wonder, how do tangible things create this intangible feeling of joy? None of my professors knew the answer, and so this sent me off on a quest to understand how the physical world influences our emotions.

And what I discovered is that there’s a growing body of research that shows that many different aspects of our surroundings have a profound influence on our joy and wellbeing. But because psychology has historically been an inward-looking discipline, focused on the role attitudes and behaviors and neurochemistry play in shaping our mindsets, this perspective had largely been overlooked.

initiatives like Publicolor, a nonprofit that paints underserved New York City school districts in vibrant colors, that show that color can have a substantial influence on behavior, reducing absenteeism and increasing students’ sense of safety, and it becomes clear that while the potential benefits of these kinds of interventions are substantial, the costs and risks are very low.

DURING YOUR 10 YEARS OF RESEARCH INTO THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN OUR ENVIRONMENT AND OUR EMOTIONS, WHAT HAS SURPRISED YOU THE MOST? One of the areas of research I find most surprising is the finding that exposure to greenery and natural elements can affect interpersonal relationships. In one study of residents in Chicago public housing, researchers found that having a greater density of trees around a building could decrease incidences of aggression and irritability among residents. In a study of prisons, just watching nature videos led to a 26 percent reduction in violent incidents. And just adding a few houseplants to a windowless computer room made people behave more generously toward each other. One hypothesis is that nature restores our cognitive reserves, which in turn makes us calmer and less irritable. It also has been shown in numerous studies to restore our concentration. Yet studies also show that we consistently underestimate the mental health benefits we’ll get from spending time in nature. So finding ways to get outside and bring the outside in are vital to our wellbeing, and might also subtly improve our productivity and our interpersonal relationships too.

We can also look at areas where the research is further along, such as with the effects of light on health and performance.

For example, studies show that workers who have a greater exposure to natural light sleep better at night and are more active during the day than those who sit in dimly lit areas.

Exposure to natural light in schools has been shown to correlate to improvements in student performance of up to 26 percent on standardized testing. And as with bright color, brighter light improves mood, reduces stress and increases alertness among workers. These studies show that simple changes to the work environment can measurably influence quality of life and performance for employees.

EVERYONE CAN INSTANTLY TELL WHAT THINGS MAKE THEM HAPPY, BUT HOW DO YOU INTENTIONALLY FIND AND CREATE OR INCORPORATE THOSE THINGS INTO YOUR LIFE AND THE WORKPLACE? Knowing that there are certain sensations — colors, textures, patterns, and forms — that elicit joy, we can use this to embed joy more fully into our surroundings. For example, a cross-cultural study of nearly a thousand workers shows that people working in more colorful environments are more alert, confident, friendly, and joyful than those in drab spaces. So knowing this, it makes sense to include a vibrant piece of art or a colorful mug in your workspace. Similarly, neuroscience research shows that sharp angles stimulate activity in a part of the brain called the amygdala, associated in part with fear and anxiety. So incorporating round shapes and avoiding sharp angles in a design can help to create an environment that feels joyful, not stressful.

A few tips to finding and increasing joy every day at work :

IN YOUR BOOK YOU TALK ABOUT ENERGY AND ITS INFLUENCE (THROUGH COLOR) IN THE SCHOOL CLASSROOM. HOW WOULD YOU CONVINCE THOSE ON THE BUSINESS SIDE OF THE VALUE OF THAT? (E.G., HOW COULD SOMETHING AS SEEMINGLY SUPERFICIAL AS COLOR HAVE SUCH A PROFOUND EFFECT?) A recent study of workspace and performance shows that productivity improves up to 15 percent in an enriched workspace (with elements like art and plants) over a plain one. Pair this kind of emerging research with case studies from

Simply creating more frequent experiences of joy has been shown to have meaningful effects on performance. Joyful salespeople increase time spent in retail stores and likelihood of a return trip. Joyful business people make better decisions and consider a broader range of scenarios in the process of making a decision. Some studies indicate that productivity improves up to 12 percent when we’re feeling joyful.

1.

Add a pop of color to your desk to boost energy and bring life to spaces that are often drab.

2.

Keep something cute handy. Not only do cute things often spark joy, but research from Japan suggests that looking at cute things increases our ability to focus.

3.

Seek out natural light, especially in the morning and in the post-lunch slump. Light helps synchronize circadian rhythms, which boost mood.

4.

Add a plant to your workspace. As noted, looking at greenery counteracts the physical effects of stress, restores our ability to concentrate and may promote more generous or tolerant behavior.

5.

Do a happy dance. While it might sound strange, moving to the same beat has been shown to create a sense of belonging and improve people’s performance on cooperative tasks.

Register today at www.clomedia.com/symposium

BY DAVID WOODS he landscape of employee learning and engagement is constantly shifting, but what does that mean for organizations that are just beginning their digital learning journey?

Artificial intelligence, adaptive learning and virtual reality: While these technologies are exciting for the potential they bring in training employees and offering more engaging experiences, there are many organizations that are still stuck in outdated modalities for whom such leaps are unthinkable. Many organizations are still printing and shipping manuals and binders all over the country or even the world to get information to their people.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

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In many industries, small, incremental changes can often be more practical to accomplish at speed than large, sweeping changes, and the same can be true for learning and development departments that feel stuck in their current training methods. The good news is that small steps along the digital learning path can lead to significant changes in your learners’ lives and in your training department’s efficacy.

Dusty binders and manuals are a thorn in the heel of many a CLO. Here’s where to start to bring your training into the digital age.

1: Go Digital There are numerous ways to digitize your existing content. Depending on your existing file types, simple conversions into a PDF format can yield a variety of delivery options where content can easily be rendered on either a desktop or a mobile device. Different providers offer different functionality, but core functionality — such as the ability to easily search and find relevant content — is important, particularly if your training is often used by employees for reference purposes.

2: Go Mobile For a learning and development professional who has not shifted into digital delivery, this concept may seem just as large and sweeping as something like virtual reality. Industries such as hospitality, insurance, and construction and engineering, to name a few, have numerous employees out in the field, not confined to a desk. With less than half of today’s learners located onsite at an organization and almost 30 percent of learning occurring outside physical walls, according to Brandon Hall Group’s 2017 “Extended Enterprise Learning” study, mobile and offline access is imperative to modern training and business goals.

Mobile meets your deskless workers where they are and in a way that they are used to learning. After all, in our personal lives if we need to find an answer quickly or reference something as simple as a recipe, the first thing we do is pull up an internet search on our phone. Enabling modern employees who are not tied to a desk to utilize their most essential personal device for work is a critical factor to consider in how training reaches your workforce.

3: Get Contextual While mobile learning provides learners instant access, it also allows for deeper, richer learning experiences. Provide learners the opportunity to receive their learning in an environment with the appropriate context. We can look at the mobile knowledge building process, or mKBP, model to gain further insight around how our geographic location actually impacts the learning experience. An expansion of Gerry Stahl’s collabora58 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

tive knowledge building process model, which divides knowledge building into personal understanding and social knowledge building, the mKBP places importance on the context of an individual’s physical location.

Mobile and offline access is imperative to modern training and business goals.

For an employee working in a kitchen, for example, standards and procedures regarding kitchen safety and equipment operation are often delivered on the job in order to provide the appropriate context. It makes little sense to provide this type of training to an individual via a remotely located computer or an in-person classroom session — it’s much more effective in a hands-on context. Mobile learning can provide this type of deep, rich learning that aids knowledge retention.

Mobile learning also reinforces the concept of justin-time learning. Organizations that have employees on the front line, out in the field or on job sites do not have the luxury of providing digital training materials, which require a computer and an internet connection.

For many of these organizations, reaching employees with critical information that is easy to reference can be done by ensuring the learner has mobile access.

Mobile access is important for those employees who may not be receiving specific training but are forced to solve a problem in an urgent situation using company information. Take the case of claims adjusters for insurance companies. Often onsite at personal or commercial properties, it is beneficial for these employees to easily access key information related to the property they are evaluating. Thumbing through a binder for proper regulations can be time consuming, but searching and referencing the content on a mobile device at the point of need is far more efficient. Being able to outline procedures and instructions and review regulations can be extremely effective for learners and result in a better experience for clients.

And don’t forget the folks in the field who are working in a warehouse, basement or just beyond the reach of a cell tower. These individuals may need to access their digital materials offline, as they may lack access to the internet or a network. Mobile also allows for learning and reference or spontaneous collaboration among peers during a public transportation commute.

Even if you still utilize a classroom, your learners should be able to access your content when necessary beyond the classroom.

4: Get Interactive

You don’t have to shoot for the moon in your first attempts at transforming and changing your learning programs.

The next step beyond delivering static content to employees on a mobile device at their point of need is to improve learner engagement and interaction with the content. There are two ways to get started: Make the content itself more engaging and review the features of the mobile platform.

Taking print content and delivering it in a digital format is a great first step, but taking that static text and adding more engaging and enriching features to it can greatly impact the learning experience. For example, the addition of instructional videos to your training learner engagement, you need to know how they’re materials can provide users with key visuals that rein- interacting with your content. Are they reading/ force written text. viewing it? Are they passing assessments, highlightImagine being a new employee in a warehouse and ing notes or sharing with colleagues? having instructional videos detail key pieces of equipment, workplace safety WHERE ARE YOU ON THE PATH TO DIGITAL MATURITY? and operational procedures. These vidEMERGING EXPERIENCED EXPERT eos reinforce the written text and provide visual learners with important inContent format Print/PDFs SCORM, virtual instructor-led HTML 5, EPUB, interactive training, video. video formation on their mobile device at their point of need.

Assessments Manual evaluations Standard digital inquiry Advanced digital simulations In addition to video, formative assessments and quizzes can be added to Content Read-only locked PDFs Digital rights management Access to content is granted security to credentialed, individual the content to allow a learner to check users. his or her understanding. If you conContent Not organized or Curated and organized Content is distributed on a set sider adding assessments to your conmanagement contextual path. Content is gated at each tent, you should always evaluate level. whether those scores need to be reLearner All devices, online/offline Learning tools: highlights, Social and adaptive learning corded or tracked. Quizzing elements engagement access, mobile note sharing, bookmarking experiences can provide organizations with a picture of how well an employee may be Analytics Data dump with .csv Dashboard with engagement Engagement with outcomes grasping particular elements of the export data and recommendations new job and give you a sense of Technology Email LMS, online e-reader API integrations, mobile apps whether the materials you are providing are effective in their presentation.

While offering dynamic content can Source: David Woods help learners become more engaged, there are also elements of the digital platform one chooses that can provide additional learn- Big Things Start Small er engagement. For instance, many digital platforms You have to start where you are. If your L&D will allow the learner to take notes and add highlights world consists of binders and print manuals, look at to text for important information they may need to ref- the first small steps you can take into the digital realm. erence later. Some digital platforms also include social You’ll likely find it immediately rewarding and a great elements, which may allow management to share their way to start down new roads in your organization’s annotations or portions of text or video with their col- learning culture. leagues. Social elements that can promote communicaYou don’t have to shoot for the moon in your first tion among teams drive engagement and foster a learn- attempts at transforming and changing your learning ing environment in a way that standard printed programs. Many great changes that we experience are a materials cannot. result of small, incremental changes; taking those first Reporting and analytics were found to be the small steps can push you in the right direction toward most important characteristics to support an extend- training a more modern and engaged workforce. CLO ed learning system according to the Brandon Hall study. What type of analytics to gather depends on David Woods is an account executive with Intrepid by what you plan to do with the data. To measure true VitalSource. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Case Study

The Language of Business

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

C

ampari Group may be best known for its signature aperitif, but the 158-year-old company has more than 50 brands in its portfolio, including Grand Marnier, Skyy Vodka and Wild Turkey bourbon. The $2 billion organization has more than 4,000 employees in offices in every region of the world. Its global presence means Campari employees often do business with clients in other countries, making language barriers a frequent concern.

Many global organizations rely on English as a language of choice when communicating across borders because it is so widely spoken. That’s great for English speakers, but it can be a challenge for everyone else. “Being a multinational company, our employees have had increasingly more contact with the English language in their day-to-day activities,” said Ana Claudia Gonçalves, human resources manager for Campari Group in Sao Paulo, Brazil. “Moreover, Campari is highly committed to its employees’ careers and development, and we understand how important English proficiency is for professional growth in today’s world.”

Campari has offered language training to its employees for years. However, in 2016 Gonçalves’ group conducted a review of the language training program and found it came up short. The programming took a one-size-fits-all approach that wasn’t meeting every learner’s needs, and the vendor didn’t provide enough metrics to track learners’ progress.

“That’s when we found Voxy,” Gonçalves said.

Voxy is a web-based English language training company that provides adaptive curriculum and personalized instruction for corporations and individual learners. Unlike a lot of language training programs that use formal scripts and tiered vocabulary lessons, Voxy is built around the idea of using authentic conversations to teach language, said Katie Nielson, Voxy’s chief education officer in New York. “We use real-world content to personalize the instruction to the needs of the learner,” she said.

Language on the Go Campari partnered with Voxy in April 2017 to deliver an eight-month English language pilot pro60 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

SNAPSHOT Campari Group is using political articles and lifestyle magazines to help employees learn English.

gram for 30 employees to test its impact. From the beginning employees were excited, Gonçalves said.

“We received nearly 80 applications for the 30 spots, which shows our team’s commitment to their own professional development.”

The program offered a combination of self-paced lessons and live virtual classes customized to the kinds of business conversations and contacts the learners were likely to experience on the job. Based on feedback from Gonçalves’ team and the duration of the course, Voxy determined that learners should complete a minimum of 48 self-paced activities and two live classes per month to meet their language proficiency goals.

Once students were selected, they completed a survey to assess their current English language skills, their personal and professional goals for the class, and the types of content they like to read. Voxy used the data to provide content that was relevant to their interests and abilities. This step is vital to the Voxy training methods, because they’ve found that when lessons are too simple or boring, learners disengage, Nielson said. “They have to be interested in the content or they won’t pay attention.”

By using content built around current events and trends, the learners are more invested in deciphering it. For example, Ana Rodriguez, a trade marketing analyst who participated in the pilot and considered herself a high beginner, noted that she liked to read articles about world news and food and drink trends, so those articles populated her lessons. “It made it more interesting to do the work,” she said. It also exposed her to more common English language expressions and casual conversational terms, which she found helpful. “As a marketing analyst, I encounter English expressions every day, so these lessons helped me in my job,” she said.

The live classes are similarly adaptable, with instructors responding on the fly to the needs of whoever shows up to class. “We train our instructors to respond to what the learners want to talk about, rather than coming in with a PowerPoint presentation,” Nielson said.

Each virtual class includes a live instructor but also enables students to talk to each other and share documents so they don’t disrupt the flow of the class.

Rodriguez appreciated the opportunity to practice with her Campari colleagues in the live sessions and to talk about topics relevant to their collective work.

“It was an important part of the program,” she said.

You Can’t Game the System Rodriguez feels the class helped her to improve her English and said she is more confident having conversations with peers and clients. And she’s not alone.

The pilot project was a success based on multiple measures, said Gonçalves. “Program adoption was high among the majority of users, who were also able to commit to the study goals we set.” The active user rate was 86 percent throughout the program based on the number of lessons students completed and their attendance in group sessions.

Nielson noted that this number is especially impressive because Voxy only measures “active participation,” which means if learners just open a lesson or enter a live class but don’t participate, they don’t get credit. “You can’t game the system,” Nielson said.

To ensure a high rate of participation, Gonçalves’ team worked throughout the program to remind learners to stay engaged. “Maintaining consistent engagement levels is a big challenge with language learning, but we overcame it by coming up with creative ways for learners to keep track of their performance and reminding them regularly of how essential English is for their growth,” Gonçalves said.

Their strategies included creating a leaderboard to rank learners’ performance, sharing news articles on the importance of English for career growth and sending English language study tips. The most highly engaged users were rewarded with private tutoring credits. She also met face-to-face with learners who were falling behind to try to revert the situation.

“When it comes to keeping them motivated and engaged with their learning, all efforts are worthwhile,” she said.

Nielson agreed. She noted that when companies have an active champion who monitors em-

ployees’ engagement with language learning, it can have a dramatic impact on participation and results. “If you have someone who holds learners accountable, they are more likely to take it seriously,” she said. “It doesn’t take a lot of effort, and it has a big impact.”

Voxy’s tracking also showed a steady increase in proficiency across the learner population. “At the beginning of the program, 61 percent of the group consisted of beginners and high beginners,” Gonçalves said. “But after eight months, 57 percent of the learners had already reached low intermedi-

“They have to be interested in the content or they won’t pay attention.”

— Katie Nielson, chief education officer, Voxy ate.” Learners also rated their satisfaction with the program at 4.5 on a 5-point scale.

“We’ve noticed that people really do see value in the program,” Gonçalves said. “Even a year and a half after launching the initial pilot, employees still reach out to us requesting to participate after hearing their colleagues’ positive remarks about the course.”

Campari and Voxy and now working together to expand the program and to offer it to employees across the company. “Our goal is to see our employees improving their English proficiency and, consequently, achieving more growth opportunities within the company,” Gonçalves said.

Every Program Needs a Champion For companies interested in launching their own language learning program, Nielson suggested starting with a needs analysis to determine who in the company would benefit from language training, how the training will help them do their jobs better and what proficiency looks like. “If you set clear goals, they learn faster,” she said.

“User outreach is also crucial to the program’s success,” Gonçalves added. “Staying in touch with employees through newsletters, monthly rankings and other engagement activities can be extremely useful in helping the project gain strength within the organization.” CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

61

Business Intelligence

Disruption, Meet Strategy CLOs are prioritizing strategic alignment to navigate ongoing change.

BY ASHLEY ST. JOHN

s we begin 2019, the learning landscape continThe survey also looked at which competencies are ues to be dynamic. currently considered essential to the CLO role alongside When asked how the role of chief learning officer is those that will be most essential to the role in the future. changing, 76 percent of respondents to a 2018 survey The ability to influence clearly is expected to remain imof current and aspiring CLOs cited increased use of portant: Influence and partnering was the top ranked technology, 53 percent pointed to the importance of essential competency for CLOs at 55 percent (Figure 3), content curation versus creation, 47 percent cited ex- and it was also rated highest among future competencies panding audiences and 46 percent noted CLOs are needed for the role (Figure 4). being tasked with modernizing legaHowever, while business acumen cy processes (Figure 1). was ranked second highest among Combine all this disruption with current essential competencies, at 43 talent gaps, a generationally diverse percent, only 35 percent ranked it as workforce and more, and it’s no an essential future competency, placwonder the ground learning leaders ing it behind strategic management OF SURVEYED stand on feels increasingly unsteady.

(42 percent) and measurement/anaCURRENT AND Eighty-six percent of those surveyed lytics (38 percent). ranked gaps in specialized talent as a Further, proficiency in learning ASPIRING CLOS high- or medium-priority challenge methods and concepts is expected to be RANKED GAPS IN facing CLOs (Figure 2). Sixty-seven less important in the CLO role of the percent identified lack of budget as SPECIALIZED TALENT future, with 37 percent ranking it high or medium priority, followed among current essential competencies AS A HIGH- OR by 54 percent citing the aging workwith only 21 percent identiMEDIUM-PRIORITY compared force and 51 percent citing disrupfying it as a future essential competency.

CHALLENGE. tive technology threatening survival.

As we look ahead, many learning Results from the survey, which leaders are instead prioritizing stratewas conducted by Human Capital Media Research gic alignment. Among the current CLOs surveyed, 66 and Advisory Group, the research and advisory arm of percent cited better alignment of learning strategy with Chief Learning Officer magazine, were compiled as business strategy as an aspirational goal (Figure 5). part of a benchmarking report, “The Role of CLO: Driving leadership development was noted as a What’s Next?” The report examines the career path goal by 48 percent, followed by driving corporatewide for the head of the learning function and what that change efforts (39 percent), changing the organizarole will look like in the future. From July through tional L&D model (37 percent) and retaining more August 2018, nearly 800 learning leaders and talent high-performing employees (32 percent). CLO executives shared their thoughts on the duties, responsibilities, career paths and aspirations of current Ashley St. John is Chief Learning Officer’s managing and future CLOs. editor. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

86

62 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

%

Source: “The Role of CLO: What’s Next?” CLOs: N=423; aspiring CLOs: N=248 . All percentages rounded.

A

FIGURE 1: HOW IS THE ROLE OF CLO CHANGING? 76% 53%

47%

46%

21% 12%

Increased use of technology

Curating versus creating content

Expanded audiences

Tasked with modernizing legacy processes

Outsourcing content

Other

FIGURE 2: CHALLENGES CLOS ARE FACING High priority

Low/no priority

Gaps in specialized talent

86%

Lack of budget

15%

67%

Aging workforce

33%

54%

Disruptive technology threatening survival

46%

51%

49%

Lack of leadership buy-in

50%

50%

Increasing demands of transparency/authenticity

50%

51%

FIGURE 3: ESSENTIAL COMPETENCIES FOR CLO ROLE 55% 43% 37%

Influence/partnering

Business acumen

Learning methods and concepts

36%

Strategic management

31%

Leadership skills

29%

Interpersonal skills

24%

High EQ

FIGURE 4: FUTURE COMPETENCIES NEEDED FOR DEVELOPMENT OF CLOS 44%

Influence/partnering

42%

38%

Strategic management Measurement/analytics

35%

Business acumen

29%

25%

21%

Executive leadership

Executive presence

Learning methods and concepts

32%

31%

30%

Retain more high-performing employees

Collaborate on end-to-end talent management

Focus on requirements of critical positions in the company

FIGURE 5: ASPIRATIONAL GOALS FOR CURRENT CLOS 66% 48% 39%

Better align the learning strategy with the business strategy

Drive leadership development

Drive corporatewide change efforts

37%

Change the organizational L&D model

Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

63

IMMERSION continued from page 26

SPACE TO FAIL continued from page 53

Priming is the practice of framing the initiative and getting participants ready to learn. This might involve providing them with an overview of key terms, engaging in perspective-setting exercises or bringing in a storyteller to share an experience.

Armed with the right tools to go into an experience through the priming step, employees should have the opportunity to work on something that exposes them to people and ideas they haven’t interacted with before.

Whether meeting refugee entrepreneurs, supporting job seekers or even working with community members on solving a problem, the main purpose is to provide an experience that forms relationships by bringing different people together around a common goal.

Finally, after the experience is over, it’s important to define action steps to continue the learning. Initiative designers should help participants create an action plan for applying what they’ve learned to work and everyday life over the next seven, 14 and 30 days. They should also make sure to provide suggestions and examples for those who are still processing the information.

employee engagement,” she said. “High employee engagement will lead to high employee retention, which leads to profitability.”

In fact, Bubenik said sometimes a company’s sales team and customer support employees can provide the best advice for improving the firm’s products and services, leading to higher retention, higher sales and revenue growth. In addition, Bubenik argued that if companies aren’t growing, they are dying — they must always be thinking about how to make their product or service better.

“Even though they may differentiate themselves at one point in time, they can’t stop there,” she said.

“Pretty soon, new technology will be adopted, or those services will be mirrored and duplicated by someone else — you have to be innovative in figuring out the next best thing.”

Any learning objective or training program is usually tied to a business goal. Bubenik said if learning leaders want to develop intrapreneurship, innovation or creativity programs, they need to build a business case first. “At the end of the day, everyone is looking at the bottom line, so you can’t come in with a ‘feel nice’ program,” she said.

“It has to be tied to what causes pain in the organization — not meeting sales goals, not retaining or attracting key talent, being outsmarted by competitors and losing your share of market. These are good hard business cases for developing these kinds of programs.”

However, Raz says over time, there needs to be a cultural shift in how companies measure success. He used mentoring as an example — something he loves to do for his employees. “It was transformational for me to have people who gave me space to fail, who gave me feedback, who talked through ideas with me,” he said. “I try to be that to other people. I carve out time in my day to be available for this.”

However, organizations don’t necessarily value mentoring as a measure of success or see it as a data point. “How many companies are going to say, ‘Oh Joe over there, his sales numbers aren’t looking great, but he’s mentored 40 people who are now all over the company,’ ” Raz said. “That’s a pretty valuable employee. He might be a crappy sales guy, but maybe he’s really inspired people.”

Raz said profits are important, but they can’t be the only measure of success. “Look at the Starbucks story — growth, growth, growth, but at the expense of the community aspect, which was something that people really did value,” he said. “We all have a responsibility in trying to shift the culture.” CLO

Time to Let the Old Ways Die Cultural immersion’s goal is to create learning opportunities and facilitate deeper connection points between people who don’t normally interact with one another. Its blend of learning and relationships serves as a missing link necessary to drive diversity, equity and inclusion forward.

Our traditional programs are too focused on classroom-based education and rolling out symbolic messages and commitments that don’t get realized in practice. These programs trigger diversity fatigue if there aren’t enough underrepresented employees to include. Even in the companies that do have enough diversity, mutual understanding and cross-collaboration are hard to come by, hampering positive outcomes.

The established approach to DEI doesn’t take into account what really leads to change: exposure and experience.

With cultural immersion initiatives, getting to know different people with unique backgrounds and ideas leads to increases in companywide diversity, shared goals and overall feelings of belonging, representation and trust.

As Tancredi put it, “Exposure matters more than anything else. I can’t tell you how many times volunteers meet the [immigrants and refugees involved with Upwardly Global] and realize when you get to know somebody, you notice that the difference isn’t a big deal.” CLO Alida Miranda-Wolff is founder and CEO of Ethos, a company culture consultancy. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

64 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Ave Rio is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

LEARNING AGILITY continued from page 48

Make Learning Agility Easy Your efforts to build learning-agile teams will pay off sooner rather than later if you spell it out as a value and make it part of your culture. For instance, infuse ongoing learning opportunities into daily responsibilities and align them with performance expectations. Give your people every chance you can to apply new learnings in real-world business scenarios and reward them for coaching and serving as mentors to their peers. There’s nothing like sitting next to a more experienced colleague to learn something new!

Your team should also curate learning content so that you create a powerful brain trust and no one feels they must reinvent the wheel. Between the free material available online and the massive library that inevitably exists within your organization, your team probably has access to as much infor-

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mation as it needs. However, it’s up to leaders to ensure that this content is organized and easily accessible.

As an example, publisher Kogan Page is in the process of creating a digital platform that will allow any employee to search and read content from more than 900 backlist titles.

Learning agility isn’t a skill that comes naturally to everyone, especially those who were educated in a more traditional climate. But by encouraging certain habits, promoting skill acquisition, fostering intrapreneurship, practicing hands-off management and making learning easy, your team will possess a major advantage in an increasingly fast-paced business world. CLO

Clifford Capone Vice President, Group Publisher 312-967-3538 ccapone@CLOmedia.com Derek Graham Regional Sales Manager 312-967-3591 dgraham@CLOmedia.com

AL, AR, DE, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KS, KY, LA, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, NC, ND, NE, OH, OK, SC, SD, TN, TX, VA, WI, WV, District of Columbia, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan Newfoundland, Europe

Daniella Weinberg Regional Sales Manager 917-627-1125 dweinberg@CLOmedia.com CT, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VT, Quebec, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Europe

Alexandra Levit is the author of “Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future.” She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

Kevin M. Fields Director, Business Development 312-967-3565 kfields@CLOmedia.com Melanie Lee Business Administration Manager mlee@CLOmedia.com

ADVERTISERS’ INDEX Advertisers/URLs Page

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Ariel arielgroup.com ASU GSV asugsvsummit.com Bellevue University corporatelearning.com CLO Resource Center resources.clomedia.com CLO Symposium CLOsymposium.com CLO Webinars CLOmedia.com/on-demand Columbia Business School gsb.columbia.edu/execed Cornerstone csod.com D2L d2l.com/enterprise

DeVryWORKS 38-49, Back Cover devryworks.com eCornell 47 excel.ecornell.com/clo Empower The User 49 empowertheuser.com HCM Advisory Group 3 humancapitalmedia.com/research Bellevue University’s Human Capital Lab 15 humancapitallab.org Rosetta Stone 21 org.rosettastone.com/language-promotion Skillsoft 5 learn.skillsoft.com/HCM Southern New Hampshire University 2nd Cover snhu.edu/work Wharton 28-29, 3rd Cover execed.wharton.upenn.edu/results

36-37 17 34-35 6 25-27, 54-55 7 32-33 30-31 19

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65

IN CONCLUSION

Combat Content Overload

Resist the urge to create your own learning content • BY KELLY PALMER

W

Kelly Palmer is chief learning officer of Degreed and co-author of “The Expertise Economy: How the Smartest Companies Use Learning to Engage, Compete, and Succeed” with David Blake. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

hen employees want to learn something new, where do they turn? In 2016, my company, Degreed, conducted a survey to find out. The responses showed that today’s workers turn first to their peers, bosses or mentors before searching the internet. The last thing they do is consult their learning organization.

This makes intuitive sense. Given the digital landfill bombarding today’s work environments, people know that consulting Google in order to learn something will give them millions of options — and that the top results might not be the best for them. So they instead want guidance from individuals they trust. They want to know how these people learned critical skills.

The recommendations they get in response often point to content that’s publicly available, such as how-to videos, MOOCs, TED Talks, online communities of professionals with similar interests and all sorts of other materials. With recommendations in hand, learners can skip the search and go straight into learning, often at the moment of need.

But when leaders in these same organizations pinpoint skills that they want employees to learn, they often don’t turn first to their own employees who already have those skills and ask for recommendations. Instead, all too often, businesses reflexively decide to order up some new, original content to teach their workforce.

Training magazine’s 2017 “Training Industry Report” found that organizations are spending an estimated 28 percent of their L&D budgets on content development, much of it outsourced to content creation agencies.

It’s time for businesses to resist this urge. It’s often unnecessary and wastes time and money.

Today’s workers are overwhelmed with content. According to a January 2017 Chief Learning Officer article, “A Network of Experts: From Content Curation to Insight Curation,” they “gather it, filter it, sort it, categorize it and hoard it all day. They bury themselves with it and then rightfully complain they are overloaded and overwhelmed.” One of the most important solutions to this problem is, quite simply, do not create new content.

It’s a lesson I learned at an offsite event for a tech company. L&D leaders from across the organization came together to coordinate their content strategies. At one point, they got to talking about how to upskill their workers in project management. That’s when they discovered that the company had 15 different but similar courses created by different learning groups on the same

66 Chief Learning Officer • January/February 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

topic. Many people had created original content that lived in content management systems, web servers, learning management systems, and on wikis and individual computers. No one had a view into all the content available.

Machine curation helps highlight learning options without having to create anything new.

This company’s problem was not unique. In my years as a CLO, I’ve encountered numerous similar problems at organizations around the world.

Having an integrated learning platform helps solve this problem. When the company aligns in a single learning network and allows employees to post links and rate content, people throughout the organization are able to find curated pathways and recommendations.

In addition to social curation, machine curation helps businesses discover and highlight learning options without having to create anything new. For example, if an employee wants to learn how to deliver better presentations, a learning platform can automatically select and serve up, say, five relevant pieces of content per day based on what it knows about that individual. If that worker consumes the content, he or she gets more recommendations. If not, the technology searches for something else.

Of course, there may be times when creating original content is the way to go. Every organization has some content that is specific to their company and something no one else can create. One example is onboarding content for new hires. Or there may be a unique way you need a piece of technology applied that isn’t covered by something you’d find in a learning library.

So, my recommendation isn’t to never create new learning materials. But those times when you do should be the exception. When business leaders find themselves considering whether to develop original learning content, the default answer should be “no.” CLO

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