Chief Learning Officer - March 2016

March 2016 | CLOmedia.com

SPECIAL EDITION

➤ The Problem With Executive Education ➤ Leadership Lessons From the EMBA ➤ Roadmap to Effective Executive Education ➤ Hot List of Executive Education Providers

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KELLY PALMER

eCornell.com/CorporateHR corporateprograms@ecornell.com

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EDITOR’S LETTER

The Quest for Executive Education T

here’s an old saying in the advertising business: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Many corporate educators know the feeling. For years, they’ve been searching for the answer to a basic question: What learning investments deliver the greatest return?

Countless dollars and hours have been spent in the quest for ROI. Learning departments have hired consultants, recruited analytics experts and developed their data muscles to target what learning is effective.

Despite all that time and toil, clear answers remain elusive. ROI can be fairly easily identified in discrete programs or initiatives but is highly dependent on a wide

Investment in executive education remains strong despite elusive returns.

That quest for highly tailored education and the resulting ROI has pushed many companies — and CLOs — into developing customized executive education. Academic institutions have poured into the space to answer the call. CLOs have an array of options available from the world’s global education giants like Harvard and INSEAD to regional and topical specialists like Thunderbird School of Global Management.

CLOs are poised to keep the investment taps open. According to data collected from the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, leadership development is the area CLOs feel will have the most positive effect on their businesses’ performance in 2016. Nearly 90 percent said so in a recent survey and 41 percent expect to increase their investment with external vendors to carry it out.

They’re playing with a big chunk of change.

The global market for executive education is more than $70 billion, according to a figure cited by the Financial Times.

This month, we focus on executive education with special coverage designed to help CLOs navigate this high-stakes, always-evolving market. Starting on page 28, you’ll see a package of stories on what’s shaping and disrupting traditional executive education and how CLOs can make effective decisions to meet their learning needs.

To go along with that, we’ve included a helpful feature we’re calling a “Roadmap,” with practical advice for CLOs looking to start investing in executive education or refine their strategy.

Philadelphia retail pioneer John Wanamaker, who coined that term I referenced, struggled with how to make the most of his investment in advertising.

But underlying that doubt is deep faith in its utility.

Marketers need to spend money to promote their products. The search for more effective and cost efficient ways to do that continues, as it should if we’re to make sure we’re not just wasting our money, but the investment remains important.

Smart businesses and CLOs say the same about their investment in education. CLO

array of variables, including context, measurement tool and assumptions. Return on learning remains ambiguous and correlative in a world that, for right or wrong, increasingly demands certainty and causation.

So the quest continues. Nowhere is this more apparent than in executive education.

For the career-minded, education is a well-trod path to move up in business. Whether a traditional open enrollment MBA or one of the many shorter, targeted executive MBAs that have popped up, ambitious managers continue to sign up in droves to speed their climb up the corporate ladder. The hefty salary boost an MBA unlocks might just be a significant incentive, too. According to recent estimates, universities award more than 125,000 graduate business degrees annually.

But when it comes to corporations, traditional academic programs have not been so effective. Bosses see their businesses like special snowflakes, similar in their broad characteristics but vastly different in specific shape.

Some general leadership skills are universal. Business acumen, communication, strategic thinking and general business management competencies regularly top the list.

But when it comes spending their limited learning dollars, businesses are looking for a little bit more. So learning leaders hunt for content and curriculum tailored to their organization’s specific needs and require educators to use real-world business problems as action learning projects and core curricular components. Mike Prokopeak When it comes to executive education, what’s good for Editor in Chief Google isn’t necessarily what’s good for the gander. mikep@CLOmedia.com 4 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

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VICE PRESIDENT, CFO, COO Kevin A. Simpson ksimpson@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, GROUP PUBLISHER Clifford Capone ccapone@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF Mike Prokopeak mikep@CLOmedia.com

Joe Dixon jdixon@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, RESEARCH & ADVISORY SERVICES Sarah Kimmel skimmel@CLOmedia.com RESEARCH MANAGER Tim Harnett tharnett@CLOmedia.com RESEARCH ANALYST Grey Litaker clitaker@CLOmedia.com

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Marc Katz mkatz@CLOmedia.com Daniella Weinberg dweinberg@CLOmedia.com ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Brian Lorenz blorenz@CLOmedia.com DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT AND EVENTS Kevin Fields kfields@CLOmedia.com

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Erika Andersen Ken Blanchard Sarah Fister Gale Jim Graber Bravetta Hassell Elliott Masie Lee Maxey Bob Mosher Evan Sinar Wendy Webb Randall P. White Kellye Whitney

AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cindy Cardinal ccardinal@CLOmedia.com

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John R. Taggart

Gwen Connelly

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PRESIDENT

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CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

Norman B. Kamikow CO-FOUNDER (1943-2014)

CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Cushing Anderson, Program Director, Learning Ser vices, IDC Frank J. Anderson Jr., ( Ret.) President, Defense Acquisition Universit y Cedric Coco, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Lowe’s Cos. Inc. Lisa Doyle, Vice President, Learning and Development, Lowe’s Cos. Inc. Tamar Elkeles, Chief People Of ficer, Quixey Thomas Evans, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, PricewaterhouseCoopers Ted Henson, Senior Strategist, Oracle Gerry Hudson-Martin, Director, Corporate Learning Strategies, Business Architects Rob Lauber, Vice President, Chief Learning Of ficer, McDonald’s Corp.

Maj. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel, ( Ret.) U.S. Air Force, Director, Deloit te Consulting Justin Lombardo, Interim Chief Learning Of ficer, Baptist Health Alan Malinchak, Executive Advisor, Talent and Learning Practice, Deltek Universit y Lee Maxey, CEO, MindMax Jeanne C. Meister, Author and Independent Learning Consultant Bob Mosher, Senior Par tner and Chief Learning Evangelist, APPLY Synergies Rebecca Ray, Executive Vice President, The Conference Board Allison Rossett, ( Ret.) Professor of Educational Technology, San Diego State Universit y Diana Thomas, Former Vice President, U.S. Training, McDonald’s Corp.

Annette Thompson, Senior Vice President and Chief Learning Of ficer, Farmers Insurance David Vance, Former President, Caterpillar Universit y Kevin D. Wilde, Executive Leadership Fellow, Carlson School of Management, Universit y of Minnesota

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Chief Learning Officer, ISSN 1935-8148, is published monthly by MediaTec Publishing Inc., 318 Harrison Street, Suite 301, Oakland, CA 94607. Periodicals Class Postage paid at Oakland, CA and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Please send address changes to: Chief Learning Officer magazine, P.O. Box 8712, Lowell, MA 01853. Subscriptions are free to qualified professionals within the U.S. and Canada. Non-qualified paid subscriptions are available at the subscription price of $195 for 12 issues. All countries outside the U.S. and Canada must be prepaid in U.S. funds with an additional $33 postage surcharge. Single copy price is $29.99.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS MARCH 2016

X

X

Special Edition

26-43

Features

18

28 32 38 43

CLO as Brand Ambassador

ON THE WEB

Wendy Webb Branding is more than logos, snazzy commercials and targeted hiring practices. Those are important, but in the end it’s all about learning.

Join the CLO LinkedIn Group

Special Edition: Executive Education Kellye Whitney Online learning is having a big effect on executive education.

Fortunately, providers are adapting to ensure leaders have the skills they need to succeed in business.

The Problem With Executive Education Bravetta Hassell For executive education to survive and thrive, it needs to pay close attention to the business community’s leadership needs and pick up the pace of curriculum change.

Leadership Lessons From the EMBA Randall P. White Leadership development is part and parcel of executive MBA programs. It’s also a hefty investment, but many organizations find the ROI worthwhile.

Hot List of Executive Education Providers Compiled by Bravetta Hassell Executive education programs with a global presence.

8 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

What hurdles have you faced when implementing social learning tools? How do you establish a learning objective when someone does not self-identify a skills gap?

Discuss these topics and more in Chief Learning Officer’s LinkedIn group. Plus, we’ve been featuring reader comments in the magazine, so come chat with us and get your thoughts published.

Join today to engage with peers and post your own questions at CLOmedia.com/LinkedIn. ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY JAY WATSON

TABLE OF CONTENTS MARCH 2016

22

18

Departments

44

Experts 10 IMPERATIVES

22 Profile Dreaming Big to Make Learning Happen Kellye Whitney For Kelly Palmer, LinkedIn’s chief learning officer, the future of learning is now, and it’s all about technology, personalized, curated content and social learning.

44 Case Study BBVA Bancomer Plays the Change Game Sarah Fister Gale BBVA Bancomer used gamification, social media and live actors to transform a traditional banking culture into a collaborative, environmentally focused digital organization.

46 Business Intelligence How Are You Handling the Internet of Things?

Evan Sinar Employees need to know why, how and when data about them will be used — and it pays to promote a developmental rather than a punitive slant on data collection.

Elliott Masie Stop Calling It ‘New’

12 SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

Bob Mosher What’s in a Number?

14 LEADERSHIP

Ken Blanchard 4 Dialogues for First-time Managers

16 MAKING THE GRADE

Lee Maxey A Reason to Identify and Connect Talent

50 IN CONCLUSION

Erika Andersen Be Willing to Be Bad

Resources 4 Editor’s Letter

The Quest for Executive Education

49 Advertisers’ Index

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Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

9

IMPERATIVES

Stop Calling It ‘New’ ‘New’ is often inaccurate as a learning descriptor — and potentially damaging • BY ELLIOTT MASIE

I

Elliott Masie is the chairman and CLO of The Masie Center’s Learning Consortium and CEO of The Masie Center, an international think tank focused on learning and workplace productivity. To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.‌com.

am so tired of the word “new.”

Let’s say a leadership development program develops a graphic with a new model for how management should work. The facilitator tells people they are seeing a “new and radical” shift in focus.

The graphic on the slide looks so familiar to participants. One of them searches on the corporate intranet and finds almost the same graphic, with slightly different box titles, used to describe new leadership programs announced in 1997, 2003, 2009 and 2012. Sigh.

My inbox fills with emails from learning suppliers every week, declaring brand new products and services.

They are often described as being the “leading approach in the world” and also “brand new” in the same sentence.

But most of the product announcements are evolutions, stretches and refinements of existing models.

The word “new” can be so overused and toxic that many email filtering programs will send any note with it in the subject line directly to the spam bucket. Learners

Adults bring decades of knowledge, experience and intuition to the learning experience.

Announcing something is new often asks the learner to act more like an inexperienced child. often have the same biological reaction to a declaration that something is brand new, as they immediately scan their brains to find deeply similar and familiar ideas.

To be honest, learners are often insulted and disengaged by the promiscuous use of “new.” Sure, the marketing and communication folks love using “new” in the hope it will get viral coverage and distribution.

Teachers and learning designers also love using “new” in the hope that managers and learners will gravitate to programs that promise to be radically different.

Yet, “new” backfires almost all of the time. Creativity is not about being new. It is about stretching our current realities to consider alternative elements, pathways, technologies or models of things that are current.

10 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

Learning is especially sensitive to “new.” The moment an instructor or program announces that something is new, they are assuming — or even discounting — the relevancy of everything the learner already knows.

When I was teaching my 80-year-old mother about email 20 years ago, I described it as a small change for how she could communicate with her grandchildren.

She even jumped ahead and asked if the note was “sealed” or if anyone could open it. Her knowledge about mail allowed her to rapidly understand and start using email because it felt familiar.

I asked a well-known management author how much he uses participants’ current knowledge of a seminar when introducing his new approach to leadership. Truthfully, he said, he wanted the participants to forget what they knew about leadership and embrace his new paradigm. Sigh.

What if the participants were asked to frame up their current and familiar models of leadership instead? Then, they could build from that knowledge base to construct his approach. I would be delighted if someone told me they could tweak my current model and show observable gains. That is more believable than any pitch about totally re-engineering our approach to leadership.

Malcolm Knowles, the godfather of adult learning, said one of the key differences about adults is that we bring decades of knowledge, experience and intuition to the learning experience. Announcing something is new often asks the learner to act more like an inexperienced child. He would delight in knowing that most new knowledge already exists in some ways within adult learners.

In this age of continuous innovation and creativity, it is easy to feel excited about new. I dream about really new models for learning apps, connected classrooms, brain-function monitoring, machine learning, video mentoring and dynamic, adaptive assessment.

But achieving those dreams will probably involve honoring all that is old and working, and creatively looking at elements or processes that are different, that involve stretching or that are counterintuitive. Many of them will be new, but why shout that word at that start of all our announcements?

Invite learners to try something and experience what is better, which is usually a combination of old, new and random. If it is truly new to learners, let them discover and define that for themselves. CLO

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ONBOARDING

PERFORMANCE

LEARNING

Life

SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

What’s in a Number?

Without context, numbers mean little • BY BOB MOSHER

W

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

To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

e’re No. 1!” “Three strikes and you’re out.” “Six of one, half a dozen of another.”

We like to use expressions with numbers in them.

Numbers are a universal language. They often help simplify, and quantify things that are hard to understand. They can be a powerful way for learning leaders to explain and frame difficult concepts to the stakeholders we support. Here are a few of my favorites: 1. Kirkpatrick and Phillip’s “5 Levels of Evaluation” 2. McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison’s (supposedly) “70-20-10 Model” 3. Conrad Gottfredson’s “5 Moments of Learning Need” For many, these have been grounding and defining moments. They have given our industry a powerful way to have a collective conversation around complex and abstract concepts. At the same time there is a dark side to all this: In our industry, we get ourselves into trouble by creating more questions than answers.

There are a few things we need to be careful about.

The first is one of my pet peeves with our industry. We often put sizzle ahead of substance. Each of these expressions says a mouthful offering amazing promise and impact. I have seen many of these in five-year plans and strategies, and these were by senior leaders outside the learning domain — CEOs and others in the C-suite.

On the one hand, that’s a good thing. It shows that these frameworks resonate and align to their way of thinking and, more importantly, their view of what’s strategic to the business. The challenging part is they then look to the chief learning officer to implement them. There lies the problem.

Candidly, I’ve talked to many who get the numbers but have no idea now to achieve them. Many of these frameworks don’t align to our skill set, products and methodologies. If you compare them with much of what we offer, we come up short on all three. We need to rethink our approaches and solutions within our own industry before we elevate these to the boardroom. There’s power in this community. We need to spend some time together working these things out.

The second issue is around the numbers themselves. I’ve seen two interesting things happen every time we introduce one of these things. First, we get caught up in the numbers themselves. Many of these frameworks are just that — frameworks. They are highly conceptual or theoretical models. They are

12 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

principles, not rules. They are meant to guide a higher-level conversation supported by a lower-level set of details and logistics. Achieving these things within your enterprise will vet the numbers. Hassling over “Is the 70 really 80?” or “Isn’t learning moment three a lot like learning moment four?” gets us nowhere and never was the point.

Guidelines are just the beginning as we work to reach our learners in amazing ways.

Guidelines are just that. They are meant to guide, not dictate. Only when a gifted learning leader peels back the layers in these frameworks and makes them work within their context do the real numbers materialize. Again, it’s not about the numbers — it’s the implementation and results that matter. Each will manifest differently within each organization.

The next issue I’ve seen is the result of numbering something in the first place. A numbered list implies two things: sequence and ranking. In the case of the aforementioned frameworks, being No. 1 or working on it first does not serve any of these models.

For example, I’ve talked to many learning professionals attempting to implement the five levels of learning and when I ask how they’re doing, I hear, “We’re finalizing the first two and moving on to the last three next.” That’s not the approach. In Gottfredson’s model, he would argue the entire purpose of this approach is to focus on moment three — the moment of apply — first, and leave moments one and two until last. Again, this gets back to better understanding the principles before we take them to a practical level.

So, what’s in a number? In this case, frankly, not much. Guidelines and frameworks are just the beginning as we work to reach our learners in amazing ways, in and of the workflow. We each need to find a way to make the math work in our learning teams. The better we can integrate and internalize these approaches at an operational level, the greater chance we have of benefiting from them. CLO

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LEADERSHIP

4 Dialogues for First-time Managers Set the tone for your management style with these conversations • BY KEN BLANCHARD

I

Ken Blanchard is chief spiritual officer of The Ken Blanchard Cos. and co-author of “Collaboration Begins with You: Be a Silo Buster.” To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.com.

’ll never forget the first time I became a leader.

I was elected president of my seventh grade class.

I was so excited. When I came home that day and announced my big news, my father — who later retired as an admiral in the Navy — said to me, “Ken, congratulations. I think it’s great you were elected president of your class. But now that you have that position, be sure you don’t abuse it. Great leaders aren’t followed because of their position power. It’s because they have earned the trust and respect of the people around them.” My father always supported and involved his people, yet he demanded high performance.

So how do you go about earning trust and respect when you are a first-time manager? Simple: You talk to your people. But that can be easier said than done. In our first-time manager program, we teach new leaders how to become skilled at four essential conversations: goal setting, praising, redirecting and wrapping up.

doing things right. We call this a praising conversation.

In a praising conversation, the manager praises the direct report for the specific behavior as soon as possible and encourages them to keep up the good work. This boosts the direct report’s confidence and helps them feel good about themselves — and people who feel good about themselves produce good results.

The redirecting conversation. The second performance management conversation is the redirecting conversation. This conversation is used when someone’s performance isn’t going as well as it should. As soon as a manager becomes aware of a problem, it’s important to address the situation. We teach that redirection should not be a one-way discussion — listening is a critical first step. It’s an opportunity for the direct report to discuss their performance problem with their manager in a supportive environment. It’s not about punishment; it’s about helping the person get back on track.

The wrapping-up conversation. The wrapping-up conversation happens at the completion of a task or project. It’s a chance to celebrate someone’s accomplishment and have them share what they learned along the way. Some managers may be tempted to put off this conversation or may dismiss it as unnecessary. But it’s a great way for a manager and direct report to take a deep breath, debrief and celebrate together, and get some closure on what has been accomplished.

The overall goal with these four skills is for managers and direct reports to increase the frequency and quality of their conversations. I share this advice with The goal-setting conversation. All good per- new and experienced managers alike — even up to the formance starts with clear goals. If your people presidential suite. I once suggested to a company presdon’t know where they are going, how will they ever get ident that he close off the access to his personal washthere? In the goal-setting conversation, managers work room. This way, he would be forced to walk down the side by side with each of their direct reports, coming to hall to use the men’s room and go to the locker room agreement on what needs to be accomplished by what at the company gym to take a shower. He would have date. At the end of this conversation, the direct report to get in the habit of chatting with people in the hallknows what good performance looks like, why each way and the gym, at the very least. The strategy goal is necessary, and how it will positively affect the worked. It caused a shift in the president’s routine to individual, team and organization when accomplished. the degree that he now spends several hours a week The praising conversation. After clear goals walking through the building and visiting with people. have been created and set, it’s important for Whether the purpose is to set goals, praise, redirect or managers to give people feedback on their perfor- bring closure to a task or project, it’s important for not mance with day-to-day coaching. This calls into play only first-time managers but also seasoned leaders to the next two types of conversations a first-time man- communicate openly with their direct reports. It builds ager needs to master. trust, creates a nurturing environment, engages people First, we teach new managers how to catch people and improves the bottom line. CLO

Whether the purpose is to set goals, praise, redirect or bring closure to a task, it’s important for managers to communicate openly with their direct reports.

1.

2.

14 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

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MAKING THE GRADE

A Reason to Identify and Connect Talent Partnerships produce the skills and jobs everyone wants • BY LEE MAXEY

W

Lee Maxey is CEO of MindMax, a marketing and enrollment management services company. To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.com.

hat would happen if corporate managers could groom a person for a career before hiring them?

At City Colleges of Chicago, college administrators and industry leaders have teamed up to align City Colleges’ curricula with the skilled jobs that companies desperately need to fill. The program, “College to Careers,” has recruited big names like UPS and other industry experts to help design curriculum and participate as teacher-practitioners. The goal: Give students access to real-world training and a path to a waiting job.

The College to Careers program is not unlike the Robotics & Advanced Manufacturing Technology Education Collaborative, known as RAMTEC, which is part of the Tri-Rivers Career Center in Marion, Ohio.

To fill the manufacturing skills gap in Ohio, Tri-Rivers Career Center secured a $15 million state grant and started a career pipeline for employers by identifying their needs for talent. Tri-Rivers Career Center contacted locally based robot-makers, such as Yaskawa Motoman, to develop a robotics curriculum with industry-level instruction and certifications on versions of the same robots used by many Ohio manufacturers.

According to Bob Graff, a manager in charge of building educational partnerships for the Motoman Robotics Division of Yaskawa America Inc., employers want students to learn on the same technology they run at their facilities. Instead of taking a course on general robotics theory, undergraduates living in and around Marion — as well as high schoolers — go to RAMTEC and work with the same Yaskawa Motoman robots the industry has already deployed.

“When you know what a manufacturer’s specific hiring needs are, it’s possible to align those with the curriculum schools hope to teach,” Graff said.

The genesis for the College to Careers program and RAMTEC stems, in part, from corporate America’s struggle to fill the skills gap. Chief learning officers have a terrific opportunity to be the architects who build a longer, wider pipeline of talent beginning in our schools.

How can CLOs entice a college to team up with your company? First, look at your greatest hiring need.

Determine how this need might change in the future because you will be developing a curriculum that will not begin to produce new hires at least for a few years.

Next, research with your business to figure out where your skills gaps are and where the company’s instructional expertise lies. For example, if you are the CLO

16 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

at a manufacturer, do you have design engineers on hand who are equal parts subject-matter expert and teacher? If so, they can be guest lecturers who augment the manufacturing curriculum you develop for your university partner of choice.

If you don’t already have partnerships in place with higher education, start by contacting educational institutions that produced your most successful hires. Begin a conversation with the president or dean of one of the university’s schools. Or contact the educational institution where a majority of your employees are doing post-graduate work.

Start by contacting educational institutions that produced your most successful hires.

“An honest conversation between CLO and academic dean about … focused education … is a great way to begin,” said Al Malinchak, who serves as a talent evangelist for Deltek, a software-maker for professional services firms and government contractors. “For the student, you remove a lot of graduation anxiety when you’ve groomed them for a career they can step into.”

According to Rob Lauber, chief learning officer for McDonald’s Corp., the linchpin to investing in a partnership with a City College of Chicago or RAMTEC is company leadership. Business leaders have to see a skill gap and learn that traditional recruiting methods are not enough to fill it.

It is unlikely that a partnership with a program like College to Careers or RAMTEC “will be successful if there isn’t mutual gain,” Lauber said. “I’m not sure schools and universities get this on a large scale. There are exceptions, of course.”

The exceptions, if you can find them, will lead to some exceptional branding, benefits and talent. As a CLO, you are uniquely qualified to sell the vision and the benefits of such a partnership, and make your company part of the next College to Careers or RAMTEC program. But if it were easy, there wouldn’t be a skills gap. CLO

Spring 2016

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BY WENDY WEBB

Branding is more than logos, snazzy commercials and targeted hiring practices. Those are important, but in the end, it’s all about learning.

18 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

Q

uick: What’s commonly associated with Budweiser? If Clydesdale horses came to mind, or the brand name prompted a surge of emotion around Super Bowl ads, that’s good.

Budweiser has one of the most powerful, recognizable corporate brands out there. With a heartfelt message about American values, loyalty and friendship, it’s brand is signed, sealed and delivered every time someone sheds a tear when the Clydesdales surround and protect their friend the Labrador pup from the big, bad wolf, or when the horse on the Budweiser team breaks free to run back to the trainer who raised him from birth.

It’s OK to reach for a tissue now.

Corporate branding is big these days. It’s much more than just a recognizable logo — it’s a corporate identity reinforced over and over again through advertising, marketing and the customer experience.

It’s promises made and delivered and stakeholder expectations fulfilled. A company’s brand is a story communicated consistently and clearly about who and what that company is, what it stands for, what its values are and what it will do for consumers.

More chief learning officers are finding themselves leading branding efforts, or taking on the role of brand ambassador both internally and externally. That’s because branding and learning go hand in hand. Creating a strong corporate brand requires a strong learning foundation. Every employee must feel it in their bones, become a brand ambassador and put that feeling into practice every day in order for every customer to get it.

We Can’t Escape Branding Martin Lindstrom, a branding guru and the author of “Small Data:

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19

Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends,” said that having employees think of themselves as brand ambassadors is critical to the strength and success of the brand. The days where there was a distinct divide between business-to-business and business-to-customer are long gone.

“Today we all check our private emails and Facebook accounts at work and do our work at home in our beds,” he said. “This merger of private and business means that companies need to see their own staff as brand ambassadors who can create a bridge with potential customers.”

Lindstrom used McDonald’s Corp. as an example. Assuming an average person has 30 friends, McDonald’s — with a global workforce of 1.9 million people — has access to some 57 million potential customers. Considered in those terms the importance of branding is staggering.

It’s all about ensuring the organization gets closer to its customers. Lindstrom said he persuaded Nestlé to have every staff member from finance, legal, human resources, security and operations

“We’re about filling the earth with the light of hospitality,” he said. “My role in that? In essence, it’s in every piece of my DNA. I really mean that. It’s about every level of the global experience for guests, owners, employees and the communities we’re in. We’re doing more than providing guest rooms.”

He shares that message internally and externally, does speaking engagements and crafts the company’s learning to develop employees and simultaneously reinforce Hilton’s brand. “It’s part of our culture, and we take it to a very personal level. ‘I am the heart of Hilton’ — that’s what every employee personally believes.

That sort of ownership leads to engagement, which leads to action.”

In the end, it’s about making guests feel welcome when they walk through the door of a Hilton hotel and all throughout their stay. They want to be recognized, especially the HHonors members. A native of Hawaii, Kippen likens the concept to the “aloha spirit” in his home state.

“The aloha spirit isn’t just something we say; it’s real,” he said. “Hawaiians want visitors to one of the

‘This merger of private and business means that companies need to see their own staff as brand ambassadors who can create a bridge with potential customers.’

—Martin Lindstrom, author, ‘Small Data: Tiny Clues That Uncover Huge Trends’ spend at least two days a year in a private consumers’ home to understand the real-world implications of the people who pay their salaries. During these two days, employees are tasked with a single mission: identify small data, those seemingly insignificant consumer observations that often lead to major brand or product innovations.

As a result, Nestlé staff has begun to invent new products and service concepts based on inspiration from consumers and the small data they’ve found.

“Today marketing and branding is no longer a responsibility held by the marketing department but a responsibility held by every single staff member at Nestlé,” Lindstrom said.

That’s a tall order, but chief learning officers are masters of knowing how learning and development can support — and at times define — the big-picture goals in their companies. They also can help to put training in place to help employees reinforce corporate branding within the workplace and outside of it.

Kimo Kippen, chief learning officer for Hilton Worldwide, has been helping to define and build Hilton’s brand through corporate learning since joining the company in 2010; the man lives and breathes the brand.

20 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

most beautiful places on earth to feel welcomed and appreciated. The heart of Hilton is much the same.”

Like the aloha spirit, he explains, the Hilton brand is more than a catchphrase or an attitude — it drives the company.

Hire for Brand Fit One way Kippen makes sure Hilton’s brand promise to fill the earth with the light of hospitality is reinforced on a daily basis is by hiring the right people in the first place — some 100,000 each year, worldwide. The brand helps to attract the right kind of people, and that brand must convey a message on how Hilton hires, orients, onboards, trains and promotes.

Hiring for brand fit first is a big piece of that; then it’s about training for skills. Kippen said hospitality is a calling. The people he wants as Hilton employees, from the top brass on down, are of a certain ilk.

“I started in this industry as a busboy, and I could go back to waiting tables right now if I had to and be proud to do it,” he said. “Most of our general managers started as hourly employees and worked their way up.”

It’s the people who naturally have hospitality running through their veins that Hilton tries to find.

That’s not always easy. To hire roughly 100,000 employees each year, the company easily sifts through 10 times that number.

“We’re looking for people who really and truly enjoy service,” Kippen said. “People who are naturally warm, genuine, caring and joyful. When we’re interviewing housekeepers it’s, ‘Do you enjoy cleaning? What’s your take on dirt?’ Literally, we ask that question.”

It’s about finding someone whose attention to detail is so fine-tuned they can’t physically walk past a gum wrapper on the floor without picking it up. Although it’s a small thing, a guest could walk past that same gum wrapper, get a bad impression, and just like that, the brand has a chip in its armor.

Train for Skills A big part of a CLO’s role involves big-picture thinking — figuring out ways that learning can reinforce a company’s vision and goals. To have a great brand, requires great training. “It’s so much a part of who we are here that I never get asked why training is important,” Kippen said. “I might get asked if we can make it more efficient or cost-effective, and that’s my job.”

Once Hilton hires for brand fit, specific job training begins, and even while the housekeeping staff, for example, is learning how Hilton wants its beds made and towels folded, they also learn how to deliver the more intangible things that will reinforce its brand.

“If they come upon a guest in the hallway, within 15 feet they should notice them and make eye contact and within 5 feet they should say hello,” Kippen said.

“It’s not about the guest saying hello to them first; it’s about the employee initiating it.”

In the end, he said, it all goes back to creating a culture in which learning is appreciated and valued.

“We encourage owning it.”

Brands Need Work Creating a strong brand from the ground up is one thing, but transforming an underperforming brand is another. Dan Pontefract, chief envisioner for Telus Corp., a Canadian telecommunications company, helped drive the effort to turn his company’s brand around.

Back in 2000, the top brass at Telus took a good look at the company and didn’t necessarily like what they saw. Employee engagement was at 53 percent.

Customers weren’t all that happy with the service they were getting. Leadership styles within the company clashed, and learning was mainly relegated to formal events. Today, employee engagement is at 83 percent.

Telus is ranked the No. 1 communications company

in Canada, and it is a member of Canada’s Most Admired Corporate Cultures Hall of Fame.

Achieving all of that required a massive change in how Telus learns, leads and works. It required connected learning, using collaborative technology and improving learning modes to connect people to content, people to people, and people to ideas through formal, informal and social means. There was also a

‘I started in this industry as a busboy, and I could go back to waiting tables right now if I had to and be proud to do it.’

—Kimo Kippen, chief learning officer, Hilton Worldwide University shift in work styles — now Telus employees are trusted to work where, when and how they find most effective.

Indeed, branding reinvention efforts were so successful the company launched the Telus Transformation Office, a consulting firm that helps other companies transform their brands.

“Through keynotes, workshops, articles and consulting, we not only help customers with corporate culture issues, we are in parallel promoting the Telus brand, and our employee engagement practices and history,” Pontefract said. He is also the author of “Flat Army,” a book about the Telus transformation.

“At Telus, we believe ‘The future is friendly,’ and that tagline has been an important part of our brand for more than a decade. We help other organizations achieve a future friendly state of their internal corporate cultures.”

For example, Pontefract said Telus has been assisting a major health care insurer with various transformation requirements including leadership practices, use of collaborative technologies and identifying ways to introduce “pervasive learning” — learning that is equal parts formal, informal and social.

“They look to Telus as a leader in this space, and tap into our experience to fuel their strategic objectives,” he said. “It allows Telus to assist another organization in need, while demonstrating our track record and leadership. All of this helps the Telus brand. It’s really a win-win-win formula.” CLO Wendy Webb is a journalist based in Minnesota. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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PROFILE Kelly Palmer

Dreaming Big to Make Learning Happen

BY KELLYE WHITNEY

For Kelly Palmer, LinkedIn’s chief learning officer, the future of learning is now, and it’s all about technology, personalized, curated content and social learning.

K

elly Palmer is a builder. Not the bricks-andmortar, feet-on-the-ground, put-X-tab-intoY-slot-type builder one might expect from a leader with an engineering background. Instead, the Issaquah, Washington, native is a kind of dream builder, one who was recruited away from Yahoo Inc. almost four years ago to build a learning function from the ground up at LinkedIn Corp.

With more than 400 million members in more than 200 countries and territories and counting, the professional network’s vision is a grand one: create economic opportunity for every person in the world. It makes a similarly big promise to its employees — to help them transform themselves, the company and the world — and learning is a key enabler of that value proposition.

That vision aligns neatly with Palmer’s personal and professional goals. As the company’s chief learning officer — with some responsibility for talent management as well as diversity and inclusion — she is in the perfect position to transform careers and lives.

“When you join LinkedIn, the promise from LinkedIn and from the learning and development organization is we’re going to enable you to transform the trajectory of your career,” she said. “You’re going to be able to build the skills and the knowledge to get better at the job you have today, but also get those knowledge and skills so you can

ON THE WEB Executive Education at LinkedIn Is an Internal Affair clomedia.com/LinkedInEducation

22 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

get your dream job of the future.”

It’s an unusual idea. Organizations don’t, as a rule, concern themselves with an employee’s future prospects, even when learning and development is a priority. But this tactic, while a bit counterintuitive, is one way to secure the best talent; and talent is the bellwether with which LinkedIn will achieve its lofty, global vision.

Richard Socarides, head of public affairs at Gerson Lehrman Group Inc., a membership network for one-on-one professional learning, said he has watched LinkedIn’s transformation with interest, in part because GLG is a large consumer of the company’s products.

“To attract the best talent, which I think they’ve done, you have to approach the whole professional learning paradigm in a new way,” he said. “No matter how great your current place of employment, in three, five or seven years you’re going to be working somewhere else. That’s the new normal. LinkedIn is fully embracing that idea. It’s quite bold and something that’s really hard for people to do.”

The Engineer Brain on Learning Technology is a key enabler for a value proposition around learning as a transformation tool. Palmer has worked in some facet of technology almost her entire career, including time at Sun Microsystems Inc. in the 1990s and 2000s. She began in product development and user-experience design and expanded into roles including director of Java tools engineering and director of product engineering. When Sun began acquiring companies, she was asked to expand her role of managing a 250-person organization in 2002 to help integrate some of the new acquisitions into the engineering business unit.

“I came to the point in my career where I was very successful, and I was doing a lot of interesting things, but I really didn’t feel like I was having an impact on the world

PHOTOS BY JAY WATSON

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23

PROFILE Kelly Palmer

the way I wanted to,” Palmer said. “So I stepped back. I did a little soul searching, and ended up going back to my roots in education.”

She applied for and got a job as the senior director of Sun’s learning organization in 2006 and simultaneously earned a master’s degree in instructional and performance technology — with an emphasis on learning technology — from Boise State University. Palmer said she had always loved education and learning for the effect it can have on people’s lives. She even earned a bachelor’s degree in English and communications from San Jose State University with the intention of teaching at the university level, before an aptitude for technology lured her away.

Some years later, while firmly entrenched in the world of work, she said she thought about quitting high tech and going into education in the nonprofit sector so she could use technology to effect change. She ultimately didn’t; instead she satisfied her philanthropic leanings in 2014 by joining the board for the Taproot Foundation, an organization that seeks to drive social change through pro bono work.

After four years at Sun in an executive learning position, Oracle Corp. bought the company in 2010, and Palmer took a role at Yahoo, leading a large learning organization as vice president of learning. She spent two years there before Linkedin recruited her in 2012. “It was an amazing opportunity. I haven’t seen many start a learning organization from scratch. It was exciting to think about learning as a blank canvas, to think about all the things we could do, how we could think about learning differently.”

Palmer said the learning community has been talking about the need to do things differently for decades, yet traditional learning hasn’t changed much beyond using newer, technology-enabled delivery systems. That’s the thing about having big, lofty goals. They can be tough to realize. But in her current role, Palmer has been able to shift the learning paradigm and put things in place that employees actually use.

“She’s definitely a big-picture-idea person,” said Patricia Wadors, senior vice president of global talent and chief human resources officer at LinkedIn. “So she surrounds herself with people who can execute and implement her ideas, which is great. Being self-aware is a good thing.”

Wadors said when there is a problem to solve, Palmer is loath to look at what has been done before, even if it was successful. Instead the CLO considers, “What will work right now?” Sometimes that means pushing back and looking long term vs. adopting a short-term solution, “which I appreciate,” Wadors said.

In addition to thinking like “an engineer” to solve problems, Wadors described Palmer as a thought leader when it comes to business development and company strategy. She was active in multiple facets of the company’s acquisition of Lynda.com in 2015. “It’s been fun watching her play in that space and evaluate the larger market significance and LinkedIn’s potential role in it.

“She’s not afraid to try new things,” the CHRO said.

“It’s part of being a big thinker. She will look at what sticks in our culture and employee base and can we modify it.

And, she’s an active learner herself.”

Intersection of Technology and Culture

LinkedIn recruited Kelly Palmer in 2012 to build its learning organization from scratch, which was “an amazing opportunity,” she said.

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Every learning program at LinkedIn reinforces its culture and values. Its products, vision and mission are part of the same conversation beginning on new hires’ first day.

Onboarding involves a New Hire Roadmap, which outlines week by week a list of things they need to do to become successful and productive in their first 30 days. Further, the roadmap is gamified, with a progress bar across the top to show the employee exactly how they’re doing during the experience.

Next employees can access a tool called The Transformation Plan, which aids their efforts to get better at their current job and think about their career in the future. “We serve up skills in this program so you can pick what you want to focus on,” Palmer said. “Then you can drag and drop curated learning assets into this transformation plan, and track your progress over time against those career goals.”

The platform upon which all of this happens is called Learn[In], and it’s a far cry from traditional learning management systems, which Palmer said often don’t do what learning leaders want them to do. “One of the first things I did was hire a couple of developers and said, ‘Let’s build this learning platform that will allow us to do curated con-

tent, to build a new hire roadmap and this transformation the challenges associated with information overload, plan so that we can do with learning what we always imag- something all learners suffer given the amount of informained we could do.’ ” tion coming at them on a daily basis. Managing that overAfter the transformation plan, learning strategy diverg- load is also why Learn[In] actively curates content for emes even more from traditional approaches. For instance, ployees rather than just making it available. instead of the popular 70-20-10 model, Palmer uses a 70An employee’s Google search to learn more about so30 model. Traditional learning is a bit antiquated, she said. cial media might produce thousands of hits. A Learn[In] Worse, the lecture model — where people get in front of search, on the other hand, serves up the eight or 10 best, people, then learners memorize facts and take tests — has most relevant pieces of learning content to help employfound its way into the corporate world. ees find what they need when they need it. Today, the At LinkedIn, she said 70 percent of the way people company handles content by topic area, but Palmer said learn is to get information when they need it, learning in it plans to individualize curated content based on an context of how they employee’s existing do their job, or skills and those the learning in the conemployee hopes to text of how they acquire. want to move their Wadors said career rather than Palmer often bases use prescribed learnlearning strategy on ing competencies or data, which the typ—Kelly Palmer, chief learning officer, LinkedIn Corp. ical learning leader learning paths. That translates to a heavy doesn’t. For examuse of readily available online content. Some of that con- ple, “If people look a lot at how to code in mobile applicatent is LinkedIn specific, and the company’s offerings were tions, she’ll see the trend and validate the need for the skill greatly enhanced by the Lynda.com course repository. to business leaders: Should we develop learning? Are you The other 30 percent includes classroom training, and trying to hire for it? Should we develop a solution?” that’s not all. “A few years ago people were under the imGLG’s Socarides said that kind of evaluative, learnpression that if you did a lot of stuff online, you were say- ing-based approach to solving business problems is necesing that you didn’t want to do anything in person any- sary for today’s professionals to be successful and stay inmore; I couldn’t be saying anything further from that,” novative. “The pace of innovation today requires all top Palmer said. “But the fact is people don’t have time to sit in professionals to be lifelong learners,” he said. “And at the in-person activities a lot.” center of that is taking a big-picture approach to what Instead, when people do step away from their busy jobs learning means.” to spend time together, it should be done in intact work Big-picture thinking is what LinkedIn, and Kelly Palmgroups where they’re solving real problems and practicing er, are all about. It’s likely a match made in heaven, given activities they can immediately apply on the job. For in- both want to have a hand in changing the world. stance, last year Palmer and her team developed a four“We have this notion of dream big, get shit done, and week program called Conscious Business to help employ- know how to have fun,” Palmer said. “That’s a bit crass ees put LinkedIn’s culture and values into practice on a because of that one word, but the idea is that dreaming day-to-day basis. big is part of who we are as a company. If I’m leading Collaborating effectively, improving relationships, how learning at LinkedIn, I have to dream big and make to communicate with co-workers, how to solve problems, things happen.” how to act with integrity — the program covers all of She said CLOs in general have to think differently these ideas in a variety of ways. Participants learn in cohort about learning because the future will be more about groups and through videos, knowledge checks and prac- inspiring people rather than controlling them, helptice activities with co-workers in real business scenarios. ing overwhelmed learners find what they need when They can share via a discussion board, and meet weekly they need it and using talent analytics differently to with a facilitator to synthesize learning. “It’s minimal time measure learning impact. There should be no more in person, but very powerful. That’s an example of the fu- butts-in-seats-type data. “It’s about using technology ture of learning: It’s blended, pedagogically sound. It takes to mirror back what people are doing with learning it to a whole new level,” she said. and how that can help them with their jobs or to navigate their careers.” CLO

‘If I’m leading learning at LinkedIn, I have to dream big and make things happen.’

It’s All About the Data

Analytics, learning insights and dashboards are in constant use at LinkedIn. The company uses data to mitigate

Kellye Whitney is Chief Learning Officer’s associate editorial director. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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a d v e r t i s e m e n t

BEST PRACTICES IN LEARNING

The self-awareness gap is preventing your organization from learning Here are 5 things you can do about it

BY UDEMY

I

t’s no surprise that employee learning needs are shifting more dynamically and rapidly than ever before. We all want to deliver the right training content to the right employee at their moment of need, but it’s time-consuming, costly, and complicated to pull off. So how do you achieve the seemingly impossible feat of perfect corporate training? You’ll be surprised to hear the answer.

Research at Udemy has shown that the essential element that separates great corporate training from the standard training is the same that separates top performance in many competitive arenas: self-awareness.

Before you focus on your individual employees, in order to deploy a successful training program you must understand your weaknesses and blind spots as a learning leader, and as an organization. This is challenging because the HR or operations managers responsible for deploying new training solutions often do not understand each and every skill that employees will need and when they’ll need them. They are not self-aware. And by the time your workforce is aware of the training they want and need, a lot of productivity hours have been lost.

This gap between HR professionals and their employees is the result of a lack of

self-awareness. The training leaders of today and tomorrow must find ways to bridge this gap. To help you combat this, at Udemy for Business, we’ve learned that there are five essential criteria to narrow the self-awareness gap when deploying training solutions.

Do you know the skills your company needs at this very moment?

25% of employees leave jobs because of inadequate learning opportunities.

Because so many skills (particularly those around technology) become obsolete so quickly today, many companies are recruiting individuals with adaptable talents and offering training to keep them up-todate on job skills, rather than looking to hire new talent with new skills.

How are you equipping your workforce with the skills they need? While no one can predict the future, you can keep a closer eye on trends and anticipate holes in your workforce’s existing skill set if you are dedicated to excellence. Performing that gap analysis also means having an accurate picture of the skills your training programs have covered today through a rigorous and timely curriculum and skills review.

Do you understand all your options for service and software partners?

Because skills are always changing, corporate training programs need to evolve

a d v e r t i s e m e n t

BEST PRACTICES IN LEARNING

as well. Few companies have the time, expertise, or dedicated resources to create and maintain their own skills-based training modules. However, buying a pre-built set of courses doesn’t always necessarily address your business’s unique needs either.

Learn what will make a difference for your internal customers. Find the right balance for them between building training content of your own versus buying the components of training you deliver.

Does your company and your training program live the value of continuous improvement?

In many companies, training is viewed as a chore. Some of that is attributable to the experience itself, as traditional corporate learning systems are clunky, boring, and out of touch with the way most of us engage with technology and consume content today. Delivering video-based training online, whenever and wherever employees want and need it, can drive better employee engagement, but technology alone isn’t enough. A company’s leadership team must champion a culture of continuous learning.

Cultural change is slow in any organization, but organizations that provide great, upto-date content and emphasize learning across the organization are most likely to succeed. Supporting an ecosystem of learning will uplevel the performance of your organization, as well as the personal satisfaction of your employees.

Have you given your people the best instructors?

The best expert in a given field might not be the most effective teacher. Corporate learners crave the authenticity delivered by a practitioner with domain expertise and a gift for teaching. Yet, creating and curating this kind of content is tougher than you might think. You need to marry high-quality content with expert instructors who know how to bring a subject to life so students can really absorb it, learn it and live it.

At its most basic, a successful training program needs to be built on superior training content. That includes not just what’s covered in the curriculum but the end-to-end experience employees have interacting with the content and applying it to their actual work situations.

Are you proud of your training ROI? ROI is notoriously difficult to measure.

But here’s the good news -- companies that offer online training save time and money on travel and accommodations, as well as instructor resources, and those savings can be invested back into other revenuegenerating parts of the business.

These criteria will help you address the self-awareness gap. By truly assessing your organization and breeding a culture of learning you can greatly improve the effectiveness of your workforce.

COMPANY PROFILE Built for businesses striving to stay at the forefront of innovation, Udemy for Business is a next-generation online learning platform specifically designed to offer relevant, on-demand skills training anytime, anywhere. The Udemy for Business solution curates cutting-edge, high-quality courses taught by industry experts and provides teams with intuitive tools to securely create and distribute their own proprietary content. Global brands like 1-800-Flowers, Lyft, Oracle, and Pitney Bowes rely on Udemy for Business to train their workforce and excel in the skills-driven economy.

S pecial E dition :

Executive

Education Executive education providers are adapting to ensure tomorrow’s leaders have the skills they need to succeed in business.

Executive Education Roadmap page 30

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The Problem With Executive Education page 32

Leadership Lessons From the EMBA page 38

Hot List page 43

introduction by

S

K elly e Whit ney

purred by technology and shaped by market forces, executive education continues to evolve and change.

Take online education, for instance.

Online learning has been around for a while, but the once quite traditional forum of executive education has now opened its doors wide to tech-enabled delivery. Chunks of online masters and large pieces of education programs can now be delivered in smaller units, enabling executive education providers to create products tailored to reach the business community.

Not all providers are taking advantage of online delivery vehicles to the same extent, however. Name recognition counts for a lot as far as perceived value and capability, according to Lee Maxey, CEO of Mind-

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29

Max, a marketing and recruitment services company for executive education at large universities, and columnist for Chief Learning Officer. He likened it to a have-and-have-not scenario. Schools with better brands like Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School are growing their executive education offerings significantly.

Schools with lower cache brands are not doing as well unless it’s on a local scale.

“Businesses are looking for something they can count on,” he said. “The brand of the school has a big impact on that. Local brands have an easier time and greater success connecting with the local business community, but they can’t leverage that online scale that a bigger brand school can.”

Online learning delivery is also making executive education providers rethink their core competencies and what value and effect their offerings have for participants in the marketplace. Renu Kulkarni, associate dean for executive education at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said there’s a lot of experimentation going on but not at the expense of core learning.

“It’s making us experiment to really get to how can online or MOOCs or the various flavors create an even better experience. But we also have to be careful about the business model.”

Speaking of business models, clients are requesting more custom programs from their executive education providers than they have in the past. Part of this move seems to be a desire to connect better with high potentials or executives deemed especially worthy of additional learning investment. Another part is rooted in a need to map specific competencies to core functions or areas of the business earmarked as highgrowth areas, for instance.

Thanks again to online technology, custom curriculum is easier to build than ever before. Executive education providers can more easily modify existing products to meet a client’s needs. Schools are building content to meet targeted objectives, and authoring tools are making it easier to use.

ROADMAPS Executive Education Roadmap Throughout this section see Chief Learning Officer’s practical guide to plan, implement and review executive education programs. This Roadmap provides guidance for identifying a university-based provider, developing curricula and measuring results.

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Executive Education Glossary Executive Education: Nondegree programs, generally provided by an academic institution, designed to develop the skills of business leaders.

• Custom: Tailored to a corporate customers’ specific needs.

• Open: Available to all working managers.

Master of Business Administration, or MBA: A graduate academic business degree conferred by a university.

Executive MBA, or EMBA: A graduate business degree program, generally tailored to working professionals unable to take part in a traditional academic program.

SCORM, or Sharable Content Object Reference Model, is now running on many schools’ learning management systems, which boosts client’s ability to access learning. “Things are in the cloud now,” Maxey said. “If you have access to an Internet browser, you can run content. It was much harder to do that when you had to put stuff behind a firewall. It was harder to make sure that things were compatible.”

Client needs are at the forefront of most of these changes, and executive education providers are focusing on developing relationships to fulfill those needs. Maxey said long relationships are common as clients tend to stick with providers who give them what they need.

“UCLA has been working with Toyota for almost a decade,” he said, and has provided everything from off-the-shelf to custom programs for their executives.

“In terms of how they should partner with them, that varies,” he said.

The viability and tenure of that relationship centers on a provider’s ability to suss out clear objectives. Companies also have to be clear when it makes sense for them to use an open-enrollment program vs. a custom one, and whether they want online learning, in person or a hybrid of both. The clearer a company is about its needs and expectations, the likelier it is to get what it wants from an executive education provider.

Maxey said schools are trying to craft content for what they think the market wants but aren’t always sure. For their part, companies should do assessments to target specific needs. “A good CLO, someone who is strategic about their organization, could make better requests.”

Clarity of purpose is key, but so is collaboration.

Kulkarni said the relationships that work best focus on collaboration from the onset, even before deciding between open enrollment or custom programming. A consultative approach Picking an Education Provider identifies client needs, the impetus for creating Identifying the right school to work with can mean the differan executive education program, changes they ence between success and failure. Organizations all over the want to create in their senior executives, and world have their choice of learning and development partoutcomes desired. ners, among them academic institutions. When it comes to “Of course, the sweet spot for schools like ouraddressing emerging business concerns, tapping into exselves is when we can take those needs, underternal expertise is particularly important, said Karl Johnson, stand those needs, marry them with our faculties’ senior vice president of leadership consulting for the Full interests, and complement them with a practiCircle Group. tioner perspective,” Kulkarni said. “When we find that match, that’s when the partnership Learning leaders should start by examining exactly what is it works very, very well.” the company needs. Today’s organizational needs are increasHowever programs ultimately develop, ingly complicated and unique. Solutions are needed yesterKulkarni said the bar for in-person engageday, and time is of the essence. But this learning investment ments is growing steadily higher. Online edcan start at $1,000 per person, per day. As an organization’s ucation and emerging delivery options are prospect of investing in executive education, “it has to be a driving change. good fit,” Johnson said.

Regardless of delivery, several content arTo create a winning partnership, determine: eas are in demand: strategic leadership, leadIs the partner up for the task? Among the factors Cigna Chief ing high-performance organizations, managLearning Officer Karen Koching change, risk management, er considered when identifying managing volatility and perROADBLOCK the program provider the health sonal leadership. General maninsurance company would use agement skills are also a comPrograms “that have was whether the prospective mon client request. “Executives really done a great job institution demonstrated the who are very strong in a funcof building a robust netknowledge and skills in the areas tional area now want to be able work of all kinds of different partners the executive team was most into think across silos, and go beyond their own faculty are the ones terested in. from a seasoned functional exyou now see serving the needs of corecutive to general manager porations much better,” said Karen Is the provider customer-minded who can think holistically,” Kocher, chief learning officer at Cigna. in its approach? Today’s marKulkarni said. ketplace is fast-paced, and the Executive education is also organizations working to meet its uncovering new areas of focus demands have just as demanding needs. The partner should like neuroscience. Though not many compawant to understand the organization’s needs and to craft somenies are focused on it, Kulkarni said, those who thing to meet them in a very customer-focused and agile way. do are often focused on innovation. Cognitive Can the provider work quickly? It’s far from unusual that when learning and neuroagility are now part of the an organization decides what it wants, Kocher said, “we want executive education conversation. it to start yesterday.” That may be difficult for some academic “At the University of Chicago, we are a institutions because the pace is different. “Changes in academmedical and a biosciences research [organizaic curriculum and other things can take years; getting them to tion]. We’re able to tap into that, and explore work this urgency can be difficult.” how that might be an appropriate component of how we teach,” she said.

Is the institution offering something unique that will give the orThat is the ultimate result of the ongoganization a competitive advantage? Creativity wasn’t the driving executive education evolution. Both ing decision-maker for Kocher. In the case of the organization’s providers and their client companies conglobal acumen needs, that program not only had an in-country tinue to change. CLO international learning component but also used a consortium

ROADMAPS

Kellye Whitney is Chief Learning Officer’s associate editorial director. To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.com.

approach, allowing Cigna leaders to exchange ideas and work with peers in other industries.

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32 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

T H E

Problem W I T H

Custom programs are addressing many of the business community’s longstanding complaints about academia.

Executive Education

BY BRAVETTA HASSELL

C

igna Corp. Chief Learning Officer Karen Kocher couldn’t be happier with the executive education programs the company invested in.

Program participants continue to speak about how valuable the learning experience was. One man often reflects on the inspiration he was able to draw to solve real-time business challenges. “You know something is valuable when you not only learn from it or within it, but you can actually make real-world situations better,” Kocher said.

Over the past five years, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business helped the global health insurance service company develop general leadership skills, while Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business focused specifically on developing global acumen to create globally savvy and capable leaders.

Dartmouth was especially appealing for global leadership because of its consortium approach. Cigna’s people could learn from experts as well as exchange ideas and insights with a blend of people from four other companies, Kocher explained. “It was creative; it was effective.”

Critics of executive education often speak

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about the gap between organizations’ talent management needs and the university lecture hall. It’s that focus on real world problems that has made Cigna’s experience successful. But not all are satisfied with their executive education offerings.

Customization Is Key Savvy executives often point out the obvious: By its very methodical and measured nature, academia is not agile or adaptable enough to meet C-suite executives sophisticated development needs.

Devin Bigoness thinks it is. As executive director of the Johnson School of Management at Cornell University, and project director for Duke Corporate Education before that, his work depends on a belief that executive education can bring value to the corporate landscape.

‘When you’re working with an academic institution, things tend to work at a different pace, so it’s difficult to find an organization not only customercentered but also agile.’

—Karen Kocher, chief learning officer, Cigna Corp.

Consider the multidisciplinary nature of the university experience. “More and more businesses are having to develop into the business of everything,” Bigoness said. “Everyone from trade associations to Fortune 500 companies is trying to develop leadership capabilities and business acumen in their people — big challenges the head of talent, HR and learning face, but also the business line faces. Universities have a distinct capability set they can bring to the table.”

Johnson & Johnson is using the school’s offerings to teach its leaders how to better think about applied innovation for the company’s translational medicine compound teams. Tapping into the university’s business, applied science and engineering research and expertise is creating an inherently dynamic partnership, Bigoness said.

The Johnson School of Management’s focus is customized executive education, helping organizational leaders execute their given strategy by building and developing extant and new talent capabilities. The question, how can academia help businesses, is constant for Bigoness and his team.

“How do we leverage all that we can bring in the 34 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

context of business education, whether that be in engineering, agriculture, law, medicine or business, the broader disciplinary research and the work that’s been done?”

He said once staff has an understanding of an organization’s strategy and goals, and its current capabilities, members can collaborate with the learning leader to design an education solution using Cornell’s various resources. The outcome is a tailored fit, so no two solutions engineered by the school are alike. Bigoness said this consultative and highly customized approach is how executive education programs will find success.

Historically, when business schools engage with organizations, the challenges organizations face fit neatly into the buckets a major business school works with such as finance, marketing and strategy.

But myriad developments in the past 10, particularly the past five, years have created a more diverse, multilayered and ever-unfolding set of problems that surpass the value in a mass manufactured, prefabricated solution.

Business problems are deeper, more global, more complex, and Bigoness said executive education providers need to be able to serve clients in a much broader way. Provider range and flexibility is one among a handful of things Kocher said were especially essential to find an executive education offering worth the investment. Other things include: customer centricity, agility and creativity.

These essential offerings are why leadership expert Roger Martin cautions learning leaders to run if a prospective executive education provider doesn’t have a customer-focused attitude. The former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto said executive education is not about getting tools a company thinks might fix a problem.

“It’s let’s go get somebody who will be able to say I will work on that problem with you, and in the process of it, transfer from me to you some skills,” he said.

Speed, Responsiveness Core For a program to be responsive to an organization’s learning and development needs, it needs the resources to effectively meet them. And as varied as the companies and organizations — multinational companies to trade and industry associations as well as Fortune 500 companies — seeking solutions are, so must the solutions and expertise that drives them.

Cornell’s Steven Miranda said before any plan can be executed, an attentive executive education program should engage in some corporate client fact-finding.

His program’s preliminary work begins with some quantitative homework — discovering what’s happen-

Open Enrollment vs.

Custom Programs

O

pen enrollment executive education — existing academic programs open to all — isn’t for everybody.

Determining an organization’s leadership development needs and who exactly the resources are best suited for can make all the difference, said Steven Miranda, managing director for Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies.

For today’s executives, one can be certain of at least two things: they’re short on time, and what time they do have is precious.

C-suite leaders will reap little benefit from a classroom experience that doesn’t tap into and integrate the personal experiences and insights they bring to the table. Content that isn’t customized to their organization-specific leadership and business needs is useless content.

Organizations also must consider the midlevel and more junior management, whose development is just as critical but for whom a highly customized, one-on-oneminded program is just not economically feasible, Miranda said. To meet the learning needs for these cohorts, organizations may want to offer a more broadly applicable open enrollment learning experience.

That doesn’t mean the learning is dated. It’s imperative for both the executive education provider and the client organization that offerings are not out of date. Miranda said he is a big believer in executive education programs not only offering contemporary education in topics of interest to corporate customers but also delivering on the classic business school training that organizations ask for year after year.

Organizations considering open enrollment for staff development should make sure material is current, he said, “ripped from the headlines so that people can look at it and say, ‘Oh, OK, this isn’t, say 100 percent applicable to the pharmaceutical industry, but it is definitely applicable to the world we live in today.’ ” A strong customized program can position executives to meet current challenges they are experiencing — with support. Open enrollment programming for midlevel, junior-level as well as senior leadership can help different cohorts learn the skills they need using insights from multiple industries and offer unique learning and networking opportunities.

But Miranda said the bottom line is: “Absolutely customize at the top of the house, a little bit less so in the middle to lower levels simply because of the economics of the volume that you have to deal with.”

—Bravetta Hassell

ing with the company, whether its business performance is on the uptick or downturn and what he calls “aggressive listening” — all to surmise what’s shaping the current environment from which the organization is strategizing and developing.

His biggest criticism of executive education programs is they rely too heavily on “canned content” and not enough on customized delivery relevant for the culture and organization in question.

“One of the mistakes a lot of executive education organizations make is they enter into the first conversation in sell-mode,” Miranda said. “The first couple of conversations we’ll have with you will be lots of listening and lots of asking questions, so we’ve got a better understanding of what your challenges really are.”

In the old days, Kocher said organizations went almost exclusively the academic route for outsourced leadership help. Then the tide shifted, and learning leaders moved away from academia and toward for-profit partners. Why? The universities weren’t agile enough.

“When you’re working with an academic institution, things tend to work at a different pace so it’s difficult to find an organization not only customer-centered but also agile,” she said. “Typically when we finally decide what we need and we want to get it, it’s not unlike most companies — we want it to start yesterday. That’s difficult for a lot of organizations, let alone academic institutions.”

It’s a persistent reality Miranda acknowledges when considering how Cornell, or any executive education provider, can stay competitive and valuable.

Institutions can have all the great academic material they want, but the executives need personal, real-time experiences they can use inside and outside of the classroom.

“Unless you’re creating an experience that integrates their learning into the actual program, that takes advantage of what they know, you’re going to be unsuccessful,” he said.

That’s why preliminary homework is so important, and why Miranda and his colleagues make it a point to stay connected to corporate HR, talent management and learning and development leaders, as well as read industry publications to keep up to speed on what companies are facing, thinking about and might come knocking at the door for.

For example, take change management. One executive education strategy might be effective for a Fortune 100 tech company, but that same strategy likely won’t produce the same results for the United Nations, Miranda said.

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3 Trends Changing Executive Education

E

xecutive education programs offer leaders a chance to learn from and work with some of the brightest minds, in a variety of disciplines where new insights and theories can be tested in a forgiving environment.

That doesn’t mean these programs are, or will remain, relevant, according to chief learning officers and other leaders tasked with overseeing their organization’s executive education strategy.

“You have to understand and be able to grapple with what your clients are facing, whatever the broad range of business trends and skills are,” said Devin Bigoness, executive director for executive education at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. “We need to be able to quickly adapt to what our client needs to move their needle and grow their business.”

Here are a few of the realities driving change in executive education that are critical to organizations enjoying the full value of their investment: Technology: People learn across a much wider selection of technology platforms, and it is increasingly acceptable to learn online or through blended learning, more so than, say, a decade ago. One response to this that has been growing in popularity: flipping the classroom. “Anytime I’m working with a client, we’re always thinking about what’s the right medium and methodology that maximizes their time together but uses it very wisely,” Bigoness said.

Speed of business: It’s unlikely that any leader would argue the world of work hasn’t gotten more pressurized given the intense need to drive change. The speed of change and innovation is happening faster, and as a result, learning leaders are feeling this pressure directly from senior leadership. That means organizations in executive education programs have less time to spend learning in one long sitting. “It used to be that you could say to a client ‘Come to Ithaca for a month or six weeks over the summertime’ and engage that way,” Bigoness said. Now “if that was your marketing pitch, you’d be very challenged unless you were doing something very distinctive.”

Competition: Academic executive education programs are operating in a growing landscape that includes leadership consulting firms, professional service firms and the proprietary learning organizations developed by companies themselves, in addition to other business schools. As such, their learning offerings must be up to the minute, relevant and, above all, effective methods with which to develop leaders.

—Bravetta Hassell

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the helm, each one’s culture is different.

“The core content of what you’re delivering will be pretty much the same, but the way you link in with the executives in those organizations, that’s what makes a program unique and competitively advantageous to take,” he said.

Further, organizations stand to gain more from a partnership when executive education programs use their insights and resources to facilitate learning and experiences that have current and future value.

Creativity wasn’t the primary decision-maker in Kocher’s provider selection to help Cigna meet its global leadership development needs. The fact that Dartmouth had developed a consortium approach, an on-the-ground global learning experience and a blend of academic and corporate — even journalistic — resources to support its learning, was a tie breaker.

“People have come back from in-country experiences with a better appreciation of what it really takes to be an effective global leader,” she said. Even better, participants create relationships across companies, talking with new peers about business challenges and new opportunities.

MBA Down, Exec Ed Up? While an executive experience like Cigna’s sounds idyllic, it’s not necessarily the rule, said Rotman School of Management’s Martin, in “Are U.S. Business Schools Headed for A GM-Like Fall?” an August 2015 Poets & Quants article. He likened the future of contemporary MBA programs to a fate similar to General Motors in the 1970s. But he won’t lump executive education in that barrel because the stakes are higher — teaching executives makes a difference.

“Generally speaking, the people who do executive education are professors who like teaching and put a high preference on teaching,” Martin said.

“And because executive education is a competitively harsher environment, if you teach badly to executives, you don’t get asked back.”

Still, these programs’ inability to meet today’s needs with cutting-edge resources instead of trying to apply yesterday’s classic theories to 21st century problems could be their downfall. Martin said it’s often easier to have existing professors teaching executives the same things they teach students, which might not the most cutting-edge stuff. For universities conducting research and developing curricula on the newest things in business — things professors aren’t researching yet — the cost will be very high and harder to pull off.

“It’s a big challenge, and I don’t see any easy solution to it because creating new content for exec-

utive education is not in the economic structure of any business school,” he said.

If companies “want to get new stuff that isn’t well-ensconced in the academy already, they’re going to have to fund it to a much greater extent than they’re used to funding executive education.”

‘More and more businesses are having to develop into the business of everything.

Everyone from trade associations to Fortune 500 companies is trying to develop their people in leadership capabilities and business acumen.’

—Devin Bigoness, Johnson School of Management, Cornell University

It looks like companies might do just that.

According to a 2015 Executive Education Survey of L&D leaders administered by the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, 53 percent of respondents reported seeing organizational spending on leadership development and executive education increasing in the next 12 months.

But executive education programs shouldn’t jump for joy too quickly. Kocher said in the future, what will distinguish the academy from competitors like for-profit leadership firms is cost, in addition to time-to-availability and the opportunity to integrate newer age concepts and practices into their curriculum.

“The cost needs to come down in many cases from the academic institutions,” she said. “We’ll see if they can get there, if that’s possible.” CLO Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.com.

ROADMAPS

Executive Education in Action

During initial meetings between the executive education provider and the organization, the university should be in listening mode, getting a feel for the company’s current state of affairs, its capacity in stated areas of need and its objectives, said Steven Miranda, managing director for Cornell University’s Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies.

Collaboration is critical to design a program doesn’t slap a bandage on a program’s issue but addresses the underpinnings of any issues.

By design, most of the more advanced executive education partnerships with corporations and chief learning officers have a mix of program participants, said Karl Johnson, who served as assistant dean for executive education at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management before becoming senior vice president of leadership consulting at the Full Circle Group, and has held similar roles at the University SHORTCUT: of Notre Dame WHAT IS ACTION LEARNING? and University of This experiential approach California Berkeley. to learning elevates the “In some of the effect and immediacy of an organization’s best programs executive education program results. we’ve run, the Often a part of custom programs, action CEO will come in learning has leaders work on an existing and introduce the business opportunity, to learn through program, and lay doing while also meeting real-time out the strategy,” business objectives. he said. “Then a strategy professor would come in, lay out some tenets and models of strategy to get people clear on how to develop strategy in the future but also get a clear understanding of the direction the organization is heading.”

Programs that have a mix of leader-to-leader, academicto-participant types of dialogue going on in the room are often more effective. When actual projects are brought in for participants to work on as part of action learning, organizations often feel the effect of their executive education investment sooner.

At the heart of it all, program design should build the appropriate skills, get participants clear on the company’s direction and what type of leadership will make it successful in the future, and — while Johnson said it’s often hard to come by in a university space — engage leaders on a personal development journey.

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Beyond academic training, executive MBAs are becoming valuable tools for developing leadership skills.

Leadership

Lessons

EMBA FROM THE

BY RANDALL P. WHITE

38 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

T

oday’s executive MBA students are more exposed to leadership development than before. Traditional MBA courses are still the nucleus of the degree, but leadership development — often presented at the beginning of the program and again at the end of the experience — has fundamentally changed the academic outcome. It has become the red thread that runs through the curriculum.

That means learning organizations can look to EMBA programs as effective leadership development opportunities. The EMBA’s more specialized focus that functions as a laboratory to develop an understanding of leadership and to test and view the learners’ effect on organizations in real time.

Not Your Mother’s MBA “The person that we’re seeing within the EMBA world is a much different person from MBA world,” said Roger Hallowell, affiliated professor of strategy and business policy at HEC Paris. “They’re more intrinsically motivated than extrinsically motivated, which has a profound impact on how they approach the topic of leadership. The ability to look inward to see how their behaviors affect

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other people — what one colleague of mine calls the ‘leader’s emotional wake’ — is significantly greater for an older person than a younger person.”

Hallowell earned his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1984 and, after earning a doctorate there as well, taught in the Harvard MBA program. Today, Hallowell said he sees some key differences in the EMBA experience vs. traditional MBAs from 30 years ago.

One, the pedagogy has evolved with more experiential learning, enhanced interaction with peers and mentors, an emphasis on global business, respect for cultural diversity and a greater commitment to social responsibility.

Personality assessments and one-on-one feedback — developed over the past decades in corporate environments with the help of organizational psycholo-

gists — are now standard. The goal is to gain self-awareness, emotional intelligence and the ability to extrapolate decisions amid the ambiguity of real world business environments.

“We certainly have a new pile of tools,” Hallowell said. “The EMBA programs of today are more focused on 360-degree reviews, such as the Leadership Versatility Index, which is a fantastic tool to understand how you’re being perceived by the people around you. In my experience getting an MBA, we never did anything like that.”

Combined with a core curriculum of traditional masters level study in accounting, marketing and strategy, the leadership lessons prepare students to take on challenging roles in their jobs. It also improves the total learning experience. With the emphasis on experiential learning, there is less time spent in lecture halls.

EMBAs provide a practical learning environment in which leadership traits can be practiced and developed.

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Executive MBA programs require that candidates study independently and in small groups with a high degree of accountability placed on each student to participate and lead in turn. EMBAs often involve broad international travel that places students in corporate environments challenging their cultural biases while increasing knowledge and skills through practical observation.

Many programs call on learners to apply their experience in a months-long capstone project. “If the project is going to be eight months, I thought I better make it a company I would be willing to build,” said former GE executive Swaady Martin, a graduate of the TRIUM EMBA program, a degree jointly taught by New York University, London School of Economics and HEC Paris.

Her TRIUM capstone became her new enterprise, Yswara, a socially responsible firm that processes African commodities into luxury products and distributes them globally. Yswara launched in 2012.

Martin still follows the strategy developed in her EMBA. She also relies on regular meetings with a former classmate and mentor, a top executive with luxury brand Hermès, for feedback and advice, which is not uncommon for EMBA graduates. She exemplifies the intrinsically motivated and sometimes idealistic EMBA. Her example is not extraordinary. A sizeable percentage of graduates eventually launch their own companies and nongovernmental organizations, while others return to their jobs and lead major changes that benefit their employers.

Changing Corporate Leadership As this new model proliferates, it is likely to change corporate leadership and redefine executive development in a number of ways. Leadership ability develops from emotional intelligence, mastery of interpersonal communications and, in general, people skills. EMBAs provide a practical learning environment in which each of these traits can be practiced and developed.

Mary Logan, past academic dean of TRIUM and now a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said leadership development is fundamental to all aspects of the leading EMBA programs. “There is a focus on leadership through all the courses, no matter if it’s accounting or marketing or a leadership-specific course,” she said.

Further, it’s focused more on the “why” and “how” than just the “what” of leadership. Logan said through final projects at TRIUM — these are startup projects are done in teams — students go out into the world and try to collect all the data they need for a project.

Plus, they work together, getting guidance and handson experience figuring out how to get their teams to move in a desired direction.

Before students graduate, they have a chance to

Reader Reaction

What was the most important thing you learned while earning your MBA? Was the investment worth it? If not, do you regret it?

Tiffany Crosby: For me, the investment was definitely worth it. I learned that I had the business acumen to back up my dreams of being in learning and development. I was inspired to leave the executive job I had and launch out in a different direction. It’s been four years, and I haven’t regretted it.

Karin von Hodenberg: I got my MBA to advance my career and to grow my education and learning by being exposed to more focused specialties. What I received from this degree, was to not only expand my knowledge from learned professors who are still close to the real world, but to learn from the other students and their varied experiences. My MBA taught me how to be a better manager of people and a better leader.

Tim Kincaid: I love learning, and my MBA had an industry focus (aviation) that kept it interesting and relevant for me and my career.

After completing the degree (while working full time in corporate PR at American Airlines), the biggest surprise was I did not want to do primarily analytical, financial and quantitative work. I could do that work, but I didn’t enjoy it.

Far from this being wasted time or resources, earning an MBA continues to benefit me in unanticipated ways. It boosted my confidence and capabilities to competently interact, support and lead those who were MBAs. Another learning was the surprising power of the credential itself. The MBA gives me credibility and quicker rapport for coaching engagements with highly analytical leaders, and teaching graduate and undergraduate business courses.

Derek Spooner: I gained a ton of knowledge from my MBA. My undergraduate degree was in sports communication. When I started my MBA program, I had experience in TV and film production and marketing services. So, it’s safe to say, I needed the business background. It would be impossible for me to pinpoint the most important thing I learned. The investment was completely worth it. Funny how much you can enjoy school when it is a conscious choice you make to go back and get an advanced degree. I rediscovered my love for learning.

What do you think? Join the discussion at CLOmedia.com/ MBALessons, follow us on Twitter @CLOmedia or join our Chief Learning Officer LinkedIn group.

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ROADMAPS

Measuring and Feeling the Results To assess the effect of Cigna’s investment in leadership and global acumen, Chief Learning Officer Karen Kocher examined promotion rates, global movement rates and job performance for the program participants. She also used Net Promoter Score, a common customer satisfaction measurement tool to gauge internal program satisfaction.

Beyond that, learning leaders evaluate executive education program engagements in a number of other ways including: Leadership competency modeling: Executive education programs are often designed to develop specific skills the organization has said are essential. Learning leaders can survey participants’ bosses and managers three to six months after an engagement to see if they observed a change in knowledge, skills and abilities.

Action learning projects: Many executive education programs include action learning projects, focused on strategic organizational issues. Teams generally report their recommendations for these projects to senior leaders within the organization who can then provide the learning leader with a qualitative assessment of the engagement’s success.

Individual development plan: Programs often include an individual leadership development and/or cohort leader-to-leader component, said Karl Johnson, senior vice president of leadership consulting at Full Circle Group. This typically includes a 360-degree assessment, executive coaching and FOR THE JOURNEY an individual de“Be really broad in your velopment plan. thinking about the potential While the assesspartners that you can and ment results aren’t should work with for any of the various opshared, he said portunities that you’re dealing with,” said the plan should Karen Kocher, chief learning officer at Cigna. be. “The CLO may then choose to survey boss/managers of participants three to six months after the engagement to determine how much progress participants have made against the goals described in their” individual development plans.

Additional organizationwide program impact measurements, usually owned by talent management leaders, include succession planning metrics, employee engagement surveys and employee retention metrics.

practice how to lead effectively both when they return to work during breaks in study, and while completing coursework. The EMBA programs create an environment that makes leadership growth hard to avoid.

“The concept of ‘the lesson is in the room’ is amplified tremendously in an EMBA class,” Hallowell said. “As a professor, when someone says, ‘I think this is what we should do,’ I turn as facilitator and ask the class, ‘What do you think?’ The most profound learning is where the different class members are teaching each other.”

Whereas Hallowell said a traditional MBA can be thought of as a career “turbocharger” that immediately propels a graduate up to a better job, he said EMBA students are more driven

‘If the program does its job right, the EMBA graduate will have spent several intense months opening the horizons of his/her mind and being confronted by people from all over the world.’

—Marina Kundu, Financial Times/IE Business School Corporate Learning Alliance

by personal challenges and a desire to recalibrate their lives through their work. These factors tend to pack classes with very experienced and successful executives from diverse backgrounds and cultures who tend to be generous with their knowledge.

The Real Value to the Organization It might not be practical for most companies to offer full tuition reimbursement for an EMBA. According to the Financial Times, currently a majority of EMBA students personally cover most of their tuition and expenses. What organizations can do is target EMBA graduates in recruitment efforts.

Still, many corporations do provide some underwriting of degreed education, and sending high-potential candidates to earn EMBA degrees is not out of the question. Marina Kundu suggests it might be worth the investment. She was instrumental in developing the EMBA program at HEC Paris and is now vice president of methods, learning technologies and efficacy at the Financial Times/IE Business School Corporate Learning Alliance.

“If the program does its job right, the EMBA graduate will have spent several intense months opening the horizons of his/ EMBA continued on page 48

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HOT LIST Executive Education Programs With Global Presence

A small sampling of U.S.-based executive education providers who offer programs globally.

Listed alphabetically; compiled by Bravetta Hassell; editor@CLOmedia.com.

Institution name and Web address

Chicago Booth Executive Education chicagobooth.edu/ executiveeducation

Cornell Executive Business Education johnson.cornell.edu/ Executive-Education

Duke Corporate Education dukece.com

Duke University: The Fuqua School of Business fuqua.duke.edu/programs/ other_programs/executive-education/

Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University

Number of clients with business headquarters outside U.S.

Number of international participants in customized programs

13

Overseas programs

Special note from the program

550

Australia, Brazil, China, Kuwait, Qatar, Singapore, Spain, U.K.

Scholars at Chicago Booth include winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

563

China, Egypt, Europe, India, Latin America, South America, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates

Cornell Executive Business Education customizes educational programs for business impact. Core areas are leading innovation, strategic leadership and business acumen.

78

2,500

More than 600 custom programs with offices in India, Singapore, South Africa and the U.K.

Duke CE has delivered custom programs in more than 75 countries, and has a network of 1,500 global educators delivering 10 to 15 programs per week to approximately 225,000 participants in 7,500 programs to date.

118

None: Fuqua does not create custom programs

Global Leadership Workshop is offered on demand in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Shanghai

“We measure our graduates’ success by their impact on workplaces and the world around them, their relationships and their reputations,” said Elizabeth Hogan, associate dean of global marketing.

103 in countries including Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, China, Croatia, Japan, Mexico, Qatar, Singapore, Turkey and United Arab Emirates

Programs can be delivered at Thunderbird and Arizona State University sites worldwide, at client sites, or designed as in-market immersion programs.

16

18

937

7

289

2 programs in Saudi Arabia

Specially developed programs include the UCLA Anderson Post Graduate Program in Management for Executives, the XED Entrepreneurship Accelerator Program and the Nazer Program.

35

About 4,500 annually

Belgium, Canada, China, France, Hungary, Singapore, Turkey, United Arab Emirates

Clients include Allergan Inc., Bank of America Corp., Caterpillar Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp., FedEx Corp., Lowe’s Cos. Inc., Schneider Electric, and Volvo Car Corp.

thunderbird.edu/executive

UCLA Anderson Executive Education anderson.ucla.edu/ executive-education

UNC Executive Development uncexec.com

Note: The University of Virginia Darden School of Business did not respond before press time.

Source: Institutions

Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

43

CASE STUDY

BBVA Bancomer Plays the Change Game

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

I

n the buttoned-up world of banking, tradition, hierarchy and the prestige of a corner office are ingrained in the corporate culture. So when BBVA Bancomer, the largest financial institution in Mexico, decided to move its headquarters from a traditional building with lots of private offices to two state-of-the-art, LEED-certified buildings full of open work spaces designed to foster collaboration and transparency, the executive team knew it would be a shock for employees and management.

“When you change your physical space it affects your culture,” said Alfonso Bustos Sanchez, dean of Bancomer University. “If you don’t address that shift in mindset, you will lose a great opportunity to foster change.”

The move to the new buildings was part of a broader digital transformation at the bank that included moving all products and services online and enabling the more than 100,000 employees worldwide to collaborate digitally. Collaboration and transparency were not considered priorities in the old way of doing business at BBVA Bancomer.

“One of the main obstacles for a collaborative and digital culture was the legacy building,” said Fernando Rau, talent management consultant with consulting company Overlap in Mexico City. “Dysfunctional buildings can develop dysfunctional habits.” In the old headquarters, the level of contribution of each staff was measured by the size of their office, and the overall

SNAPSHOT BBVA Bancomer used gamification, social media and live actors to transform a traditional banking culture into a collaborative, environmentally focused digital organization.

design of the office spaces fostered privacy over collaboration, he said. Employees weren’t accustomed to working side-by-side with managers, or prioritizing things like work-life balance and team empowerment.

BBVA Bancomer’s leadership team knew the employees needed a robust change-management effort to make the move successful, and traditional communication campaigns and training programs would not be enough. “We wanted to use the move as an opportunity to help our employees acquire a new way of working so they could take full advantage of the new building,” said Uriel Galicia, learning and development director at Bancomer University.

In 2015, to coincide with the move, BBVA Bancomer’s learning and development organization and Overlap designed an innovative culture change program, called Ciudadania NET, or Nueva Experiencia de Trabajo, which means “new working experience.”

The program used gamification to foster collabo-

Renderings of BBVA Bancomer’s new buildings, from left: BBVA Bancomer Tower Reforma, Parques BBVA Bancomer Tower and BBVA Bancomer Data Center in Mexico City.

44 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

ration and competition, and included online training modules, social media components and real-world activities to demonstrate behavior change. “We developed the program using games, missions and journeys to make it engaging for employees, and to create opportunities for collaboration,” Galicia said. “We found that to be a useful way to convince employees

which they discuss the effect of the change on an internal social media platform, complete feedback surveys, and capture and share moments where team members made the change part of their new way of working.

Each mission includes a combination of online learning and live interactions with specific tasks. For example, in phase one, employees might watch a vid-

‘When you change your physical space it affects your culture. If you don’t address that shift in mindset you will lose a great opportunity to foster change.’

—Alfonso Busto Sanchez, dean, Bancomer University of the importance of changing their behaviors.”

Rau said in the beginning, gamification was a tough sell for the bank’s executive stakeholders, who needed to be persuaded that games and leader boards were serious enough to drive the desired change. But the learning team took the time to answer all of their questions, and to talk through how it would work to win their support.

“It was risky,” he said. “It took time to get them on board, but they are very happy now.”

7 Habits of Highly Effective Employees With leadership support, the learning team began by defining the seven behaviors employees would need to be successful in the new environment: 1. Show respect for others, their space, their environment and the rules.

2. Exercise work-life balance and encourage it in others.

3. Be collaborative and promote teamwork.

4. Keep things simple, be positive and embrace technology.

5. Use the new premises and workspace layout properly.

6. Keep personal impact to the environment at a minimum.

7. Be autonomous, making use of and promoting the new bank’s self-service capabilities.

Using the seven habits as a framework, the learning team created a blended online and real-world learning initiative that includes 14 missions to be completed over 12 weeks.

The missions are grouped into three phases. Phase one is focused on building awareness and educating employees about the new behaviors and why they are important. Phase two is about taking action — getting employees to actually use the behaviors on the job.

Phase three is about reflection and feedback, during

eo about respecting the environment, and complete an online trivia game about collaboration. In phase two they perform specific assignments, such as scheduling use of a shared meeting space, posting a selfie to the social media site using the recycling center, or collaborating with teammates.

Employees receive points for completing tasks that can later be exchanged for prizes. As they complete missions and gather points, they receive badges and earn higher rankings to demonstrate levels of mastery. All of the points and employee rankings are shared on the online leader board to foster competition and highlight employees’ accomplishments in the new space.

Show and Tell One of the more unusual aspects of the program are the actors; they perform in the online videos and engage with employees in the workplace. Rather than put on formal staged productions, the actors were instructed to mingle with employees while in-character.

“Each actor embodied a specific personality,” Rau said. “Some represented behaviors employees needed to embrace while others represented behaviors they needed to leave behind.” Each one was given an ironic name, like Joaquin Solente, which in Spanish sounds like “Joshua the insolent” and Laura D´irse, which translates to “time to leave.”

While in the office the actors might engage in disruptive behavior, such as talking loudly on their cellphones in common areas. It was a way to show employees the right and wrong way to behave, which had a big effect, Sanchez said. “They would follow a script but they also engaged with employees and had conversations with them.” These interactions were one of the most popular features of the program.

CASE STUDY continued on page 49 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

45

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

How Are You Handling the Internet of Things?

BY EVAN SINAR

A leader’s role in the Internet of Things environment is a careful one. Employees need to know why, how and when data about them will be used — and it pays to promote a developmental rather than a punitive slant on data collection.

T

he term Internet of Things describes an emerging environment where Internet-connected devices automatically and continually transmit status information. Anyone with a Nest Thermostat in their house or a Fitbit on their wrist is already using an Internet of Things, or IoT, device. And outside the home, many systems track and communicate about our daily activities without our knowledge.

This is just the beginning. In a world where data are a currency, companies cannot afford to neglect a form of big data that requires no human intervention to acquire, yet can produce immense business value. Thus, corporate IoT use is surging. It is projected that more than 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet within five years. Companies recognize the Internet of Things’ potential to obtain useful data about all facets of their business operations and as a result, they’re aggressively bringing these systems online.

The Internet of Things doesn’t rely on data entered directly by employees, but it has become an influential source of data about them. Studies suggest nearly half of

FIGURE 1: MANY LEADERS STRUGGLE WITH TECHNOLOGY With the Internet of Things, implementations and strategy are much more difficult to launch and sustain.

66 %

are highly confident using data to guide business decisions.

12 %

view self-study online learning as most effective.

60 %

are highly confident using technology to improve their workforce.

11%

view social networkbased development as most effective.

50 %

feel technology makes it easier to develop as a leader.

Source: Development Dimensions International, 2015

46 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

5%

view mobile-based development as most effective.

organizations plan to adopt employee-focused IoT devices within two years. Various systems already monitor, track and report on employee activity, productivity and even health. However, their use poses risks for employee trust and retention. Leaders have to act as keystones to ensure data gathering doesn’t harm employees’ interests.

How the IoT Affects Employees Though gathering employee-related data is projected to increase dramatically, it is already underway in many organizations. Some of the ways businesses capture and use workplace data about employees include: • Biometric sensors track where employees are within the company’s facilities, whom they interact with and even the tone and speech patterns of their conversations.

• Wearable devices continually gauge employee productivity — for example, in a warehouse — based on their speed of movement, how long they remain in one place and their efficiency of movement based on how often they need to retrace their steps to complete a task.

• Location sensors estimate when an employee will reach their destination for a meeting, and if a delay is projected, automatically send a notification to alert other attendees to delay the meeting start time.

• Fitness monitors prompt desk-based employees to be more active and tailor health recommendations to match employee activity levels.

• “Augmented reality” apps and glasses provide employees with up-to-date information about their surroundings, recording and recommending actions in real time.

• Devices attached to company-provided transportation gauge occurrences of drivers exceeding speed limits or stopping at locations outside their prescribed routes.

• Devices track the actions taken by expert opera-

tors of complex systems such as submarines and nuclear power plants, and use this information to inform training programs for novice users.

In addition, computers, tablets and phones already connected to the Internet have become prolific sources of data about employee productivity and susceptibility to nonwork diversions. Drawing on advances, these devices also have become “smarter” in their ability to recommend, for example, breaks for employees staring at a screen for too long, or to suggest topic ideas when their activity levels suggest they are struggling to complete a written report. All of this information about individual employees is subject to company review and corresponding action, and can be incorporated into an employee’s personal record within a human resource information system, or HRIS.

Do IoT Benefits Match Up to Potential Consequences?

For companies able to successfully harness a vastly expanded range and depth of workforce data, the benefits can be massive. Research has projected employee IoT productivity gains of 8.5 percent and job satisfaction gains of 3.5 percent. Scaled across a workforce, these effects can generate huge company returns from the technology investment needed to put IoT devices in place.

These advantages can be further multiplied by using IoT analytics to better understand and predict employee behaviors. Successfully executed, future-oriented HR analytics are linked to an organization’s financial strength, yet high-quality, individual-level data to drive these analytics are limited or unavailable for many jobs. If the Internet of Things can generate a previously unimaginable level of detailed information about the activities and outcomes of a full range of jobs, an organization’s IoT energies will prove truly transformational for the precision and predictive power of its talent analytics.

Leaders also must consider the human side of these efforts. Ignoring and failing to act on human facets can harm the workforce, negating many IoT benefits.

Consider these four areas of potentially negative impact on employees from poorly designed and implemented IoT systems: • Employee resentment and disengagement: stems from a perceived lack of privacy and control over what information is collected about them and how it is used.

• Legal action: an employee can — and has — filed suit against a former employer if fired after becoming frustrated with and uninstalling a tracking app.

• Increased stress levels: results from heavier scrutiny given to the employee’s to-the-second actions; stress can degrade health.

• Damage to the company’s brand as an employer of choice: if the organization is seen as overly intrusive and infringing on employee rights.

However, companies using also can boost employee job satisfaction. What factors help to generate a positive employee reaction to IoT? How should leaders influence these efforts? To answer these questions, first ask if are leaders prepared to serve as the agents to make sure IoT-produced employee data is accurate and appropriate.

The Internet of Things falls within a broader category of technology that leaders are asked to use to improve their — and their employees’ — effectiveness. A leader’s general comfort and familiarity with technology has important implications for the newer systems and devices that become part of employee-focused IoT projects. Technology is only as effective as leaders’ confidence using it and advocating it to employees. Unfortunately, many leaders fall short on technology savviness, generating risk for new workplace technologies, the Internet of Things among them.

In Development Dimensions International’s “Global Leadership Forecast 2014 | 2015 Multinational Sub-report” research with more than 3,000 leaders from multinational corporations, summarized, only 60 percent report high confidence leveraging technology to improve their workforce (Editor’s note: The author works for DDI). Signs are scarcely more positive for the typical leader’s ability to use workplace data — data IoT will generate at a far larger scale than currently available — to guide business decisions.

Only 2 in 3 leaders were highly confident making data-driven decisions. Even for learning purposes leaders exclude many new technologies — including social, mobile and online learning — from their lists of most-effective development methods. Further, technology for workforce improvement remains largely unproven even for the newest generation of leaders. While a sobering 5 in 10 leaders felt technology made it easier for them to develop as a leader, a mere 43 percent of millennial leaders shared this opinion (Figure 1, p. 46).

Maximize the IoT Payoff Leaders seeking to actively engage with IoT technologies and to act as a stronger bridge between corporate and employee interests can shape higher-return, lower-risk use of employee-focused IoT in seven vital ways: 1. Build a foundation of trust. Employee trust is an important enabler for far more than the Internet of Things, but research has shown it’s an essential factor in whether employees react with resentment or optimism about performance monitoring and other technology systems. LeadINTERNET OF THINGS continued on page 48 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

47

EMBA continued from page 42

INTERNET OF THING continued from page 47

her mind and being confronted by people from all over the world with very diverse backgrounds who have different outlooks and points of view,” Kundu said. “Graduates will have been enriched by the sharing and benchmarking of best and worst practices across different industries and businesses and global contexts.”

It is commonly reported that graduates bring innovative thinking back to their jobs, sometimes challenging business models for the better. “Before my EMBA, I was completely focused on my job at GE, but I felt like I wasn’t bringing anything new,” said TRIUM alumna Martin. “When I finished, I had fresher ideas and broader vision, and I was more equipped to contribute to an organization.”

Executive MBA degrees are expensive but valuable.

Organizations are likely to get back executives who are impassioned about bringing new ideas and not averse to disruption and change. It’s an opportunity best reserved for promising performers who can build on their strengths, but probably not the best way to fix weaknesses or rescue derailed executives.

“Life-long learner,” is how Logan describes the ideal candidate. “Put your energy on your stars.

Look for someone who is already spending their own time on learning and is already committed to improving themselves.”

One of the risks of underwriting advanced degrees is the possibility that the graduate will leave the company for a better offer.

“We know that candidates are choosing EMBAs today to further their professional development,” Kundu said. “In my experience, 30 to 40 percent of EMBA participants in any given cohort are looking either to start their own business or to get a general management qualification which will allow them to switch career paths entirely.”

However, Kundu said the majority of graduates hope their degrees will allow them to move into new roles within their current companies. “Companies that are serious about continuing education and talent management for their employees can complement their corporate learning programs by supporting select top executives to do such degrees,” Kundu said.

“But they need to be realistic about their expectations,” she said. “The success of their investment will depend not only on the individual graduate, but on the space they create for him/her to come back into the organization and use what they’ve learned.” CLO

ers can pursue development programs to close deficiencies in necessary trust-building skills.

2. Improve comfort, familiarity and proficiency with all types of technology, specifically for IoT devices. Explain what they are and how they are being used. This is not an area of strength for many leaders, but it’s a gap that must be closed to confidently allow IoT to be implemented.

3. Make sure IoT data are right and accurate.

Leaders must understand what IoT data are actually being captured and ensure the right data are gathered. These data must provide accurate employee information, eliminate extraneous factors and avoid data flaws leading to misinterpretation of the information and false impressions about employees.

4. Know exactly what the IoT data will — and won’t — be used for. Is the data really going to help employees become better? Or is it a new way to catch them doing something wrong? When information tracked about employees is viewed as developmental, it is more likely to be seen as fair and to induce job satisfaction and commitment.

5. Plan to use data to give employees personalized feedback. This factor can’t be overstated and makes the biggest difference in how employees see the Internet of Things. Simply, how is the data helping employees learn and grow personally? If leaders can’t make a credible case for why and how, negative effects and rampant suspicion are nearly guaranteed.

6. Respond to employee concerns with empathy.

Leaders skilled in listening and responding to employees with empathy, developed on their own or in partnership with learning, will be better prepared to quell concerns about the collection and use of data about employee activities.

7. Communicate the reasons and benefits of IoT from the employee’s perspective. Take these messaging steps long before the first device is strapped to an employee’s wrist or the first data point is gathered about their actions.

Companies plunging headlong into the IoT do so for many business reasons, yet the employee’s viewpoint is not always considered when plans are made; those who actually wear or are tracked by IoT devices can be an afterthought rather than a primary consideration.

Strong and improved leader awareness, involvement and skill-building are vital to prevent employees seeing the Internet of Things’ big data as Big Brother. CLO

Randall P. White is founding partner of The Executive Development Group and co-head of leadership and affiliate professor at HEC Paris. He also teaches at TRIUM and Duke CE. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

Evan Sinar is chief scientist for Development Dimensions International and director of the Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

Who Should Get an EMBA?

48 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

CASE STUDY continued from page 45 In the final phase, employees received points for sharing feedback on social media about how their group is doing with the training — good or bad. The social sharing helped foster a more collaborative experience for trainees.

At the end of the 12 weeks, employees who complete all the missions receive a NET citizenship passport. “It is a way for them to show pride in their new culture, to say ‘I am a citizen of this environment, and I am making these behaviors stick,’ ” Sanchez said. “The passports were very well received.”

To further embed a sense of team work, the company moved employees into the new space in stages, so the learning team could focus on groups of roughly 100 people at a time, rather than all 9,500 at once. “Each group moved over together, and they all work on the same floor, so it created camaraderie and support,” Rau said.

The training began in May 2015. By December, nearly 8,500 employees had completed the program, with the remaining groups scheduled to finish in early 2016. To track the programs’ effect, the learning team surveyed all employees on the key behaviors before and after training — a survey that employees received points for completing. Results released in December showed substantial improvements in several categories. One of the most notable: Before training, only 19 percent

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of employees agreed with the statement, “No need to think before I promote and practice work-life balance” in the workplace; after training, 79 percent agreed with the statement. This 60-point jump was especially exciting as quality of life was one of the more difficult behaviors to get employees to embrace in the old bank culture, Sanchez said.

The results show similar increases among those who say they “embrace the technology available that allows me streamline my job;” this increased to 99 percent from 42 percent; and those who say they “properly use the new ‘auto-service portal’ ” also jumped to 99 percent from 42 percent.

Though he said the culture transformation is far from complete. “Change is not a one-shot program, it is a journey,” Rau said.

“We still have to follow up and keep reinforcing the behavior change if we want it to be embedded for good.”

The learning program was a great chance for the HR and tech teams to prove their value, Sanchez added. “It sends the message that we are innovative, and that we understand how to create an environment where employees can learn from each other and participate in a truly engaging learning experience.” CLO

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49

IN CONCLUSION

Be Willing to Be Bad Pretending to be an expert all the time does learning a disservice • BY ERIKA ANDERSEN

A

Erika Andersen is the founder of Proteus, a consulting, coaching, and training firm and author of “Be Bad First: Get Good at Things Fast to Stay Ready for the Future.” To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.com.

s Janet walks back to her office, she reflects on the meeting she’s just wrapped up with her team, the top learning and development staff in their large consumer goods organization. They had been discussing their new people management curriculum rollout, and at one point, she suggested they all participate in one of the pilot groups. Their response? Dead silence, and looks ranging from surprised to puzzled to irritated.

Janet tried again. “We’ve all agreed that many of our executives aren’t excellent people managers.

Wouldn’t it be great for us to model the kind of openness to learning that we expect from them?”

No one disagreed with her outright, but she could tell they weren’t comfortable with the idea. She could mandate her team’s attendance. But if they show up looking bored or spend the course surreptitiously checking their phones, it will have exactly opposite the effect she wants.

People tend to emphasize only the happy outcome, rather than the learning that came before the success.

The other attendees will see them as know-italls who don’t think they have anything to learn about people management. And, she thinks to herself, the irony is that every one of them — including her — could use some improvement in their management skills.

Janet’s difficulty is all too common. Senior executives — including learning leaders — often resist learning, even when they need it. From leadership development to learning new company processes, new technologies or industry advances, senior people often act as though they’re supposed to know everything already. It makes it difficult for them to keep up with the demands of an ever-more-rapidly changing world.

What’s a chief learning officer to do?

Fortunately, it is possible to help people at any level become masters of mastery: learners who expand their skills, knowledge and understanding daily. These three things can help you and others become high-payoff learners.

50 Chief Learning Officer • March 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com

1. Publicize and reward the power of “noviceness.” Many of the most effective, innovative leaders are willing to be beginners, to acknowledge they don’t know things, and to open themselves up to acquiring emerging skills and knowledge necessary for success.

You likely have some of those in your company. Find them, and find ways to showcase them — for not just their achievements but also the learning process they went through to get there. Point out how they tried new approaches, made mistakes, got better and finally succeeded. Most people — most companies — tend to emphasize only the happy outcome, rather than the learning that came before the success. Focusing only on the end product reinforces people’s unrealistic, and unhelpful, expectations about having to be expert at all times. Learning leaders can make sure people are acknowledged for doing the learning that leads to better results.

2. Make sure learning is happening in learning.

Janet has the right idea about having her team model openness to learning. She just has to help them see the value for them and the rest of the organization.

People often only want to do new potentially daunting things when they can see the personal benefits of doing them. So, rather than trying to convince them to participate in the pilot management skills course, she could go back to them and ask: “How might it benefit you to be a part of the pilot? How might it benefit our function? How might it benefit the company?” If they can answer those questions in ways that are meaningful to them, they’re more likely to attend and benefit from the training.

3. Recognize the inevitability of “being bad first.” Humans love to be good at things. But every time we need to learn something new, we’ll likely be bad at first. When you’re attempting to get good in a new area of skill or knowledge, you’re going to feel clumsy, make mistakes, have to ask 101-level questions. You can’t change that, but you can make the process easier by simply accepting it. Tell yourself and others: “We’re going to be bad at this until we get good at it.” If Janet can help herself, her staff and their senior executives shift their mindset into “accepting being bad,” at the start of new learning, it will make them feel less pressured, more capable and hopeful. That will make it easier for everyone to learn and grow. CLO

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