April 2018 | CLOmedia.com
JPMorgan Chase’s
Jesse Jackson
Special Report: Leadership Development - Taco Bell’s New Seachable Training Library The Dawn of the Robot Coach - Organizational Learning Is a Social Act - The Nature of Business Tribes
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EDITOR’S LETTER
Dad Rules
A
ccording to some estimates, companies spend as much as $50 billion a year on leadership development in the hope of finding and developing their future leaders. While that commitment is certainly crucial, in many cases the most important investment in leadership starts way earlier with our first role models: mom and dad. Take my dad, for example. The son of a bus driver and retail worker from a working class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago, he was the first in the family to attend college, much less graduate from it. Dad parlayed his first job as manager in the appliance department at a Sears store into a decades-long career that ended with him as a regional manager for Sears service centers across a large swath of Chicagoland. Day in and day out, he was out the door before sunrise often getting home only after the sun had gone to bed. I’m sure he had days he didn’t feel his best but I never heard him complain about it. There was no mystery to it: Hard work was simply what you did.
The most lasting leadership comes from our parents.
analytics tools take on the task of chewing through data and information, the so-called “hard” skills of leadership — processing information and managing inputs and outputs — become less and less important. In the not-so-distant future, the traditional tasks of leaders may even be automated. Where does that leave the role of a leader? Elevated. It goes beyond expertise, business acumen, strategic focus, decision-making and management prowess. Leadership is mission and purpose. It’s about inspiring and motivating others to achieve your shared objectives as well as their own goals. Leadership is about what you do but also how you do it. Leadership is deeply personal. As I talk to business executives and chief learning officers alike, I am continually struck by how often they mention parents as inspiration for how they lead. It happened again recently when I spoke to Tom Gartland, former president of North America for Avis Budget. Tom shared how the last phone conversation he had with his father before his sudden death when Tom was 16 motivates him and led him down the path to the message at the center of his book “Lead with Heart.” Scott Kriens, chairman of Juniper Networks, said his father’s death in 2004 caused him to take a step back from his job at the top of one of Silicon Valley’s most profitable companies and evaluate who he wanted to be as a leader and make authentic and trusting relationships the center or his mission. My own dad turned 80 in March. Time is short but as we approach the end of our journey together I continue to learn from him. I rely upon his example as I raise my own children. I’m learning how to deal with deteriorating health with dignity and grace. I continue to see the power of humor to deal with the inevitable heartbreaks, setbacks and challenges that can so easily overwhelm us. But most of all, I continue to learn that the lessons in life aren’t how much you know but about how you live. CLO
But it wasn’t all work. Dad coached my sisters’ softball teams, served as commissioner of my Little League, volunteered at church and was unfailingly one of the first to help a neighbor when they needed it, whether it was as simple as sharing a kind word or as big as building a porch. Dad had the tools for both. While I don’t ever recall talking to him about leadership, I understood where he stood loud and clear. Show up all the time, especially when you feel like you’d rather be anywhere else. You never know when someone will need you. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Life’s no joke but find humor in the challenges. Take responsibility for yourself. When you mess up, own the consequences. Be kind to others — not for what it gets you but simply because everyone deserves to be treated with respect. As we write in this month’s issue, leadership isn’t Mike Prokopeak simply a set of skills and abilities to be honed and pol- Editor in Chief ished. In fact, as artificial intelligence and powerful mikep@CLOmedia.com 4 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
96%
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A PUBLICATION OF
APRIL 2018 | VOLUME 17, ISSUE 3 CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER John R. Taggart jrtag@CLOmedia.com PRESIDENT 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 EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Rick Bell rbell@CLOmedia.com MANAGING EDITOR Ashley St. John astjohn@CLOmedia.com SENIOR EDITOR Lauren Dixon ldixon@CLOmedia.com ASSOCIATE EDITORS Andie Burjek aburjek@CLOmedia.com Ave Rio ario@CLOmedia.com COPY EDITOR Christopher Magnus cmagnus@CLOmedia.com EDITORIAL ART DIRECTOR Theresa Stoodley tstoodley@CLOmedia.com VIDEO AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER Andrew Kennedy Lewis alewis@CLOmedia.com EDITORIAL INTERNS Aysha Ashley Househ ahouseh@CLOmedia.com Mariel Tishma mtishma@CLOmedia.com
VICE PRESIDENT, RESEARCH & ADVISORY SERVICES Sarah Kimmel skimmel@CLOmedia.com RESEARCH MANAGER Tim Harnett tharnett@CLOmedia.com DATA SCIENTIST Grey Litaker glitaker@CLOmedia.com RESEARCH CONTENT SPECIALIST Kristen Britt kbritt@CLOmedia.com MEDIA & PRODUCTION MANAGER Ashley Flora aflora@CLOmedia.com PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Nina Howard nhoward@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, EVENTS Trey Smith tsmith@CLOmedia.com EVENTS CONTENT EDITOR Malaz Elsheikh melsheikh@CLOmedia.com WEBCAST MANAGER Alec O’Dell aodell@CLOmedia.com EVENTS GRAPHIC DESIGNER Tonya Harris lharris@CLOmedia.com
BUSINESS MANAGER Vince Czarnowski vince@CLOmedia.com REGIONAL SALES MANAGERS Derek Graham dgraham@CLOmedia.com Robert Stevens rstevens@CLOmedia.com Daniella Weinberg dweinberg@CLOmedia.com DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Kevin Fields kfields@CLOmedia.com
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Josh Bersin David DeFilippo Michael E. Echols Soren Eilertsen Sarah Fister Gale Jack J. Phillips Patti P. Phillips Joe Raelin Marygrace Schumann Todd M. Warner
AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cindy Cardinal ccardinal@CLOmedia.com DIGITAL & AUDIENCE INSIGHTS MANAGER Lauren Lynch llynch@CLOmedia.com DIGITAL COORDINATOR Mannat Mahtani mmahtani@CLOmedia.com LIST MANAGER Mike Rovello hcmlistrentals@infogroup.com BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION MANAGER Melanie Lee mlee@CLOmedia.com
CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Cedric Coco, EVP, Chief People Of ficer, Brookdale Senior Living Inc. Lisa Doyle, Head of Retail Training, Ace Hardware David DeFilippo, Chief People and Learning Of ficer, Suf folk Tamar Elkeles, Chief Talent Executive, Atlantic Bridge Capital Thomas Evans, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, PricewaterhouseCoopers Gerry Hudson-Martin, Director, Corporate Learning Strategies, Business Architects Kimo Kippen, President, Aloha Learning Advisors Rob Lauber, Vice President, Chief Learning Of ficer, McDonald’s Corp. Maj. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel, ( Ret.) U.S. Air Force, Director, Deloit te Consulting Justin Lombardo, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, Baptist Health Adri Maisonet-Morales, Vice President, Enterprise Learning and Development, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Alan Malinchak, CEO, Éclat Transitions LLC and STRATactical LLC Lee Maxey, CEO, MindMax Bob Mosher, Senior Par tner and Chief Learning Evangelist, APPLY Synergies Rebecca Ray, Executive Vice President, The Conference Board Allison Rossett, ( Ret.) Professor of Educational Technology, San Diego State Universit y Diana Thomas, CEO and Founder, Winning Results David Vance, Executive Director, Center for Talent Repor ting Kevin D. Wilde, Executive Leadership Fellow, Carlson School of Management, Universit y of Minnesota James P. Woolsey, President, Defense Aquisition Universit y Chief Learning Officer (ISSN 1935-8148) is published monthly, except bi-monthly in January/February and July/August by MediaTec Publishing Inc., 111 E. Wacker Dr., Suite 1200, Chicago IL 60601. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Chief Learning Officer, P.O. Box 8712 Lowell, MA 01853. Subscriptions are free to qualified professionals within the US and Canada. Digital free subscriptions are available worldwide. Nonqualified paid subscriptions are available at the subscription price of $199 for 10 issues. All countries outside the US and Canada must be prepaid in US funds with an additional $33 postage surcharge. Single price copy is $29.99. Chief Learning Officer and CLOmedia.com are the trademarks of MediaTec Publishing Inc. Copyright © 2018, MediaTec Publishing Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Reproduction of material published in Chief Learning Officer is forbidden without permission. Printed by: Quad/Graphics, Sussex, WI
FREE LIVE
ONLINE EVENTS
CONTENTS A
pril
2018
24 Profile Accidental CLO, Intentional Learning Ave Rio Jesse Jackson leads JPMorgan Chase on a digital learning journey.
58 Case Study Yo Quiero Learning! Ave Rio Fast-food giant Taco Bell created a searchable training library for a frequently changing menu.
62 Business Intelligence Follow the Leader(ship) Spending Mike Prokopeak Learning investment shows that leadership development remains a top priority for most organizations.
ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY DAVID LUBARSKY
8 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
CONTENTS
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING IS A A pril 2018
52
SOCIAL ACT 46
34
Features
18 46 52
18
Experts
Organizational Learning Is a Social Act
10 BUSINESS IMPACT
Todd M. Warner Relationships matter in organizations. Avoid overlooking them by embedding learning into the context of work and promoting connection and dialogue.
The Dawn of the Robot Coach
Michael E. Echols Revising Beliefs, Behaviors and Value
12 BEST PRACTICES
Sarah Fister Gale Artificial intelligence may power the next generation of mentors, but can technology really replace a human touch?
Josh Bersin Learning in the Flow of Work
14 ACCOUNTABILITY
The Nature of Business Tribes Soren Eilertsen The right leader can help an organization leverage tribal instinct for maximum business performance.
Jack J. and Patti P. Phillips Do You Have a CEO-Friendly Scorecard?
16 ON THE FRONT LINE
David DeFilippo It’s Not All About the Technology
66 IN CONCLUSION
SPECIAL REPORT: Leadership Development
34 Building the Leader of the Future Mike Prokopeak
Joe Raelin Learning Your Way Out
Resources
39 When It Comes to Gender Bias in Leadership, Talk is Cheap Ave Rio
4 Editor’s Letter
40 Looking the Future in the Face Marygrace Schumann
Dad Rules
65 Advertisers’ Index ARE YOU A PART OF THE CLO NETWORK? Follow us:
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9
BUSINESS IMPACT
Revising Beliefs, Behaviors and Value
Reactions to the 2017 federal tax restructuring speak volumes • BY MICHAEL E. ECHOLS
F Michael E. Echols is principal and founder of Human Capital LLC and author of “Your Future Is Calling.” He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
ew recent events have impacted beliefs and behaviors as rapidly as the federal tax code passed by U.S. Congress in December 2017. Within weeks of passage, a wave of corporate actions swept over the mantra of “the new normal” broadcast to defend sub-2 percent GDP growth. Actions spoke louder than words. What, exactly, is the lesson to be learned? And how can that lesson be effectively applied to advance the goals of learning? Let’s first examine the lesson itself. Deservedly, an immense amount of media is directed at the new tax law’s financial and economic implications. States with high state income and property taxes are squealing like stuck pigs about the unfairness of the law for residents within their state boundaries. At the same time, the vast majority of economists stalwartly defend their econometric models. Those models show that demographics and anemic productivity growth make 3 to 4 percent GDP growth impossible. The phrase “new normal” has proven to be a security blanket most mainstream economists have found extremely difficult to discard. In spite of the intensity and frequency of news created to influence elections and/or generate clicks for ad dollars, it’s evident the new tax law has and will continue to have important economic consequences. So what are some of those implications and how do they relate to the learning community?
What is most interesting about these recent national experiences are the changes in beliefs and behaviors that have resulted. People across the political spectrum are acting differently based on a revised set of beliefs. The most visible action is the one being taken by individual and corporate investors. The financial indices are the scorekeepers on these new behaviors. People are investing in their own portfolios at an unprecedented rate while companies are feverishly increasing their own capital investment plans. Within weeks of tax law passage, Apple announced its $350 billion investment plan. The close proximity between passage of the new tax law and the magnitude of the announcement is striking. The plans for such investment must have been in the works for some time. Although I must confess I have never personally had to figure out how to spend $350 billion, one has to assume a lot of work over an extended period of time is required. Examining what changed on such short notice is worthwhile: It was the beliefs and behaviors of Apple leaders. One can draw no other conclusion than that the infamous new normal of the recent past was nowhere to be found in the spaceship-shaped Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California. When it comes to the economics of these changes, it is the prospect of accelerating capital investment that is the horn of plenty created by these tax changes. A core lesson is that the economics of increased investment linked to a big shift in beliefs and behaviors can produce dramatic real value. What is the lesson to be learned by the leaders of the learning community that can qualify for the holy grail title of “best practice”? Like the currently demonstrated economic evidence in our nation, I argue that it is the changes in beliefs and behaviors with regard to investment that is the main driver. So, you may ask, what exactly are those lessons that The reduction in the U.S. corporate tax rate has we in the learning community should adopt as our already had immense financial effects undeniable by own? Unfortunately, I have used up my words allocateven the “new normal” crowd. Early predictions of a ed to this month’s column. Let me leave you with this stock market crash have been swept away by equity tidbit: The lessons to be learned are indeed about the markets that are growing the 401(k) retirement ac- beliefs and behaviors of investment — exactly the counts of everyday citizens across America. But it is same elements that are so powerfully driving value crenot merely the fattening of corporate and individual ation all around us as a result of the new federal tax balance sheets that is the lesson to be learned here. laws. Stay tuned. CLO
The economics of increased investment linked to a big shift in beliefs and behaviors can produce dramatic real value.
10 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
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BEST PRACTICES
Learning in the Flow of Work Make workflow-integrated learning a reality • BY JOSH BERSIN
F Josh Bersin is founder of Bersin, known as Bersin by Deloitte, and a principal with Deloitte Consulting. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
or years we have been talking about the need to integrate learning into the flow of work. This domain has been called performance support, on-demand learning, microlearning, adaptive learning and even learning nuggets. Today this ambitious idea is within reach. I’ll start with a simple idea: Break all the learning programs you have into two types — micro and macro. Microlearning content is short and focused enough to meet an immediate need. It is a video, article, blog, e-book, audio clip or other form of content that can be indexed and found easily. An example of microlearning might be a software engineer who forgets the syntax for a certain type of data structure. They could look online, find an example, and quickly copy it or review it before continuing work. It might be a pricing guide, compliance overview or set of rules about how to log in or complete a transaction. Or it could be an article that offers a new idea. Macrolearning content, by contrast, is deep and comprehensive enough to teach new concepts and skills and give the learner an integrated framework for understanding a topic. It may include background material, sample exercises, case studies or even interactive projects that make learning stick. While the goal of microlearning is to solve a problem, the goal of macrolearning is to develop a new skill, obtain a complete understanding or provide context for deeper knowledge. A course that explains Blockchain, for example, may not transform a novice into a Blockchain developer, but it should give them enough background to feel confident using Blockchain concepts in their work. They could then dive in further. This simple construct helps deliver learning in the flow of work. Employees new to a position or role need macroprograms (e.g., onboarding) but once they get started they need microlearning to remind them of tips, inform them of changes and keep their skills current. New adaptive (or intelligent) learning platforms make this possible. Research published in a 2007 article in the Journal of Memory and Language, “Repeated Retrieval During Learning Is the Key to Long-Term Retention,” demonstrates that “spaced learning,” the process of timing the content and reminding people of concepts after a pause, can have dramatic improvements in retention. Today’s learning experience and microlearning systems can deliver this algorithmically, evenly spacing learning over time to make sure you
12 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
get what you need based on past interactions. It’s important to remember that learning in the flow of work means having a mentor, doing after-action reviews and asking questions in an open-ended, reflective way. As you sit down and design new learning in the
Microlearning solves problems; macrolearning develops new skills. flow of work (design thinking is part of this process), don’t forget to include the collaborative and cultural components in your design. A simple conversation or the request to “share what you’ve learned” could be as memorable or important as the fanciest new video. When I talk with CLOs and other learning and HR professionals I’m always asked the question, “How do we get people to use the content we’ve built?” Learning in the flow of work is the answer. People are busy. They want to learn but they don’t have much time (according to Bersin by Deloitte research, an average of 24 minutes per week is spent on learning). If you want to make learning relevant, give people access to just enough information to do their jobs, deliver it when and where they need it, and use intelligence to make sure they get enough spaced learning and macrolearning in the process. Consider the success of one major financial institution that redesigned its entire corporate university, building an end-to-end learning environment that lets anyone publish content at any time, enabling micro and macrolearning to flourish. It now has certification courses in digital commerce, Blockchain/bitcoin and cybersecurity complemented by hundreds of curated articles, videos and podcasts on all aspects of the digital world of currency. The company is attracting some of the brightest engineers in digital commerce. The tools of L&D have changed. It’s time to embrace microlearning in a big way. Learning experience platforms, microlearning platforms and new systems that provide chatbots and virtual environments are here. Just make sure you design them to fit into the flow of work. CLO
AN INVESTMENT IN KNOWLEDGE PAYS THE BEST INTEREST. — BENJAMIN FR ANKLIN
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ACCOUNTABILITY
Do You Have a CEO-Friendly Scorecard? An L&D scorecard can increase support and funding • BY JACK J. & PATTI P. PHILLIPS
I
Jack J. Phillips is chairman and Patti P. Phillips is president and CEO of the ROI Institute. They can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
n 2010, the ROI Institute conducted a major study sponsored by the Association for Talent Development to understand the executive view of learning and development investments. With responses from 96 Fortune 500 CEOs, the results were comprehensive, representing the largest input from this important group specifically on this topic. The initial results, presented in a keynote at the 2011 Chief Learning Officer Symposium, showed that the No. 1 measure of L&D investments preferred by executives is business impact, followed by ROI. We also asked how many executives see a learning scorecard — only 22 percent said they did. However, we know from our work with ATD, CLO and others that most major learning functions have some kind of scorecard. The problem is that L&D scorecards usually are not presented to the top executives in organizations. Why does this matter? One of the questions in the ROI Institute’s study was, “What is your role in learning and development?” The No. 1 answer selected (78 percent) was: “I approve the budget with input from others.” The top executive is a major stakeholder in L&D with ultimate approval, and a meaningful scorecard is important — possibly even critical. The scorecard should offer insight into how L&D programs contribute to improvements in bottom-line measures. So how should the scorecard be populated? First, consider the inputs — or indicators — such as the number of people involved in programs, their involvement time and the investment in learning (per person). Executives want to see learning’s reach and costs.
would recommend this to others.” These are powerful reactions for executives to see. Additionally, consider showing the connection of each program to key business measures. For example, identify the top five measures for the organization (e.g., revenue growth, profitability, customer satisfaction [maybe in terms of net-promoter score], operating costs and talent retention). Imagine placing this list in front of every participant in a program and requesting, “On a scale of 1 to 5, tell us the extent to which you think this program, when fully implemented, will influence these measures.” This line of sight to key business measures is critical; if your CEO can’t see it, you have a problem. Taking this measurement may also provide evidence of a lack of alignment, which underscores that there is work to be done on this important issue. Next, you can populate the scorecard at level 2, learning, with just one measure (which can be captured simultaneously when you capture reaction): the extent to which participants have learned the skills and knowledge provided by the program. Still, reactions and learning measures don’t garner much executive attention, so you need to move to level 3 — application. This is where you should ask participants the extent to which they have used what they’ve learned. This can be collected with every follow-up evaluation conducted. It’s best practice to follow up on application for about 30 percent of programs you hold each year. We know that most programs aren’t measured at level 4, or impact. Best practice currently is to measure about 10 percent of programs at level 4. When they are measured at this level, it is important to include an impact study summary on the scorecard. Next, you can push evaluation to level 5, an ROI study. As best practice, we suggest evaluating about 5 percent of programs at this level. When you do conduct an ROI study, place a brief summary of it on the executive scorecard. Following identification of inputs, focus should This scorecard approach should be more digestible turn to the five outcome levels, level 1 being partici- for an executive and may increase respect, support and pant reaction. Instead of expressing overall satisfaction perhaps even funding for L&D in the future. If you with programs, reaction data should include feedback have questions or would like to request a detailed docsuch as, “is important to my success,” “is relevant to ument showing how to build an executive-friendly my work,” “I intend to use what I’ve learned” or “I scorecard, please let us know. CLO
A line of sight to key business measures is critical; if your CEO can’t see it, you have a problem.
14 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
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ON THE FRONT LINE
It’s Not All About the Technology Technology can boost user experience, but it’s not the whole solution • BY DAVE DeFILIPPO
I Dave DeFilippo is chief people & learning officer for Suffolk. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
have a pet peeve. While the digital age has spawned technology that enables organizations and individuals to do more with a laptop, tablet or phone today than a mainframe computer in its heyday, I think this positive progress has led us to become somewhat lazy about the original reasons for these advances. There — I said it. As blasphemous as this may sound, I began my career in the ’80s, and I remember a world of paper-based phone messages and no email. For learning and talent practitioners, I make this assertion so that we all remember to breathe a sigh of relief the next time we are asked to develop a training plan, job descriptions and any other underlying human capital support requirements for said technology. As such, I suggest that we shift our focus toward performance outcomes and process definition with technology as an enabler of a better user experience, faster organizational scale and data capture for analysis purposes. Simply put, defining what we want to achieve, establishing the process and then selecting the best technology to fulfill those objectives is key. Let’s turn to some practical examples that learning and talent practitioners experience on a regular basis. First, consider the science of instructional system design as a core practice for any learning organization. Developed by Robert Gagne for the Department of Defense during World War II to more effectively train pilots, this structured system is the basis for curriculum analysis, design and evaluation. As such, the training for instructional systems designers involves a bachelor’s or advanced degree combined with ongoing professional development, thereby underscoring the specific expertise required for these practitioners. Further, back in the late ’90s with the advent of e-learning, I remember a temporary panic among learning and development practitioners who believed the days of classroom training would soon be gone as this new technology began to proliferate our world of binders and course books. Well, it looks like our classrooms are safe and the lesson learned by practitioners was that no singular learning methodology would prevail; instead, blended-learning solutions combining multiple techniques became the norm. Second, the rapid growth and sophistication of talent management systems to support and link human capital processes such as talent assessments, perfor-
16 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
mance management and competency-based curricula has created more fertile ground for this debate over technology versus process. Consider the positive progress made by these system providers and the need to create a positive user experience in the current digital age where one-click ease of use is assumed juxtaposed with processes to assess and manage organizational talent. For example, as easy as it is to select a rating for an employee’s performance review, the prework to calibrate performance relative to peers and gather objective feedback shapes the management structure and process that is enabled by a technology platform.
In the relationship between technology and process, perhaps the best approach is “go slow to go fast.” I recall years ago switching from a paper-based performance management system to an online one. During the implementation a manager proclaimed, “This is great — now I can just send my team their performance reviews so I don’t have to speak with them.” While potentially efficient, this knee-jerk reaction exemplifies the possible negative consequences of technology trumping a well-thought-out, sustainable set of processes. As I reflect on the relationship between technology and process, perhaps the best approach is “go slow to go fast.” Taking time to clearly articulate desired outcomes and to follow the required steps so technology can facilitate reaching those objectives will lead to a higher-quality user experience. Take the case of my early career experience without email and the speed at which we are now able to communicate on a global scale. Even with this technological advancement, one has to consider the most effective message, identify the stakeholders and then act on the dispatch. To this end, no matter which technology is used, the front-end investment to think through objectives beats technology every time! CLO
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ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING IS A
SOCIAL ACT BY TODD M. WARNER
Relationships matter in organizations. Avoid overlooking them by embedding learning into the context of work and promoting connection and dialogue.
18 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
W
e make many assumptions about organizational learning. Most of them are wrong. On the surface we seem to know what organizational learning is: People attend programs or complete e-learning modules, they learn something new and they somehow become better. But this approach doesn’t represent how people in organizations actually learn. Hence we see massive failures across the board in the effectiveness of organizational learning. As a result of this quandary, most organizations pursue efficiency in learning. They drive down internal learning budgets and replace costly face-to-face programs with less expensive e-learning solutions despite the fact that the completion rates of many e-learning modules are in the single digits. The thinking is “if it isn’t going to work it might as well be cheap and we should have a lot of it.” As a result, organizational learning is caught in a downward spiral of ineffectiveness. What is missing from this assessment is that people are social and work is a social act. Despite our attempts to simplify employees’ tasks down to job descriptions and efficiently place them in a position on the hierarchical chart, relationships matter in organizations and we overlook them far too often.
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Despite the amount of money organizations invest in content and experts for learning programs, it is the relationships that participants value the most. The highest rated item on almost every organizational learning program’s smile sheet assessment is networking. This ranking is frequently dismissed as nice but inconsequential yet it teaches us a lot about what is missing from organizational learning. The reality is that content is now a commodity. If people want to learn something new, they can go to TED, Khan Academy or a myriad of other locations that offer content for free. What people yearn for is context and connection — ways to make the social aspect of work more meaningful and impactful. Real learning is social in organizations and people — through their scores on smile sheets — have been telling us this for years. To make the most of learning in the social system of work, organizations must continue to retool their approaches to learning: Invest in context, not content, throw great parties and utilize leaders as your best teachers.
powerful agents to teach the organization. For example, the new leader of an audit function that is almost universally feared and loathed decides that they want to cultivate a more proactive learning approach. The audit process and outputs are retooled away from catching people when they are not in compliance to identifying and spreading best practices. While this shift may not seem material and could be easily dismissed as one more in a long line of corporate initiatives, the on-the-ground impact and effectiveness of the audit team has a chance to improve dramatically if it is built into the teams and the way they execute their work. Rather than being the “death squad” the organization fears, they become the pollinators that seek out and spread great ideas. While still delivering their auditing requirements, the shifts in approach cause the organization to engage with them and their outputs in entirely new ways and local teams start to learn from them in ways not previously imagined. When focusing on context, bear in mind a handful of critical questions: • How do we connect people around the expectations and challenges that really matter? • What is implicit in our local practices that is wrong? • How do we embed learning into the ways teams work day to day? The most pressing learning issues involve application and translation to real work, not the shiny new models typically peddled in learning programs.
What people yearn for is context and connection — ways to make the social aspect of work more meaningful and impactful.
Invest in Context, Not Content Despite the amount we invest in corporate learning, research by consulting firm McKinsey and the Corporate Executive Board, a research and membership company, shows that more than 70 percent of corporate initiatives fail. Executing on their corporate strategy is regularly touted as the most vexing challenge for CEOs. If the job of corporate learning is to make organizations better and more nimble, we have a ways to go. People work in rich contexts that they create with others. They create social norms, dictate unspoken standards that they and their peers follow, and define who to collaborate with and who to avoid. All of this is done locally in tribes of employees beyond the gaze of corporate oversight. In this environment, peer expectations are more important to performance than hierarchical expectations. This local context is what organizations should be investing their learning dollars in. One way to reorient learning to context is to look to corporate functions for teachers. Every organization has functions or teams that wield a disproportionate amount of power. Typical suspects are finance, procurement and audit. Due to their power over local teams, these functions can be incredibly 20 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
Throw Great Parties On a social level, a great party is great because of the mix of people that are gathered and the freshness of ideas and dialogue generated. Good wine can also help. Organizational learning needs to throw great parties at the points in the value chain where it will yield real impact. For example, a pharmaceutical research and development organization could build multiday learning parties into key transition points in the drug development cycle. Not only will this help accelerate the transition timeline between phases of development but it also yields a valuable way for the organization to capture and take action on knowledge — yielding a knowledge management system that people actually value and use. Sessions
Communication Key to Trust Less than half of employees have trust and confidence in the job being done by their organization’s top leaders. That’s according to Willis Towers Watson’s 2016 “Global Workforce” and “Global Talent Management and Rewards” studies, which also found only 47 percent of employees believe leaders have a sincere interest in employee well-being. These findings aren’t surprising, said Stephen M.R. Covey, author of “The Speed of Trust,” but trust is something leaders can learn to build. “The same way you can lose trust through your behavior, you can consciously and deliberately create it and sometimes even restore it,” he said. Trust is central to leadership at Raymond Handling Concepts Corp., said Stephen Raymond, president and CEO. “Nowhere in our values is ‘maximize shareholder terms on investments,’ which is probably the unstated core value of most of those companies that don’t trust their bosses,” Raymond said. Raymond conducts a quarterly all-hands session where he presents company results but also reads letters from customers that praise individuals and recognizes workers who have joined, been promoted or passed a service anniversary. “It provides me with an opportunity to, at some level, have a personal relationship with everyone,” Raymond said. Patrick Kulesa, global research director at Willis Towers Watson, said creating an inclusive environment and strong teams can boost employee well-being. For CLOs, that means formal training about how to drive employee satisfaction. “A lot of leadership comes down to effective communication and being able to have a line of sight into what leaders are actually doing,” he said. Covey said the fundamental issue is interpersonal relationships. “If you think your leaders don’t care about you, you’ll tend not to trust them,” he said. “If they think you don’t care, they are going to view everything you do with skepticism, suspicion and distrust.” Raymond said his company conducts a yearlong training process for new managers and tracks progress, acknowledging those who demonstrate trust and firing leaders who do not. “Trust is one of those things that you have to be consistently and constantly working on because a slip can really screw it up,” he said.
— Ave Rio 22 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
can be designed around critical dialogues so that people engage in conversations that matter and help them do their local jobs better. People in organizations long for new connections and fresh dialogue but they typically accept that they are prisoners to the intransigence of the status quo. Learning in organizations has to be built into the value chain where it will yield the most impact. By identifying and throwing the right parties, organizational learning can help people learn what will really help them do their work better. The key to a good party is provocative dialogue. Most people in organizations have been conditioned to go along with things. To make the most of their potential, they need to be woken up and provoked with fresh stories and ideas in the context of their real work. One of the keys to a great learning party is provoking the right dialogue. This is an art form that can be cultivated but it is vital to avoid rote, formulaic events. Surprising people and making them think in new ways with new people around real work is a valuable learning lever.
Leverage Leaders as Your Best Teachers Your leaders teach every day. They’re just not aware they are teaching. A number of organizations have focused intensely on enabling leader-led learning. To be clear, these approaches are not your parents’ leader-led learning of 65 PowerPoint slides covered in 60 minutes. Leaders must build the skill to invite and provoke dialogues. In one project in Australia, the top 400 leaders of a financial services company worked in intact teams to help leaders translate their insights from a program back to the day-to-day realities of their team through a series of strategically designed provocations. The sessions, co-led by an external facilitator and the leader, focused not on content but on translation to the context of the team. The leaders were held accountable by the facilitators for engaging their teams with openness, curiosity and vulnerability. The impact was striking. Rather than getting hung up on interesting models, teams actually engaged around the ways that they worked and what they could do differently. The impact on the normal operating routines of these teams and their collective impact on the organization yielded improvements in change agility and performance of the organization. Good organizational learning needs to focus on harnessing and focusing leaders as the best teachers within the organization. Hierarchy is a strong lever in organizations and if leaders can build skills and get the right tools to teach their people, the impact can be incredibly powerful. People learn in organizations every day. They determine their own reasons why but they frequently do this in isolated bubbles around familiar populations. Organizations need to shift from a focus on the traditional nouns of corporate learning such as e-learning, training and content to verbs, such as getting people connected with others in compelling ways. At its starting point, organizations should recognize that people are smart. If you give them the right bread crumbs, they’ll find the right way. CLO Todd M. Warner is the founder of Like Minds Advisory, a leadership development firm. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
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Profile
Accidental CLO, Intentional Learning Building on decades of experience at JPMorgan Chase, Jesse Jackson leads the firm on a digital learning journey.
BY AVE RIO
A
self-proclaimed “accidental CLO,” Jesse Jackson has served in numerous roles at the multinational banking and financial services firm JPMorgan Chase & Co. After completing five years of active duty in the U.S. Navy, he joined the bank’s management development program more than 25 years ago, starting as a teller and a banker. He eventually moved on to consumer banking management roles such as sales manager, branch manager and division sales manager. Jackson said his career path has been opportunistic. “It’s about crushing the job that you’re doing very effectively and performing as well as possible, and as a result, other opportunities will open,” he said. “As jobs are being destroyed, new jobs are being created. Individuals should not necessarily be focused on a set of jobs as opposed to a set of skill sets and attributes needed to perform effectively.” About four years ago, Jackson moved into his current role as CLO of consumer and community banking. Because he has spent so much time in the business, Jackson said he can truly understand the tactical elements of the various internal jobs while simultaneously understanding the customers’ needs and wants. “It has allowed me to think differently in terms of the value I bring to the role,” he said. “Anyone who spends time in the different business functions — who has that type of intimacy around what people are doing to support the customer and what the customer is looking for — has an ability to bring value into a CLO role that’s focused on shaping skills, behavior and knowledge of employees to meet those needs and goals.” Matt Condon, managing director of consumer and community banking learning at JPMorgan Chase, said Jackson has brought focused leadership and a sharp ability to execute key priorities in each of his roles and now brings those skills into the business of learning. “I think Jesse would be successful in any position to 24 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
which he fully commits — it’s who he is,” Condon said. Jackson has a broad perspective and is adept at considering multifaceted approaches to his work, Condon said, yet he does so in a way that makes it sustainable.
A Singular Approach Jackson oversees the community bank L&D department with 700 full-time employees. It is structured around centers of excellence that are core to delivering value to internal learners: digital learning solutions, operations, platform and learning programs and controls.
“We want to be more predictive in terms of recommending the type of learning path to employees that we believe is going to enhance their performance, their job and their success.” — Jesse Jackson, CLO of consumer and community banking, JPMorgan Chase As CLO, Jackson is responsible for strategy and execution of the learning approach and delivery across the enterprise. In this role, he implemented a new learning management system to replace three separate systems that management felt lacked scale and ability to adapt with employees. “Our senior leadership recognized the ability to unlock value by bringing together learning groups, really beginning to think about how to roll that up in a way that delivers a more harmonized best-in-class practice as we think about our customers’ expectations through a more singular lens,” Jackson said. Condon said in just three years Jackson was able to successfully pull together the many training functions into one high-performing learning organization. “He
PHOTOS BY DAVID LUBARSKY
Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
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Profile structured the organization in a way that brought high quality at a much lower cost,” Condon said. “He has anticipated the needs of our learners and demonstrated a tireless effort to hire and grow the right talent to be able to provide learning experiences to our employees that are rare in the industry.”
The Business of Learning
flexible delivery paths while also supporting the standardization of best-in-class learning principles,” he said. Executive Director of JPMC Learning Alexandra Scoulas said Jackson is a technologically savvy person and they often race to see who is going to get the latest gadget. Scoulas said Jackson, a consumer himself, is effective at translating what people want in terms of digital learning. “He’s not just leading the business, but pushing them forward — leading as well as responding to what they want,” she said. “He has championed the fact that we have the opportunity to deliver in so many different modalities and he has been blessed with having some business leaders come on the scene in the last year and a half who are anxious to move us out of the classroom and integrate more informal learning.”
Jackson approaches each new challenge with a philosophy that ensures employee efficiency, which he sums up as “the business of learning.” He aims to understand what behaviors contribute to high-potential performance and then develops learning assets to optimize that performance. The key is doing so not as an event but as a continuum of experiences over the course of each employee’s longevity, he said. As he navigates the digital learning journey at Chase, Jackson said this philosophy has helped provide Going Digital, Getting Results clarity to employees in leadership development proOne challenge Jackson and his team have faced is grams on how they can progress in their careers. improving the employee learning experience associated “We have a hire-to-retire with Chase’s regulatory training agenda. mentality where we ensure that “An assumption we’ve made as a firm is that everyannually we’re building learning one needs to take certain programs every year,” Jackpaths and calendars to allow us to son said. “But as we think about the learning compremove employees through a ca- hension and capabilities of our experienced employees, dence of learning that helps us maybe that’s not really true.” enhance their proficiency To help address this situation, Jackson’s team incorthrough changes,” he said. “We porated “test-outs” that allow them to test employees help employees get in front of before they take a course. Jackson said a lot of individand understand behavioral uals with significant tenure can pass the test-outs, so changes to perform effectively in they shouldn’t have to spend their time completing a the face of that change.” course they don’t need. They also bundled classes that — Alexandra Scoulas, As part of the digital journey, have similar concepts. executive director of learning, Chase has been ramping up moAlthough test-outs and bundling are not unique to JPMorgan Chase bile learning. In 2017, the firm Chase across the learning landscape, Scoulas said Jackbuilt a mobile application, Learning and JPMC, so son was an early adopter. “Being able to test out inemployees can access the LMS and consume training stead of taking the course really gets to the heart of the on the go. With the workforce rapidly becoming a millennial majority, Jackson said engaging the digitally native generation has accelerated the maturity of their digital direct learning strategy. “[Millennials] are used to having self-directed learning paths and being engaged via virtual instructors,” he said. Engaging this workforce has prompted Chase to use video and other capabilities to allow senior leaders to speak to individuals remotely. Condon said Jackson is fully reimagining how to deliver training when and where employees want it. “Under Jesse’s leadership, we have accelerated the development of high-quality digital learning Jesse Jackson, CLO of consumer and community banking at JPMorgan Chase, sees the solutions to provide low-cost and highly key to employee efficiency as a continuum of experiences rather than a singular event.
“I have personally grown and developed as a result of his thoughtful, inspiring and sometimes challenging high standards.”
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Profile Jackson said they leverage the same business metrics that measure employee success to help them understand, tailor and calibrate the effectiveness of their program. “We have robust scorecards across our enterprise in terms of how we measure conventional learning, but [we] also try to ensure that those learning measures are evidencing our obligation to increase organizational performance via our people,” he said.
The Future of Learning at Chase
Retention and engagement metrics are points of pride for Jackson.
matter,” she said. “Our goal is to ensure employees are equipped to do their work. The end goal isn’t having them take the training, the end goal is having them know what they need to know.” As learning at Chase is becoming more digital, so is the banking world in general, with more services shifting online. With that change, Jackson said the role of learning becomes more complex. The types of questions that employees might get asked by customers are changing — questions about issues with their devices or the operating systems they are using to view their bill, for example. “We see the value curve really going up in terms of our ability to deliver more complexity and more understanding,” Jackson said. “It reinforces the idea that you can’t do it in a classroom. We need to ensure that we’re preparing people to access information and then making that information available to them.” Jackson said the ultimate measure of success of all these efforts is age-old metrics around employee engagement, employee retention and employee mobility. “While we have a very disciplined learning agenda, we’re able to deliver differentiated value,” he said. Jackson points to employee retention and engagement as defining metrics, particularly when working with millennials, who are often stereotyped as job-hoppers. “Our metrics suggest we are among the best in class in terms of being able to deliver those capabilities and, as a result, those metrics to our business and ultimately to our customers,” he said. Because Jackson’s team is focused on the business of learning, they ensure they are training against key performance indexes, Jackson said. “We are measuring performance with respect to service and sales of employees who have moved through our training programs versus employees who have not moved through those programs to ensure they are having the intended effect,” he said.
Looking ahead, Jackson wants to incorporate emerging technologies more fully into learning, specifically by personalizing learning delivery to leverage employee intimacy. “We know the job family, we know the years of service, we know their performance rating, we know what training they’ve been to,” he said. “We really want to be able to be more predictive in terms of recommending the type of learning path to employees that we believe is going to enhance their performance, their job and their success at the corporation.” Jackson said they are studying how to leverage big data to help deliver that type of intelligence to employees. Having one LMS and a singular taxonomy of learning assets across the firm will help, he said. Jackson wants to ensure that they don’t live in an echo chamber — that Chase is looking at not just what’s happening within the L&D industry but also what’s happening across other industries. For example, they studied Cornell University to understand how it is delivering virtual learning to individuals getting MBAs and they also looked at what Google and Apple are doing to enhance learning at their genius bars and how they engage customers around their product sets. Within the organization, Jackson says his team can learn from methods like observing how a banker or teller engages a client or putting on headphones at a call center with an agent. “There’s so much more that we can do to incorporate learning and recognize the learning that happens within the workforce as a way to continue to develop talent,” Jackson said. If the rest of the L&D team is anything like Scoulas, they’ll be glad to continue the digital journey with Jackson. After working closely with Jackson for the past 10 years, Scoulas said she’s found him to be an extremely thoughtful and inspirational leader. “I wouldn’t have followed him if he wasn’t a great manager,” said Scoulas, who followed Jackson on his path from customer service to business banking to learning. “I have personally grown and developed as a result of his thoughtful, inspiring and sometimes challenging high standards.” CLO Ave Rio is an associate editor at Chief Learning Officer magazine. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com. Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
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industryinsights 5 Learning & Development Metrics That Actually Matter to the C-Suite Track these KPIs, Earn Your Seat at the Table By Doug Stephen, SVP of Enterprise Learning, CGS In PwC’s most recent global CEO survey, roughly 75% of respondents ranked Availability of Key Skills as a top concern affecting their organization’s growth prospects. Only Over Regulation and Uncertain Economic Growth ranked higher. The implication is clear: CEOs recognize the crucial reliance on a workforce with the right skills. The need is especially true given the rapid advances in workplace technology and the persistent skills gap for those workers with outdated or underdeveloped skills. Since businesses continue to invest in learning and talent management, one can reasonably assume that these programs deliver results. Nevertheless, in CGS’s annual research report on the top priorities for L&D
executives, aligning learning with business priorities and ROI continues to be a top-three challenge.¹ This challenge is likely due to a misalignment between what CEOs consider important and what L&D is accustomed to measuring. L&D analytics are often seen as being subjective by the C-suite because they usually include assessments from participants on the training and development program. This data can include 1) how confident employees are in their ability to apply acquired knowledge and skills to their jobs, 2) employees’ perception of the relevance of training received, 3) the effectiveness of training materials and instructor quality, and 4) how conducive training venues are to adult learning. While trainee feedback on instructional materials, instructor quality, and training venues are important, it’s not the most useful set of metrics to the C-suite. Here are our lessons learned on where L&D can increase its influence with the C-suite:
1
Know Your Business – Global organizations are extremely complex, and it’s virtually impossible to understand all of a company’s operations. It is possible, however, to be well-versed in the KPIs used by functional, LOB, and regional leaders. While every business is different, it’s safe to assume that these KPIs will be tailored versions of the following key business metrics. Each of these represents an important objective measurement on growth and progress. 1. Revenue: sales, margin, EBIT 2. Customers: satisfaction, NPS, churn, retention, error or complaint rates, waste, and defects 3. Operations: scrap and defect rates, error or complaint rates, cycle times and lead times, inventory turnover, working capital ratios 4. Innovation: NPI time and cost, new products/ product portfolio 5. Regulatory: Compliance costs, audit effectiveness
3”
2.5”
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CGS’s Enterprise Learning Group serves as a trusted partner to many of the world’s most dynamic companies, delivering innovative, custom learning solutions that are essential to scaling their people, processes and performance. CGS’s custom professional development solutions range from interactive game-based eLearning to transformational technology rollouts. Each solution is designed to keep clients’ employee-related business fundamentals strong in today’s ever-changing corporate environment.
For L&D leaders, the challenge is to find out what your business leaders have on their dashboards. This graphic provides some useful examples of what members of the C-suite track regularly.² Depending on the industry and company, these could be on any CXOs daily, weekly, or monthly dashboard.
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Be Proactive – Learn about your company’s 1224 month strategic objectives and the potential skills challenges in meeting them. In most companies, strategic objectives are cascaded down and become part of most employees’ development plans. Speak with plant managers, site leaders, call center managers, and managers of shared service centers. In these conversations, you can learn the objectives they need to achieve, and their teams’ skills deficiencies. Similar insights can come from structured conversations with regional sales directors, marketing directors, procurement managers, or compliance directors. What these conversations will also reveal are the special projects in their 12-24-month pipeline, and the skills gaps they’re encountering. A perennial challenge is finding the right people to undertake these strategically important projects. Given the evolving demands of any business, these projects could be with compliance, marketing, sales, operations, or HR. The highest performers are usually overcommitted, but there are other players on the bench who are equally capable. L&D can provide the
support needed to drive these proactive programs that strengthen and future-proof the business. Helping LOB leaders identify these players on the bench before a pain point bubbles to the surface could be a game changer. Assess what type of support or training L&D can offer to this talent- problem-solving, interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence, creativity, or leadership.
3
Measure What’s Important –Consider putting together data collection mechanisms that measure longitudinal performance objectively. Don’t rely too heavily on trainee feedback or qualitative data that is inherently subjective. For example, in rolling out specialized problem-solving training in support of transformation programs, enlist the help of the Finance organization to measure the EBIT impact of projects undertaken by trainees. These numbers provide objective evidence of training effectiveness and very compelling ROI statistics for the C-suite. Imagine a CEO’s reaction to a training program that costs about $4k per head and delivers $100k per head in EBIT!³ These are relatively straightforward steps for Learning and Development teams to take on. Using multiple versions of the ABCD approach- Always Be Collecting Data and Always Be Connecting the Dots, L&D will land an undisputed lead role in delivering on the business metrics that matter.
https://act.cgsinc.com/Learning-2017Q1-TrendsPromo_LP-Q12017-Trends.html ²https://www.cgsinc.com/sites/default/files/Blog%20Photos/5%20Learning%20and%20Development%20Metrics%20Blog_Img%204.jpg.png ³https://act.cgsinc.com/Learning-2017Q2-Event-Webinar_01RegistrationPage.html
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industryinsights Rethinking Talent Management A Brave New World By Kati Frazier and Lisa Cannell
Overview
Big Trends and Big Questions
Lisa Cannell, Managing Director and CHRO at the UVA Darden School of Business, set out to learn answers to the questions: “What talent management practices have stood the test of time in companies, which ones are changing, and why? What impact are these changes having on talent management leaders today?” She conducted 50 interviews with a variety of industries, including a majority of Fortune 500 companies, to get to the source of the driving forces of change.
We all know the common saying “what got you here, won’t get you there.” Four macro trends of technology disruptors, fast pace of growth, brain research and changing consumer values are taking that saying to a whole new level for organizations. These trends are forcing organizations to fundamentally rethink their identities, and to reshape their organizational designs accordingly. Most organizations interviewed are hanging in the balance between the old and the new. As a result, leaders of talent management are in the middle of navigating their own identify shifts – from creators of processes and procedures to creators of solutions. People at the helm of this change are asking big questions: (Figure 1)
As can be expected, the interviews with such diverse companies revealed that companies fall on a broad spectrum of approaches to talent management and organizational design. Some are committed to completely rebuilding talent management systems within their organizations; some are committed to their tried & true approaches. While the differences in industry influenced some of the changes, they all reported on macro trends that are shaping their future. Big Trends
Big Questions •
Technology Disruptors • • Fast Growth
• • •
Brain Research
Changing Consumer Values
These driving forces have led to several organizations reporting that talent management strategies are “on the table” for disruption. The examples that follow are a sample of how companies are adapting to these significant driving forces of change.
•
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If the future is uncertain and skills needed are unknown, how do we build a pipeline of talent for succession? How can artificial intelligence enable more effective talent acquisition? How do we balance infusion of diverse new talent with protecting our core identity as we grow? How do we help our employees embrace a growth mindset and be agile? How do we organize if ‘top-down’ approaches aren’t effective? How do we take the findings in neuroscience and apply them to how we develop our employees? How do we shed old approaches that are ineffective, and prepare our people to lead new approaches? How do we incorporate new consumer values and consumer-centric culture into our talent programs?
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Recruiting & Onboarding
Learning & Development
Succession Planning
Diversity & Inclusion
In search of non-traditional talent pools. Six percent of companies reported that they are hiring outside of areas where they traditionally recruited from in the past. The search for non-traditional backgrounds has forced those responsible for recruiting to extend beyond traditional MBA programs. Additionally, several companies commented that they’re looking for new hires with more life experience. Focus on strategic roles. Five companies reported that they are moving away from onerous succession planning processes, and put “We are not a heavier emphasis on the going to be most strategic positions that a company are difficult to fill externally. As of labels, we one office furniture learning are going to leader reported: “It is more be a company important for us to identify key roles in our organization of learning.” that we cannot win without - Talent Management and then plan back up for Executive those positions.”
Performance Management
Emphasis on conversations. The 25% of organizations who reported moving from process-driven talent management to performance-driven talent management are using some variation of dialogue with managers. One social media organization claims: “we talk to our people, not about our people.” This focus on conversation has two drivers: speed and performance.
Focus on growth mindset and agility. Key emphasis in leadership development reported by 19% of organizations is cultivating a growth mindset. Many organizations cite a growth mindset as a critical skill for organizational growth. The general hope behind an emphasis on a growth mindset is developing an employee base that is willing to evolve professionally along with the changing landscape of work. Small steps, but not enough. Advances in diversity & inclusion were not widely reported across interviews. Of the interviewees that mentioned their efforts in this space, they noted the effort to move away from a more programmatic approach and develop more integrated strategies throughout talent management approaches.
Conclusion: Be Brave Leaders in talent management have a choice: they can hold on to the past, or embrace the new. In order to keep pace, leaders will need to find the courage to let go of some old approaches and pioneer new ones. Taking an agile approach to innovating and customizing talent programs with the focus on customer needs – and not HR needs – is a solid method to enter this brave new world.
industryinsights Getting the most out of your training system Using the DuPont Capability Engine for assessment and data collection By George Haber, Ph.D.
Learning and Development (L&D) activity is often challenged with proving its own value. L&D investments are often difficult to connect directly with operational outcomes. Even if these correlations are proven, they often take time to have measurable impact. This delay in correlative evidence creates a risk. If errors are made in the initial planning and executions of such programs, it could lead to a contaminated embedding of knowledge, skill and performance. DuPont’s Capability Engine is a system design that when fully integrated, provides immediate and inreal-time feedback about the learning systems and operational applications the learning system is meant to impact. Continuous assessment data from multiple sources provide actionable data that allows for early corrections in any L&D campaign.
Change: The Purpose of L&D L&D looks to change performance, attitudes and the way people think. Often these changes aren’t visible, as we can’t measure a change in attitude or knowledge without first observing and assessing a task performance. Constructing, administrating, and deploying assessments is critical to measuring the effectiveness of any learning initiative. At the same time, organizations investing L&D initiatives seek a return on their investment (ROI), which may be measured in dollars, production or safety performance. It is important to ensure that investment in any learning activity can connect or support the organization’s desired ROI.
The Capability Engine: Putting It All Together The Capability Engine works in three phases. The first phase is a three-step collaborative effort between SMEs and L&D professionals. This ensures a thorough examination of existing policies, procedures and content to eliminate the possibilities of missing a critical learning point, producing redundant material, or going against established processes. It also ensures that only quality learning providers instructors produce or deliver content. The second phase is about content delivery. Standards that ensure quality material, instructors and learning space are referenced and applied, the course is delivered, measured for perceived effectiveness and the transfer of knowledge and skill from instructor to participant is measured. Then, formal learning activities cease and the evaluation begins. The third phase collects data on the individuals’ performances in the field, measuring the acceptance of the activity to the work culture and what, if any variances of performance have taken place. The third phase also includes the collective analysis of data sets from all assessment phases, and begins to evaluate the effectiveness of the learning systems.
Putting It All Together: Analyzing for Continuous Improvement The detailed approach of the Capability Engine, built on L&D best practices, produces consistently high quality, accurate and engaging content. Assurance
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tools for the selection of learning providers ensures that the high-quality content is transferred to the learner, while field assessments ensure that the practices are being used. The key to continuous improvement has always been in developing a system to collect, analyze, interpret and act upon performance deficiencies. The capability engine provides all the elements to ensure consistent
performance of L&D activity, compare the activity with field performance and use analysis to identify and, target and correct problems. It is a tool that touches almost every facet of a cooperation, and its reach is virtually comprehensive. This is the tool to ensure the ROI of L&D. George Haber, Ph.D., is the Global Director for Instructional and Learning Systems at DuPont Sustainable Solutions.
ORRTT:: REEPPO R L L A I A I C C E E P SSP
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g n i d l i Bu r e d a e the L e r u t u F of the Driven by complexity and fueled by rapid change, the practice of leadership development continues to evolve.
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y almost any measure, Scott Kriens was a successful leader. After taking over as CEO of Juniper Networks Inc. in 1996, the veteran technology entrepreneur led the company’s growth into a global powerhouse by supplying the routers, switches, software and networking products that form the infrastructure of the internet economy. But when his father died in 2004 it forced Kriens to hit the pause button. “It was a really difficult time in my life,” said Kriens. “I was ignoring a lot of things. I was ignoring my personal life and my relationship at home.” After years of charging hard, Kriens began to reflect on his leadership journey and what came next. “It really became clear that being a leader meant being a skilled practitioner of relationships,” he said. “Being able to be in authentic relationships and show up in a way that could be trusted and relied upon by other people.” That insight was so powerful that when he retired as Juniper CEO in 2009, he and his wife Joanie founded the 1440 Foundation, a nonprofit that takes its name from the 1,440 minutes in the day. While Kriens remains chairman of the board at Juniper, his focus is now trained on the foundation and 1440 Multiversity, the 75-acre campus that is part conference facility, spa, lodge and education center they built on the redwood-filled grounds of a former bible college near Santa Cruz, California. “In traditional education, we get plenty of intellectual training, but we don’t get much relational, social, emotional training or what you might call spiritual training in a secular sense,” Kriens said. “To be truly well, we have to be developed in all dimensions. Multiversity is really meant to address the rest of yourself.” Incorporating professional development, personal growth and health and wellness, 1440 Multiversity is a symbol of a larger movement afoot in leadership, one that aims to meld business results with health and wellness; one that recognizes that organizational results come from a more open leadership model. Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
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The stakes are high. Leaders face a complex and ever-evolving business environment that can overwhelm them professionally and personally. Those charged with developing the next generation of leaders have a dizzying set of theories and methods to choose from to develop leaders. Success may just require chief learning officers to step out of their comfort zone and embrace an expanded view of what leadership is and how to develop it.
CLOs must step out of their comfort zone and embrace an expanded view of what leadership is and how to develop it.
From Traditional to Transformational The history of leadership is abundant with theories, from the “Great Man” theory that proposes certain men are born with the traits required to lead — and leaders were envisioned almost exclusively as male at the time the theory was developed — to the contingency theory that held that leadership is more like a mix and match of styles to circumstances. What has emerged in recent times as business has gone global and technology has infused it with unprecedented speed is a rising level of complexity that requires learning organizations to more closely examine what they expect of leaders and how to develop them. The gig economy, generational shifts in the workforce and the rise of artificial intelligence and data-driven management are forcing change. Some organizations are finding that traditional leadership competencies focused on managing peers and stakeholders are not enough. “While they are still critical to leader effectiveness, to succeed today and 36 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
prepare for the future, leaders need to be able to consistently demonstrate a new mindset and a new way of working,” said Melissa Janis, vice president of leadership and organizational development at McGraw-Hill Education. For McGraw-Hill, a 125-year-old company with a legacy as a textbook publisher, that meant shifting strategy to focus on learning technology by giving leaders the tools and ability to thrive in a disrupted marketplace. “Leaders must embrace an entrepreneurial approach and help to create a culture that fosters collaboration, candor, empowerment, influence and action,” she said. At BNY Mellon, the roots go back more than 200 years to its founding by Alexander Hamilton, first secretary of the U.S. Treasury and current focus of Broadway’s bright lights. But that rich history doesn’t insulate the bank from the influence of technology and an economy that is increasingly open and nonhierarchical. The challenge for leaders is to create an environment where you can pull information and answers from across the organization and move everyone in the right direction without necessarily emphasizing formal authority, said Marina Tyazhelkova, managing director and global head of management and organization development at the bank. “It’s really kind of the crux of what good leadership is all about but it’s also really hard,” she said. “Most of the leaders we have today have probably grown up in the culture where you were the glorious leader who was supposed to show the way, know all the answers and always be right.” Tom Gartland, former president for North America at Avis Budget Group and author of the book “Lead with Heart,” saw the limitation of that approach firsthand during his 40-year career. The more he dedicated himself to getting to know people and putting himself in service to them, the more they gave in return to the success of the company, he said. “Leadership is an extremely personal relationship between you and the people you work with,” Gartland said. “It’s not just the people that directly work with you. From my perspective, it’s with the entire organization no matter how large the organization is.” Effective leaders in the modern era are able to break through the distance between people and build trusted relationships, said Kriens. That means admitting mistakes and asking for help when you don’t know how to solve a problem. “The leader is the one that has to demonstrate and make that possible first, because the rest of the team is not going to be willing to make the assumption that it’s safe,” Kriens said. “That’s all going to be withheld in an environment that doesn’t have trust
Create an environment in it. The leader’s got to be where you can pull the one that shows up first to build that trust or it information and answers won’t happen.” Leaders face what Raand move everyone in the jeev Peshawaria calls the right direction without “21st century leadership dilemma,” a problem the emphasizing formal former chief learning officer at Coca-Cola and Morgan authority. Stanley spells out in his book “Open Source Leadership.” According to his research, autocratic, top-down leadership is what is needed to create results in today’s high-speed environment but that has to co-exist with less control, more volatility and heightened transparency. “Welcome to the open source era where one of the key skills leaders will need is to balance seemingly opposite ideas,” he said. He recommends that leaders focus on “positive autocracy,” an approach that includes behaviors like listening, learning and reflecting continuously and being autocratic about values and purpose while remaining humble. Leadership is a desire to create a better future, he said, and the most successful leaders are able to persevere against the odds because of the clarity and conviction of their personal values and purpose. “Leadership development should accordingly move away from superficial competency models, best practices and role-plays toward helping people uncover their leadership energy by clarifying their values and purpose,” Peshawaria said.
Evolution in Development For some companies, that means thinking about leadership development as journeys rather than programs. Like many service businesses, Havas Health & You, a New York-based advertising and communication agency, didn’t focus much on leadership development. They would often hire leaders from the outside rather than develop them internally. The extent of leadership development often consisted of hiring a coach for a top executive. “We realized we needed to do much more,” said Pat Chenot, Havas Health & You executive vice president and chief learning officer. Leadership is about two things: competence and connection, he said. The company supports competence through Havas University, a corporate university run by the agency’s parent company, as well as a tailored learning platform called YoU Central that houses Havas Health & You-centric training and development.
But it’s in connection where Chenot thinks they can make the most difference. “We really believe very strongly ... that it’s so important to build trust and communication and that emotional intelligence is even more important than IQ,” he said. As part of its flagship Developing Leaders Program, high-potential leaders are invited to participate in a nine-month development experience that includes leadership development workshops, one-on-one coaching and a designated executive mentor. Fundamental to the program is an emotional intelligence assessment and 360-degree review that aims to help leaders understand themselves as leaders before they turn to how they lead others. The program’s tagline “Becoming a Better Leader Through Introspection to Inspiration” brought home the point. “As our leaders deal with organizational changes and a constantly shifting industry and world, we want them to be also capable and prepared to cope with change and to be more resilient,” Chenot said. Gartland would share the results of his 360 with his team, something no other leader had done before at Avis Budget. “I said, ‘This is what you guys said. These are the things that I can’t change and these are the things that I heard and I’m going to change. And if I’m not doing it, call foul.’ ” That level of personal vulnerability and openness has the added benefit of encouraging and increasing connection among others. At Havas Health & You, while many of the leadership development participants worked in the same building, they didn’t even know each other, Chenot said. Gartland took the personal connection one step further when he was named president of Avis Budget. He set out on a bus tour to get to know the 22,000 employees scattered throughout North America. “We went 18,000 or 22,000 miles in a bus over 12 weeks and shook hands and personally talked and hugged and served lunches,” he said. Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
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Several years later, he still hears from people who remember that trip. “When you make that kind of impression on people and they know you care, they stay late,” he said. “They work like crazy. They take care of the customer. They do the right thing. It just changes everything.” When leadership development fails it is because it does not focus on what Peshawaria calls “emotional integrity” or the courage to admit what one really wants for oneself. “Great leadership happens when one is clear about the ‘why’ of their leadership, not just with the ‘what’ and ‘how,’ ” said Peshawaria. “It is the ‘why’ that keeps one going in the face of formidable resistance.”
Technology Transforming Practice Success also hinges on integrating leadership development across the enterprise. At BNY Mellon, the company refreshed and focused leadership competencies on two priorities: client focus and cultivating innovation. The idea was to create a shared concept about leadership at BNY Mellon that could be applied at all levels. Tyazhelkova said the goal was to touch 70 to 80 percent of the company’s 8,000 managers through leadership development programs targeted at four distinct levels: executives, senior leaders, front-line managers and new managers. “We as a business are transforming and preparing ourselves for the new world where technology and digital plays a much bigger role,” she said. “Hence you have to start preparing with a really consistent approach across the organization. So what we did with our programs is we don’t just pick a small group of anointed leaders across the board. The program is available to all.” While the model is consistent, the application is different based on the participants’ organizational level. Executives focus on strategy and meet in person in two cohorts of 30 to 40 people at the bank’s New York headquarters. Leaders in the other levels participate virtually in cohorts by region to promote connections among the group and focus on execution. Technology is central to BNY Mellon’s leadership approach, allowing the firm to bring together people to learn and interact with one another in ways that would not be possible otherwise. The cohort approach is key, allowing people to discuss and debate application of management leadership principles and ideas in the context of their environment. “You can do leadership development virtually,” Tyazhelkova said. “You can put it together as a consistent, coherent approach and you can build functional interaction where people are not always in the same room with their colleagues. It is possible.” 38 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
McGraw-Hill Education has taken a similar approach to leadership development, creating a core of leadership competencies that can be scaled by level and infusing it with technology. “In the seven years I’ve been at McGraw-Hill Education we’ve completely changed our approach to leadership development,” Janis said. “The methodology has progressed beyond full-day, face-to-face training to blended learning with robust experiential and social components.” As a result, within two years of launching the company’s flagship Catalyst leadership program nearly every employee of the company reported to someone who had participated. Havas Health & You plans to expand its use of technology for leadership development but is doing so cautiously. “We could quadruple the numbers that we run through this program if we did Skype and if we did more online,” Chenot said. “In my opinion, we dilute the effectiveness of it. We continue to really focus on face to face but we need to use technology more to really leverage the effect of all the things that we’re teaching these individuals.” Technology is central to how Martin Lanik sees the future of leadership development. Lanik, the CEO of Pinsight, a leadership technology platform and author of “The Leader Habit,” said the problem in leadership development has been execution. “We’ve been trying to turn managers into coaches for over two decades now,” he said. “I don’t think we succeeded as a field. They don’t know how to measure on a daily basis or even a weekly basis whether somebody is in fact improving and giving them real-time feedback.” Automation is the key from his perspective, and this is where technology can help. Leadership is a series of behaviors that can be broken down into smaller micro-behaviors that can be practiced until they become automatic. Using a software simulation, leaders assess their skills and personality and generate a development plan and daily exercises that can be practiced. Traditional approaches to leadership development are simply not enough, Lanik said. “[CLOs] need to identify the key behaviors and then have a very simple process to turn those behaviors into habits. We do this naturally. We intuitively get that because we do it in many other fields. For whatever reason, leadership is the one that seems to be still lacking.” CLO Mike Prokopeak is vice president and editor in chief at Chief Learning Officer magazine. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
When It Comes to Gender Bias in Leadership, Talk is Cheap Despite the fact that women earn almost 60 percent of undergraduate degrees and 60 percent of master’s degrees in the U.S., they comprise only 25 percent of executive- and senior-level officials and managers, hold 20 percent of board seats, and only 6 percent are CEOs, according to the “Women’s Leadership Gap” report by The Center for American Progress. According to a 2017 study by Lee Hecht Harrison, “Elevating Women in Leadership,” organizations see this as a problem but haven’t been successful in fixing it. The study found that 82 percent of organizations surveyed believe advancing women is a critical business issue — yet only 28 percent of HR leaders are satisfied with their organization’s ability to do so. Jill Ihsanullah, senior vice president of consulting at consulting firm Linkage Inc., said many organizations and leaders are well-intentioned, but they don’t follow through. “Organizations will say all the right things about advancing women, but when it comes down to it, the decision they make is to promote a man,” she said. A 2016 American Association of University Women report, “Barriers and Bias: The Status of Women in Leadership,” found that the lack of women in leadership roles can be examined through structural barriers preventing women’s ascent to leadership and the gender bias that continues to affect them in the workplace. AAUW researcher and author of the report Kevin Miller said paid family leave and child care offerings would make it more possible for women to meet their care requirements at home while also meeting their obligations in the workplace. According to the report, only 12 percent of U.S. workers in the private sector have paid family leave through their employer. Further, women without access to paid leave are significantly more likely to quit their jobs after giving birth. Miller said equal pay also would help advance women in leadership. As women gain higher levels of pay, they are subsequently perceived as better candidates for senior positions and are less likely to take time out of the workforce, he said. “When a couple has two incomes but one is higher, the person with the lower income is more likely to take time out of the workforce to raise children or for some other purpose. By giving women higher pay and equal pay,
it makes them less likely to take breaks out of the workforce, which means they will continue to climb ladders more quickly,” he said. Currently, women make up only 27 percent of those who are paid $100,000 or more per year, according to the report. The income gap for minority women is even larger. The report found that black and Hispanic women make up only about 4 percent of the 9 million U.S. workers who make $100,000 or more annually. Miller said there are many ways companies can proactively address the issue of gender bias. He said learning leaders should train to reduce implicit bias among employees — the tendency for people to have a subtle or even unconscious bias against women leaders. Learning leaders should consider evidence-based diversity training that focuses on bias and stereotypes to retrain people to instinctively think about not just men as leaders but women as well, he said. Learning leaders can also encourage mentorship and sponsorship programs. Sponsorship is a form of mentorship in which sponsors share both status and opportunity. According to the AAUW report, this type of professional relationship has been shown to be more effective than traditional mentorship. Beyond formal programs, Miller said it’s important that women are included in informal cultures of mentorship and sponsorship as well. “If male senior leaders are more likely to do some sort of informal mentoring with other men, that can negatively impact women,” he said. “Make sure that if you invite your colleagues out for a drink, you invite both male and female colleagues and you do it in a way that is workplace appropriate.” In changing workplace culture to address the lack of women in leadership, Miller said specific issues differ from place to place but the one thing that remains constant is the need for buy-in from the very top, which often consists mostly of men. “Where we see faster progress is where existing leadership takes ownership of the problem and chooses to invest energy, time and money as needed to fix it,” Miller said. “Some of the solutions may be common, some may be specific to a particular workplace or sector, but it’s important to recognize that it’s a societywide problem and as a result our solutions need to be careful, deliberate, complex and multipronged as necessary.”
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g n i k o o L e r u t u F the e c a F e h in t As the younger workforce moves into higher-level roles, generational leadership differences provide insight into where leadership development should focus. BY MARYGR ACE SCHUMANN
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he face of leadership is starting to shift. According to “Global Generations,” a study conducted by accounting firm EY, 62 percent of millennial employees are managing others — only slightly less than the 65 percent of Generation X employees who are managers. As younger employees move into more powerful positions, it’s important to consider how their leadership styles compare with those who came before them. Are they the virtually the same or dramatically different? How can we best help them grow as business leaders?
Collaboration and Connection: The Millennial Way? Adrian Ridner, CEO and co-founder of Study.com, a website providing online courses for college credit, said that different generational leadership styles are a result of specific values. Millennials tend to focus more on collaboration and flexibility, according to Ridner.
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While previous generations preferred to work “in silos,” because they were brought up in a culture where millennial leaders take in “a variety of ideas and view- failure was more acceptable, but because it allows points to influence the process.” them to tap into that creativity, collaboration and “We want to talk things through — it’s not ‘me, flexibility to problem-solve. the leader’; it’s ‘we,’ ” said Grant Findlay-Shirras, “While previous generations tend to avoid failCEO of neighborhood news site ParkBench.com. ure, millennial leaders like to test new ideas and This collaborative process allows for more creativity. learn from any failures,” said Ridner. Findlay-Shirras said millennial leaders are much more likely to challenge the status quo. Problems with Authority For ParkBench.com, that means mixing the busiAlthough traits and values like collaboration and ness with the personal. Rather than separating the flexibility can elevate millennials as leaders, that may two, Findlay-Shirras said the people he works with also mean overlooking their own position and auare also the people he hangs out with, “taking the thority as a leader. idea of culture, teamwork and family to a new level.” “While millennials are great collaborators and According to Ridner, these values result in millen- caring leaders, they should work on being more dinial leaders who are more understanding and caring rect with their teams and establishing authority,” when it comes to their employees’ needs. said Ridner. “They value forming personal Unlike previous relationships and generations, Findgiving their emlay-Shirras said that ployees the fleximillennials avoid bility to have conflict, particularly proper work-life face-to-face conbalance,”said Ridflict, as to not hurt ner. “As millennial personal relationleaders invest more ships. Often the in their employees, conflict they fear is retention is bound hypothetical. to improve.” “You have so Susan Weiss, a much stimulus in director at The Boeyour head, your e middle of market Weiss, director for th n sa Su — . ing Co. and memmind can get creCo g ein Bo e Th program office, ber of the millennial ative about all the generation, thinks things that might happen if somethere’s more to it than that. Weiss said she sees strong thing else happens, which is not a good thing bevalue in “allowing team members to bring their whole cause now you’re overthinking,” said Findlay-Shirras. self to work” among leaders of all generations. In genThis shortcoming may be related to the fact eral, she said that different leadership styles are much that 45 percent of millennial managers have never more complicated than generational differences. gone through formal management training, ac“I’m a firm believer that our own leadership cording to a 2017 national study by Ultimate Softstyles, no matter our generation, are formed by our ware. Compared with the nearly 75 percent of personal experiences, and to relate it solely to gen- baby boomers who were formally trained, this erational differences is an oversimplification,” could account for differences — and sometimes Weiss said. weaknesses — in management style. Findlay-Shirras said that good leaders, regardless According to the “2016 Deloitte Millennial Surof generation, share a desire to motivate and inspire vey,” which shares data from nearly 7,700 millennials their employees. And though there may be more from 29 countries, less than 27 percent of millennials mediums through which to inspire people, such as believe they have strong leadership skills. Additionally, social media, the goal is the same. though both Findlay-Shirras and Ridner saw motivaRidner agreed, saying that the best leaders, “mo- tion as a key similarity between leaders of different tivate their teams to do the best work possible and generations, according to the Ultimate Software data achieve the best outcomes.” report, only 44 percent of employees believe their However, for millennial leaders, Ridner said part managers know how to motivate the team. of that best work comes from allowing employees to fail. They’re more likely to do this, he said, not only FACE OF THE FUTURE continued on page 64
les are “O ur leade rship sty nal o formed by our pe rs relate expe rie nces , and to nal tio it solely to ge ne ra diffe re nces is an .” ove rsimplific ation
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Not only has she cracked the code for successful online dating in her book the “Data, A Love Story” but the founder of the Future Today Institute, Amy Webb convincingly explains “the future” isn’t a concept that just happens to us submissively. In her Washington Post Best Seller that has also been named #1 Best Seller on Amazon and recipient of the Gold Axiom Medal Winner for Best Book About Business & Technology- “The Signals Are Talking”- the NYU Stern School of Business professor presents us with the opportunity to see ahead, giving us the chance to forecast what’s to come, as Amy regularly has to answer to the question “What does the future hold for us?” when advising her Fortune 500 and Global 1000 clients.
How do we predict the future when we live in what seems to be an increasingly unpredictable world? MIT mathematician Edward Lorenz once observed that “only one thing can happen next,” and that the impact of that act — whatever it is — changes everything else that follows. You know this as the “butterfly effect,” but this is the heart of chaos theory. Because we acknowledge that chaos is real and that chaotic events will at some point occur, as futurists our goal is not to predict, with total accuracy, what will happen x-number of years from now. Instead, the goal is to reduce the ambiguity — to develop probable, plausible and possible scenarios using data and evidence. What is essential to predicting what’s next? Are there skills that can be taught and learned? There’s a neurological trick your brain plays on you the moment you start trying to figure out the future of something: you wind up looking at the world through a pinhole and missing all of the other adjacent and related signals that make up the more complete picture of what’s over the horizon. For example, one of our clients wanted us to forecast the future of cars, with a timeframe of the year 2037. Well, that’s twenty years from now. Most companies — not to mention government agencies, universities and everyday people — can’t move at the speed of technology. Asking me to forecast the future of “cars” assumes that our existing technology won’t change much. Instead, I reframed the question to: What’s the future of people, pets and objects moving from point A to point B? This illustrates the most essential skill in seeing the future: understanding that weak signals come from lots of different places, include those from outside your usual frame of reference. The frameworks I describe in my book “The Signals Are Talking” are new strategic ways of thinking. Anyone can learn how to think like a futurist. How do you differentiate between a meaningful trend and a temporary fad? What trends do you see as significant and lasting? Typically, trends meet four general characteristics. Real trends are rarely “trendy” — that’s to say that they don’t pop up quickly and disappear as soon as the next technology attracts our attention. First, a trend is driven by a basic human need, one that is catalyzed by new technology. Most people don’t realize this, but we’ve been trying to automate transportation for hundreds of years. Self-driving cars are just the latest manifestation of that trend. Second, trends are timely, but they persist. Did you know that GE actually developed a self-driving car and track back in the 1950s? Engineers have been working on self-driving car prototypes for decades. Third, trends evolve as they emerge. Our current crop is road legal and can now drive alongside other cars on the highway. Finally, trends usually materialize as a series of un-connectable dots, which begin out on the fringe and move to the mainstream.
Technology has upended many of our established ways of learning. What’s on the horizon that has the potential to disrupt it even further? Artificial Intelligence is the next era of computing. It’s more than a trend — it’s a fundamentally different way of approaching machines. At the moment, we are teaching machines to think just like we do. The next step is to allow machines to learn on their own, in unsupervised environments. We ought to be asking ourselves who is doing the teaching — and what machines are learning from us. Throughout the disruption and amid the noise, what is lasting and durable in education and learning? We can automate lots of tasks, but very high-level critical thinking and relating to other people are cognitive tasks that only humans can perform. Knowing that, the most lasting and durable facet of education are those courses, training sessions and degrees that focus on critical reasoning. It seems counter-intuitive, but the best possible preparation for a future among thinking machines is a rigorous liberal arts education.
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The Dawn of the Robot Coach
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Artificial intelligence may power the next generation of mentors, but can technology really replace a human touch? BY SAR AH FISTER GALE
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n 2017, Slice, a New York tech company that builds software solutions for independent pizzerias, had a management problem. The company’s tech staff is based in Macedonia, where high unemployment rates mean most of their new hires have never held a formal job prior to Slice. “We have a lot of first-time managers who need coaching,” said Rick Pereira, chief people officer. Instead of moving to Macedonia himself, Pereira implemented Butterfly.ai, an artificial intelligence coaching app that provides feedback to managers on their leadership skills. The tool uses anonymous employee survey results and past performance data to rate managers’ performance, then offers tips and training content to help them improve. Pereira, who is able to review all of the feedback, said it has helped many of his team members become better managers, including their general manager who initially had a gruff communication style. “People loved what he was saying but not how he said it,” Pereira said. Based on consistent feedback about the general manager’s rough approach, the Butterfly coach recommended a series of communication courses and articles. “Now he’s one of our strongest leaders,” Pereira said.
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Butterfly, along with VoiceVibes, Orai and GiantOtter, are among a host of new AI-driven coaching apps that promise to change the way companies provide mentoring and suggest training to improve soft skills. These apps analyze employee survey data, listen to voice cues and evaluate historic performance reports to identify the unique coaching needs of individual users, as well as offer advice and suggest training to address their shortcomings.
Hello, HAL “We are at the dawn of the robot coach,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst for Constellation Research covering next generation fact-finding. Virtual coaches may sound futuristic, but as artificial intelligence technology matures, AI-driven coaching applications are becoming increasingly possible. “It’s still early, but the technology exists and there are a number of startups making progress,” Mueller said. Siri, Alexa and other voice-activated versions of AI tools already coach us in our personal lives, providing driving directions, suggesting music and finding recipes online. It was only a matter of time before they infiltrated the workplace. And the workplace seems eager to welcome them. Accenture’s 2018 “Future Workforce” report found 72 percent of CEOs believe intelligence technologies will be critical to their organization’s market differentiation and 61 percent think the share of roles requiring collaboration with AI will rise in the next three years. While the report doesn’t specifically mention AI for coaching, the implication is that employees will increasingly be expected to interact with AI bots in their jobs. In companies with thousands of workers, or where employees work remotely, using these tools for performance feedback can provide additional support in between face-to-face coaching opportunities. This may be especially appealing for millennials, who are often noted for wanting constant feedback on their performance. “It can be difficult and expensive to scale the level of mentoring needed to guide every manager,” said David Mendlewicz, CEO of Butterfly. He pointed out that the tools are not meant to replace human coaches altogether. Rather, it’s a way to provide more frequent and targeted feedback to managers who might otherwise never get that kind of advice. For example, Slice’s Pereira said that the survey feedback Butterfly captured on his general manager consistently pointed to a need for more communication training, but without the app he likely never would have known there was an issue. “It helped us address the issue before it became a problem,” he said. 48 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
In companies with thousands of workers, or where employees work remotely, these tools can provide support in between face-to-face coaching opportunities. While the tools are not totally autonomous yet, their developers are using increasingly sophisticated strategies to assess users’ performance and in some cases they are able to track elements that a human can’t. Orai, for example, is a public speaking coach that listens to users as they make speeches and counts the number of filler words and pauses they use, along with tracking their speed, tone and energy level. Then it gives the user a report, complete with data on these metrics as well as advice on how to improve. “That kind of data is hard to capture, especially for soft skills training,” said Diane Burgess-Faber, vice president of solutions designs for Mandel Communications, a communications skills training company that recently partnered with Orai to integrate the app into its public speaking coaching program.
The Ethics of Coaching Bots So, can these tools ever really replace a human coach? Not exactly, according to Rob High, chief technology officer for IBM Watson, IBM’s groundbreaking cognitive computing system that uses AI and algorithms to answer natural language questions. “Artificial intelligence could be used in an advisory process, but on its own it can’t generate advice,” he pointed out. In other words, a computer can’t come up with ideas on its own; it can only provide feedback based on what it has been taught to do. The challenge is teaching the technology what the right behavior looks like and how to coach people to improve their results, High said. In transactional scenarios, such as answering call center questions or providing simple directions, teaching an AI bot what to look for is fairly straightforward. “You take the most common questions people ask or problems they encounter and train the system to respond,” High said. But teaching a computer how to recognize, assess and provide feedback on soft skills is far more complicated. Developers need to expose the system
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Coaching Apps: What’s Available Now? The AI coaching niche is still a small part of the HR tech world, but there are a number of promising young companies on the scene. Butterfly.ai. This AI-powered coaching app features a self-learning bot that uses anonymous employee surveys targeting specific leadership attributes to deliver custom tips and learning content directly to managers. The developers worked with advisers from University of Oxford and Columbia University to identify the key factors influencing workplace engagement. The bot offers praise for positive performance and suggests training content from the organization’s learning and development library to improve. It recently secured $2.4 million in venture funding. GiantOtter. Two MIT students launched this startup AI coaching company in 2013 to help managers prepare for difficult employee conversations with the help of “Coach Otto.” The app, which integrates with Slack and other messaging apps, lets users practice a conversation and receive feedback before meeting with a colleague in person. GiantOtter was funded by a National Science Foundation grant. Orai. An early-stage startup based in Philadelphia, Orai is a public speaking app that tracks a speaker’s filler words, pauses, energy and tone and provides both a dashboard of metrics and a summary of advice on how to improve. The developers used thousands of TED Talks to teach the system what constitutes a good and bad speech and is currently teaching it additional languages and accents. Orai recently partnered with Mandel Communications to integrate the app into their communications skills training program. VoiceVibes: This public speaking app uses analytics and predictive algorithms to assess and analyze specific features in a user’s voice patterns, including pace, pausing, pitch and volume. The recording tool enables users to record and upload speeches to their personal accounts where they can view analysis and feedback and track progress and habits across multiple practice sessions through dashboards. It’s raised $1.1 million in venture funding.
— Sarah Fister Gale 50 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
to thousands of examples and teach it what exemplifies good and bad behavior and why. Next, they have to give it clear models against which to judge users’ performance and guidelines for suggesting the right learning programs to address this behavior. There is a level of subtlety there that is hard to achieve, said David Williamson Shaffer, professor of learning science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a game scientist at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. “It’s difficult for a computer to have enough information about the world to know what a person needs to do or should do in a certain scenario,” he said. Making matters more complicated, the rules for soft skills are not set in stone. Every individual has different leadership or communication styles and the strategies they use may differ based on the situation. They also have varying preferences for how to learn. Where one manager may prefer to read an article, the other may prefer a video or an interactive online course. The bots need to be able to learn about each user so they can recommend the right content or advice. That’s not to say it can’t be done — it just takes time and data. Orai’s developers tackled this demand initially by showing its app thousands of TED Talks and defining the spectrum of good to bad based on number of views. The app’s knowledge continues to evolve as more users record their speeches, and it is able to track how they improve over time based on the feedback they receive. Orai co-founder Danish Dhamani admits that the current technology has its shortcomings, however. For one thing, it can’t yet mix and match metrics when giving feedback. A speaker may use a lot of filler words, for example, but the speech may still have a great impact due to the speaker’s energy and clarity. “The system can’t look at the whole picture that way,” Dhamani said. It also can’t judge the quality of content in the speech or any physical performance attributes, including eye contact or body language. Dhamani sees these as temporary roadblocks that will be tackled in future versions of Orai as the technology evolves. His team is currently teaching the app how to assess English spoken with foreign accents, and they have plans to add additional languages next year. They are also working on assessing the basic attributes of a good speech, including whether the speaker starts with a strong hook to engage the audience and ends with a powerful message. “We are excited about where we can take it in the future,” Dhamani said. None of these tools are perfect, but they provide a promising opportunity to give employees more customized support when a human coach isn’t available.
These Apps Have a Big Future AI coaching apps may still be a novelty, but that’s likely to change as the smaller startups prove themselves to customers, investors and the companies that may one day acquire them. Several of the startups in this space, including Butterfly, VoiceOps and VoiceVibes, have landed lucrative venture capital deals, and many of the larger HR and learning management companies are paying close attention to this trend. Gretchen Alarcon, group vice president of the human capital management product line for Oracle, said many Oracle clients are looking for new ways to use AI for HR, including coaching, employee engageROBOT COACH continued on page 65
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THE
NATURE OF BUSINESS TRIBES The right leader can help an organization leverage tribal instinct for maximum business performance.
BY SOREN EILERTSEN
52 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
E
volutionarily speaking, humans are conditioned to seek affiliation through families and tribes. These groups band together and establish rules to create a sense of safety and belonging, fight a common enemy or accomplish something meaningful. In business, tribes are often social groups linked by a leader, shared purpose or goal, common culture or organizational boundary. Belonging to a tribe in business can infuse hope among team members and awaken collaborative instincts. Tribe members frequently identify key competitors and work collectively to defeat them. However, affiliation with a tribe can be strong enough to result in protectiveness of the tribe, which, coupled with competitiveness, can override individual moral integrity. The tribal force can backfire, causing silos to form and halting collaboration. Businesses can either become victims of this force or leverage tribal instinct for maximum business performance. Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
53
To accomplish the latter, having a mature and self-aware leader at the helm is paramount; an egocentric leader can actually drive destructive tribal behavior. Furthermore, the deliberate application of organizational systems can directly and indirectly leverage tribal forces.
Relationships and the Subconscious The typical person has a handful of close relationships and upward of 20 people they may reach out to for support. The average size of a human social group is between 100 and 200 people. These statistics come from research by Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist, who also suggested that generally a person is capable of recognizing up to 150 people. Coincidentally, this number happens to be around the same size as a small village, a company in the army and an average church congregation, per Dunbar.
How leaders tell the story of a business has tremendous impact on how individuals create meaning and come together. Relationships shape our subconscious actions. The iceberg model, popularized by author and systems thinker Michael Goodman, provides a conceptual description of the human mind. Consciously, each individual lives atop an iceberg, blissfully unaware of the mass of subconscious below the waterline that influences their actions. This subconscious contains the models, patterns and assumptions that form the stories used to justify individual behavior and cope with demands of reality and our community. The subconscious also shapes the stories used to create individual meaning and address challenges. These stories are based on an individual’s past, ongoing experiences and stories heard around the tribal fire pit, the family kitchen table or corporate water coolers. As such, how leaders tell the story of a business has tremendous impact on how individuals create meaning and come together. Leaders have a moral obligation to craft stories that elevate the capacity for human compassion and connectedness.
Tribal Forces in Business Tribal forces can take five different forms within a business. These forms operate at different altitudes inside the business and are not mutually exclusive. How54 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
ever, a business should determine where to best leverage tribal focus to create meaning for the organization. First, small work groups are formed when close collaboration is required. Groups of experts with separate knowledge areas coalesce to address critical organizational issues in today’s complex, technological environment. As with the proverbial blind men who can’t identify an elephant since each only touches a part of it, people with different expertise or knowledge must work together to inform a solution. Second, organizational/functional units are the typical building blocks in a hierarchical business organization. In many midsized and larger organizations, the size of a functional area or department may be about 150 people — Dunbar’s magic number. It’s no wonder, then, that suborganizations often become tribes and are seen as silos inside the larger organization. Whether in sales, operations, finance or human resources, members of the same organizational unit often share a similar educational background and expert mindset, thereby furthering a sense of tribalism. While a simple way to align a group around a common purpose, tribes formed around functional areas are typically the most destructive to a business because they impair cross-functional collaboration, change and innovation. These problems are widespread, but they are also avoidable. Next, many business leaders leverage the competitive nature of the marketplace to build tribal belonging around defeating the competition. In the book “Tribal Leadership,” Dave Logan and his co-authors describe a type of business competitiveness as a “we are great and they are not” mindset in which individuals collaborate with others toward the goal of winning the game of business. For example, Honda, attempting to secure the top spot in the motorcycle market in the early 1980s, rallied, “Yamaha wo tsubusu!” (Roughly translated: “We will crush, squash and slaughter Yamaha!”) Organizing around the business customer is one of the most powerful tribal focuses since customer success is a leading indicator of business success. Nordstrom, for example, attracts talent with the aim to “deliver the best possible shopping experience” for the customer (according to its website). Organizing around the business customer is also evident in the Lean Startup concept popularized by American entrepreneur Eric Ries. Arising from internet technology product development, “lean business” is focused on continuous innovation to benefit the customer using customer success metrics and feedback. The fifth type of tribe seeks to impact the world with a global humanity perspective. It is likely the most powerful force but it requires the business to have an altruistic purpose. Patagonia has created a tribal community using “business to inspire and implement
solutions to the environmental crisis.” Similarly, Toms Shoes’ business model illustrates how business can be a force for social impact. These companies invite people to become part of a living system that evolves purposefully. Unfortunately, this force can also be divisive. Religious and political dogma can create the kind of groupthink that tears society apart, as evidenced by the current “red and blue state” mentality in America. Overcoming the pitfalls associated with tribalism inside business requires ego-free leadership, an executive group that models collaboration and teamwork, and a shift in the organizational system.
Transcending Ego: Evolving Leadership Most scholars seem to agree that human development evolves through nested stages that build upon one another. An individual’s worldview and other advanced capacities develop as they move through these stages. Worldviews and associated capacities provide the basis for the individual’s awareness and thinking. Human development begins with a “me”-focused perspective, develops into an “us/we”-focused tribal-oriented stage and eventually reaches an “all-of-us” global humanity perspective. In the latter stages, the individual transcends the ego, enabling the ability to “hold space” for complexity, collaboration and innovation. Unfortunately, many people don’t progress to the latter stages due to derailment or lack of facilitated growth. Many business leaders are stuck somewhere in this developmental progression, leaving a leader’s ego to play a central role in how he or she operates in the workplace. This egocentric behavior restricts the ability to collaborate and share openly with others, which, in turn, increases the likelihood for silos to form within an organization. Today’s technology- and knowledge-centered world necessitates a new mindset around human relations. The complex issues we face in business and life require expanding our worldviews to inform our awareness and thinking. Accelerated individual learning and leadership development are more important than ever to avoid silos, the “us vs. them” mentality and groupthink that can occur as side effects of tribes within organizations.
Leadership: Team vs. Committee Executive leadership groups can function as teams or committees. Members of a committee have little interdependence and meet merely to share information and coordinate resources. Members of a team, by contrast, are highly interdependent and gather around a larger goal that requires them to work and make decisions together. When the functional responsibility of the group’s members takes priority, the group is a committee. When alignment around the mission of the organization takes priority, they have the potential to become a team. 56 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
Unfortunately, many leaders default to functional leadership and the executive group becomes a committee. Leaders find it difficult to step away from an ego-driven attachment to their functional expertise and sense of authority inside their silo of the organization. This attachment also makes it difficult for the leader to employ businesswide strategic intuition, which requires suspension of the expert mindset and openness to longer-term and broader inquiry in pursuit of creative solutions. The choice between functional and business leadership also can be viewed through another lens: whether to optimize for functional group success or overall business success. It is not possible to optimize both simultaneously; one must be suboptimized. By optimizing functional area success, a leader, perhaps unintentionally, suboptimizes overall business success. This reality is an intractable problem with no optimization solution. Fred Kofman, chief philosopher at LinkedIn, conceptualizes this dilemma through the workings of a soccer team. The offensive and defensive squads each have different measures of success: the offense to score goals and the defense to prevent goals being scored. From a defensive perspective, a 1-0 loss is better than a 3-2 win, illustrating that each squad could optimize its own measure of success without the team as a whole capturing a win. Only by coming together and optimizing around a shared goal does the measure of success change. The essence of teamwork is sharing a mission and goal, which combats the silo pitfall of engaging tribes around organizational or functional areas.
Finding the Best Fit There is no perfect, one-size-fits-all organizational system. Organizations generally employ one of the following four types: hierarchical, matrix, network or self-managed teams. The top-down hierarchical control model with its single managerial focus does not serve the needs of modern organizations or newer generations of workers. In matrix organizations, managers typically report to two or more leaders to ensure focus on multiple areas, such as functional, geographic and/or product areas. Network organizational systems have a management-driven hierarchy in concert with a “strategy network” where people voluntarily guide coalitions to work on strategic organizational issues. John P. Kotter, leadership and change expert, makes a case for this dual operating system in the Harvard Business Review article, “Accelerate!” In addition to traditional hierarchy, Kotter proposes a second operating system where BUSINESS TRIBES continued on page 64
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Case Study
Yo Quiero Learning! BY AVE RIO
G
hosts of menus past include the Naked Chicken Chalupa, Cheetos Burrito and Chicken Biscuit Taco. The Mexican-inspired fast-food giant Taco Bell is known for creating unique limited-time offers multiple times a year. But with each new menu item comes the need to train employees on how to prepare and serve it. That’s where Taco Bell saw room for improvement. Ferril Onyett, director of learning and organizational development at Yum, Taco Bell’s parent company, said the past couple of years have been a journey to simplify and enhance team member experience. “We wanted to make it easier for employees to get training materials and easier to understand why we launch the products that we do and how it relates to our customer insights,” she said. “It’s been quite a challenge going from all in-person training six or seven years ago to more of a blended approach with online, on-the-job activities and classroom learning.” Through this transformation, the learning materials were spread out across multiple platforms. Taco Bell needed a place where all employees could go to access everything they need in one spot. To accomplish that goal, Taco Bell partnered with digital content distribution company Inkling to create a searchable library of content for all training materials that could be accessed both online and offline from any device. “If you think about Taco Bell from a food perspective, we really are innovative. We’ve got lots of new products, we lead in social innovation, and one of the things that’s important to us is that our team member experience is pretty innovative as well,” Onyett said.
Uno, Dos, Tres Michelle Kelso-Kay, Taco Bell’s director of learning and development, said they rolled out the program in three phases. First, they upgraded their LMS to have one central landing page where employees could look for content. Phase two involved converting the format of all standard operating procedures to dynamic, interactive “Inkdocs.” In addition to hyperlinks and videos/sound clips that can be included in an interactive PDF, Inkdocs include flashcards, quizzes, self-assessments, timelines and more. They also can be accessed online or offline. When 58 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
SNAPSHOT Fast-food giant Taco Bell created a searchable library of all learning materials to improve training for frequently changing menu items.
an employee opens an Inkdoc, the content can be downloaded directly to their mobile device, whether it’s a personal device or a shared device made available onsite. When the user comes back online, the content is automatically updated. Kelso-Kay said six or seven years ago there was an effort to digitize seven print encyclopedias containing all the standard operating procedures that Taco Bell used to print and mail to employees. The encyclopedias were turned into static PDFs and housed on the company intranet, which wasn’t ideal in terms of accessibility and searchability. Converting the standards into Inkdocs brought life back into them and made them accessible in the restaurants, Kelso-Kay said. Julie Williamson, chief growth enabler and managing director at business management consultant Karrikins Group and co-author of “Matter: Move Beyond the Competition, Create More Value and Become the Obvious Choice,” commends Taco Bell for making the PDFs more accessible. “That shift is critical and it’s often hard to do because people have often invested a lot in a PDF or static format, and they are sometimes afraid to step away from it,” Williamson said. Taco Bell is currently undertaking phase three of the project, which involves rolling out new-hire digital workbooks to all restaurants, allowing them to stop printing the books. “Things change often and we’re always updating and always redesigning and streamlining content that we have to print on demand, which increases costs,” Kelso-Kay said. “Moving all of that content to a digital workbook through Inkling allows [employees] to highlight and make notes and truly have their own digital copy.” Before this change, Taco Bell was paying $35 for a new book for every new hire. “With the high turnover, that’s really important for a restaurant,” Kelso-Kay said.
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They anticipate saving $2 million per year by discon“Stale content is probably about as useful as stale tinuing the printing and shipping of workbooks. taco shells,” Williamson said. “Being able to clear Looking ahead, Kelso-Kay sees a lot of potential on out the old content and get rid of it so that it’s not the horizon for the digital workbooks. “We were in a cluttering up the space and creating a distraction for spot where we had to move literally thousands of pages the learners is really important. It seems like they of content into Inkling, so now that it’s in there and it’s have made a pivot to where they are looking much live and people are using it, we can really start looking more dynamically at their content.” at the metrics behind the scenes to dig deeper.” Another aspect of the platform that drew Taco Bell Williamson said digito Inkling was the ability tizing the books is a great to track training compleidea, but she wonders if tion. “When companies there is another way to track training complecommemorate the motion, 90 percent of the ment of starting a new job time it’s really just around — Julie Williamson, managing director, for employees. e-learning completion, Karrikins Group “It is an interesting but that’s only 40 to 50 side effect that when you percent of the training extake away something that seems as underutilized as a perience,” Kelso-Kay said. “Having a system that alnew hire handbook, you also lose the utility of giv- lows us to track our on-the-job practice and any tools ing someone something that binds them closer to that were used was really important to us.” the organization,” she said. “It would be worthwhile Kelso-Kay said in the stores that have impleto think about other ways of marking people starting mented the Inkling system they have seen a huge within the organization as well as progressing increase in employees accessing the content. Onthrough training and L&D opportunities.” yett said once they can see results from the on-theWilliamson said those tangible reminders and ac- job component, they expect they will be able to knowledgments are important from a brand and an better isolate improvements and business results attrition perspective, which is a major challenge in caused by the program. However, in the market the quick-service restaurant industry. test they did see a 5 percent increase in customer satisfaction score with new menu launches in Spicing Up Training restaurants using the new system versus those locaWhile Taco Bell is still in the process of launch- tions that hadn’t adopted it yet. ing the program nationally, it completed a market “Many of these restaurants are operating in a test with about 100 restaurants, in which Kelso-Kay pretty competitive market for employees, so you said employees responded positively. have to see L&D as an asset and a competitive differKelso-Kay said the search functionality has been entiator for winning the war for talent,” Williamson a huge win for team members, as they are now able said. “You have to be able to provide operational to go in and search for anything and have it pop up training as well as interactional or communication easily. As for drawbacks, Kelso-Kay said they ran training.” She said the next challenge for Taco Bell into expected technical issues while making sure all will be to leverage the effects of this new program technologies were aligned, but after a slowdown they effectively in the stores and convert the workforce were ultimately able to sort through all the issues. over to it. Kelso-Kay said the two biggest training programs Kelso-Kay said going forward, the company will are new-hire training, which is all on-the-job train- stay focused on meeting the needs of today’s and toing done on tablets in the restaurants, and limit- morrow’s demographic instead of pushing out coned-time offer promotions for new menu items. She tent for the lowest common denominator. “We’re said new menu items debut every four to six weeks focused a lot on our next generation of workers … and all 7,000 restaurants must conduct on-the-job and really thinking through how they like to contraining and practice prior to each new launch. sume content and how they learn more in bite-sized While the training itself has mostly remained un- chunks,” she said. “So we’re really thoughtful and changed (job-specific e-learning course, an on-the-job strategic around how we push out content in a way practice component and performance support tools), that’s not only efficient and effective but in a way before the new system everything typically had to fit our team members want to access it.” CLO on to one page to lower printing costs. Kelso-Kay said they’ve now been able to look at the content in a dif- Ave Rio is an associate editor at Chief Learning Officer ferent way without that constraint. magazine. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
“Stale content is probably about as useful as stale taco shells.”
60 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
Business Intelligence
Follow the Leader(ship) Spending Learning investment shows that leadership development remains a top priority for most organizations.
A
s some wisecracker once noted, the war for talent is over. The talent won. Corporations are waving the white flag, recognizing that simply competing to attract the best and brightest is not enough to maintain their edge. The scarcity of in-demand talent and high cost of attracting and retaining them makes that an expensive proposition. Instead many are setting their sights on inside talent. Developing the next generation of leaders is the top priority for a majority of organizations, according to a recent survey of more than 28,000 business leaders conducted by The Conference Board. Learning department spending plans reflect that priority. According to data from the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, 94 percent of learning organizations either plan to increase or maintain their level of investment in leadership development (Figure 1). Given that some estimates put leadership development spending as high as $50 billion annually, that’s a significant commitment of financial firepower to back up what many see as central to future success. The top priorities for that spend are to grow the succession pipeline, retain high-potential employees and foster innovation and creative thinking (Figure 2). The Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board is a group of 1,500 L&D professionals who have agreed to be surveyed by the Human Capital Media Research and Advisory Group, the research and advisory arm of Chief Learning Officer magazine. This survey was conducted from June to July 2017. How much organizations spend can vary widely. According to survey data, 8 percent of organizations spend more than $10,000 per year per person on leadership development and 6 percent spend between $7,000 and $10,000. The majority of organizations (68 percent) spend less than $4,000 per year (Figure 3). These num62 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
bers are nearly identical to spending levels in 2016. So what are the skills that companies are spending all that money to develop? For executives, the usual suspects come at or near the top. Strategic planning and business acumen were both named as top skills (Figure 4). Emotional intelligence, the ability to lead innovation and coaching ability rounded out the top five skills highlighted by learning executives. Soft skills like mentoring, giving feedback and self-awareness are further down the list (all at 8 percent), reflecting a continued emphasis on business execution and strong management acumen among top leaders. When looking at lower-level managers, coaching, communication and engagement all landed in the top five, reflecting the need for managers on the front line to be hands-on and people-focused (Figure 5). Traditionally, leadership development has been a high-touch, face-to-face endeavor. Unlike hard skills or compliance knowledge, leadership skills have tended to be more nuanced and dependent on context. In-person development has been seen as necessary. According to survey data, that trend continues (Figure 6). Nearly three-quarters of learning organizations (74 percent) use instructor-led training for leadership development. Executive coaching comes in second at 63 percent, followed by e-learning. Action learning and simulations are in the middle of the pack and technology-driven approaches lag far behind. Virtual training is used by 15 percent of surveyed organizations and MOOCs by 11 percent. While talent may have won the war, the battle for leadership primacy continues. CLO Mike Prokopeak is vice president and editor in chief at Chief Learning Officer magazine. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
Figures’ source: Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, N=419. All percentages rounded.
BY MIKE PROKOPEAK
FIGURE 1: LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT SPENDING PLANS IN NEXT 12 MONTHS
6%
FIGURE 2: MOST IMPORTANT LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT GOAL
FIGURE 3: AVERAGE EXPENDITURE ON LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PER PERSON
Growing succession pipeline
Less than $1,000
29%
45%
Fostering innovation and creative thinking
18%
$4,000 to $6,999
18%
11%
$7,000 to $9,999
Developing business acumen
6%
11%
No Change
Integrating leaders into organizational culture
Decrease
11%
36%
Encouraging collaboration and teaming
Increase
7%
$1,000 to $3,999
19%
49%
15%
32%
Retaining high-potential employees
$10,000 and up
8%
8%
FIGURE 5: TOP SKILLS TARGETED FOR FRONTLINE MANAGERS
FIGURE 4: TOP SKILLS TARGETED FOR EXECUTIVES
Coaching 29%
34%
28%
25%
25%
Communication
24%
31% Employee engagement
27% Business acumen
21% Critical thinking
20% Strategic planning
Business acumen
Emotional intelligence
Leading innovation
Coaching
FIGURE 6: TOP LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT DELIVERY MODELS 74% 63%
62% 50% 43%
Instructor-led training
Executive coaching
E-learning
External seminars
Real project work
34%
33%
33%
32%
31%
Video
Stretch assignments
Peer groups
Formal mentoring
Role-plays
Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
63
BUSINESS TRIBES continued from page 56
FACE OF THE FUTURE continued from page 42
people inside the organization come together as volunteers in coalitions around design and strategy implementation. Since people are asked to volunteer based on their interest and passion for the topic, this network structure complements the existing hierarchy and accelerates strategic change. However, both the matrix and network systems suffer from some of the optimizing issues described earlier. Self-managing teams, by contrast, operate without the need for hierarchy. Organizational members are invited to work and participate actively in discussion about the future of the business. In this model, everyone is expected to assume leadership. Hierarchical organizations and those closely related are often described using metaphors such as “machine” and “family.” New metaphors for business such as “living organism” or “living system” describe the self-managed model. Frederic Laloux, in the book “Reinventing Organizations,” describes how self-managed organizations see three benefits to their model: wholeness (people bring their whole selves to work), self-management (eliminating the need for formal authority structures) and an evolutionary purpose (in which employees participate in shaping). Being part of shaping the “living system” of a self-managed organization could be the ultimate tribal force.
Bridging the Gaps
The Self-Aware Servant Leader To be an effective leader in a 21st century organization requires an understanding of human development to navigate the different worldviews and belief systems that people inside the organization hold. Leaders must be able to make space for crucial conversations and embrace dichotomy on many dimensions. Organizations must be structured to develop their people, which, in turn, also benefits the company. The future generations of workers (millennials and Generation Z) are ready for new organizational models that offer meaning and purpose. For these organizational shifts to take place, it is important for leaders to be self-aware, have their ego in check and be willing to operate from a posture of service to a greater altruistic cause. Servant leadership, as coined by Robert Greenleaf, is serving an organization’s purpose and continually working to remove obstacles facing that purpose. This type of leadership leverages the best tribal forces and builds the kind of community that becomes the ultimate testament to business success. CLO Soren Eilertsen is founder and president of Kollner Group Inc. He is professor of business strategy as adjunct faculty at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. He can be reached at editor@CLOMedia.com. 64 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
To help millennials embrace and improve their leadership capabilities, Ridner said training managers should focus on succession planning. Current training and leadership programs aren’t working because they aren’t designed with the millennial in mind; they tend to be filled with long instructor-led sessions and digital lessons. “It’s important to understand that while previous generations depended on their companies to provide a guided career path, millennials are much more self-directed in terms of career progression,” Ridner said. “They’re the driving force of their own careers and will proactively seek out learning and development opportunities — they won’t wait for those opportunities to be presented to them.” Because millennials are accustomed to instant access to information, “Bite-sized content that is available anytime, anywhere helps learners retain concepts and fits into millennials’ on-the-go lifestyle,” he said. Ridner also said that future leaders need to work with different generational leaders “so they can combine their strengths and prepare for future management positions.” “Effective digital trainings combined with onthe-job experiences with current leaders is the best way to prepare millennials for future leadership positions,” said Ridner. Similarly, Weiss sees mentorship as a crucial component to leadership development. However, she sees it less as a millennial need and more as a general leadership need. “Mentoring and coaching play a huge role in any great leader’s development journey — millennials are no different,” she said. “We need to be comfortable reaching out to each other and to leaders from across generations as we grow our own skill sets.” Although there are certainly generational differences and a need to rethink leadership development, Weiss said it’s important for that overhaul to go beyond merely analyzing millennial leaders and to “use generational data archetypes as a lens to assess our own behaviors and reactions rather than as a method to classify others. “When we use that data introspectively, we allow ourselves to have a better understanding of who we are and why we respond the way we do,” Weiss said. CLO Marygrace Schumann is a writer in the Chicago area and former editorial intern and Chief Learning Officer magazine. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.
ROBOT COACH continued from page 50 ment and providing automated training suggestions. “The idea that natural language processing could guide engagement or performance is interesting,” she said. Particularly if it can be customized to individual managers. Oracle already offers automated chat bots to answer HR questions and to guide candidates through the application process. “I can imagine a future where AI technology reaches a point where it could answer more complex questions and help people improve their skills.” IBM’s High is also optimistic about the future of AI for more sophisticated coaching applications. He envisions a future where pure AI or a combination of AI and human interaction could provide more consistent and frequent advice and training on a variety of social and emotional skills. “It’s very conceivable,” he said. But regardless of how much the technology evolves or how thoughtfully it can provide feedback and suggest training and
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compliment results, it should never be considered a replacement for human coaches. “We deliberately recommend against anyone introducing conversation agents that try to masquerade as human,” High said. He applauded the fact that Alexa, Google Home and other popular AI personalities are intentionally designed to be not quite human and said he hopes that future developers of these tools follow their lead. “It is an ethical boundary you should not cross,” he said. Most of the developers of these tools appear to agree. “No computer can replace human mentors, but it can support them,” said Butterfly’s Mendlewicz. As demand increases for smaller and more frequent opportunities to learn and receive feedback, these AI tools could fill an increasingly important role in the corporate learning landscape. CLO
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65
IN CONCLUSION
Learning Your Way Out
Action learning can develop leadership as a collaborative practice • BY JOE RAELIN
L Joe Raelin holds the Knowles Chair of Practice-Oriented Education at Northeastern University and is principal of the firm The Leaderful Consultancy. He can be reached at editor@ CLOmedia.com.
eadership in the current knowledge era cannot rely on a single source of expertise; rather, it needs to be a collaborative practice. We need to respond to complexity in our internal and external markets through the contribution and creativity of all stakeholders. At the same time, how might we bring this focus on collaboration to a practice-based method of learning? Instead of relying on traditional teacher-to-student instruction, we would need to expose learners to live engagements and then have them collectively reflect on those experiences to expand and even create knowledge while working to improve the given practice. When it comes to developing practice-based collaborative leadership and management, it is axiomatic that we begin by immersing managers in their own practices, not removing them from their lived experience. For the sake of learning, we may choose to accelerate the process by having facilitators place managers in problem domains or dilemmas to see how they might “learn their way out.” The critical change facilitators would make is to introduce novel forms of conversation that can bring out the skills of collaborative learning and dialogue. Learners would engage in empathic listening, understand the value of reflecting on perspectives different from their own and entertain the prospect of being changed by what they learn. This collaborative process opens up space for innovative ways to accomplish work or even reconceive how the work should be done. Consider the case of Jim, senior vice president of sales for a large retailer. Jim was involved in a project to determine the reason for the heavy turnover of parttime check-out clerks throughout the company’s chains but had been unsuccessful in diagnosing the source of the problem. Fortunately, he was a member of an action learning team as part of a leadership development initiative, and the facilitator invited his team members to share their views on Jim’s problem. It turned out that Jim had spoken to a number of clerks but hadn’t realized that his executive rank caused most of them to clam up during conversation. He subsequently hired outside interviewers to survey the clerks and found the clerks felt they were treated like “second-class citizens.” Jim then may have worsened the problem by sending out communications that tried to inspire the clerks, not realizing, according to feedback from his ac-
66 Chief Learning Officer • April 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com
tion learning team facilitator and colleagues, that the clerks likely wanted behavioral accommodations rather than sweet talk. Additionally, consider the collective leadership model used by the most successful national men’s rugby team of all time, New Zealand’s All Blacks. A case
Action learning allows team members to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of others. study of the team conducted by Thomas Johnson and colleagues attributed the team’s 75 percent winning record in test matches over a 100-year period to its leadership, which produces a team commitment to total honesty in self and team evaluation and reflection. Bottom-up collaborative learning accompanies its philosophy, as evidenced by one of its coaches, who said: “As we become more aware of the need for player-centered coaching rather than coach-centered, we try to recreate and simulate pressures of the game … and throw them in unpredicted events, and get the players to solve that problem.” These examples demonstrate how “learning your way out” can develop leadership as a collaborative practice. The most critical metaskill it enhances is developing in learners a peripheral awareness of one another. They seek out and learn from others’ views. They see value in sharing leadership. On project and learning teams in particular, action learning allows team members to begin to make use of the team’s resources and recognize the strengths and weaknesses of others — for example, who provides support to team members, who fosters team spirit, who explores and reports on opportunities outside the team, and so on. These issues are learning issues, and practice-based learning does not insist they be lodged within any one person; rather, they become the knowledge responsibilities of the entire team. The team becomes a collaborative enterprise. CLO
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