Chief Learning Officer - April 2019 by Chief Learning Officer

April 2019 | CLOmedia.com

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Kung Fu Leadership

love kung fu movies. Go ahead and judge me. It’s one of my healthier vices. Gulping down sugary sweet Swedish Fish like a barking seal on a bender? Not so much. It’s not just me that enjoys the occasional martial arts flick. Successful movies can gross more than $150 million from a legion of international fans. That’s not to mention the success the genre’s stars have gone on to experience since kung fu burst onto the global cinema scene in the 1970s. Jackie Chan, Michelle Yeoh and Chuck Norris all kicked their way to box office stardom. Academy Award-winning directors Ang Lee and Quentin Tarantino tackled the genre in breakthrough films like “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and the “Kill Bill” series. Angelina Jolie and Jack Black brought it to a new generation of budding martial artists through the “Kung Fu Panda” movies.

The skills of a successful leader are increasingly fluid.

Hedrick, learning leaders must cultivate in themselves the “shapeshifter” talent they seek to develop in others. Leadership and learning are a constant process of shedding who you are to become something new. In the top-down era, the all-knowing leader possessed a singular charisma, marshaling the troops to achieve clear objectives often by sheer force of personality. Teams were well defined and more often than not benefited from years of working together. Today, that’s not the case. Workers frequently span several time zones. Teams form and reform based on need and include a mix of full-time employees, contractors and an ever-changing mix of specialists and generalists. Organizations are not a single hierarchical team but rather a team of teams. Leadership looks quite different in this environment. For leaders of learning, this has interesting implications. To be sure, much of the job of a CLO is the tactical blocking and counter punching required to get things done. But the more significant part of the job is listening and adjusting. It’s leadership that shapes itself to its surroundings, bending and bowing to suit the situation at hand. Jim Irvine, global learning leader at Nissan, put it bluntly when I interviewed him for the Chief Learning Officer podcast. His advice to CLOs: Don’t try to sell your wares. Focus on solving your clients’ problems first. The rest will sort itself out. That’s not to say that CLO leadership should lack drive or vision. A thoughtful, evidence-based point of view is essential to being an executive. And there is always an element of cajoling, prodding and nagging to it. Persistence and focus are essential to leadership. But the CLO’s ability to adjust to the dynamics of their organization — to thrive within the limitations and challenges of the position — is a pretty accurate measure of their ultimate success in delivering results. To use the words of another famous fighter with a few championship belts, CLOs should be able to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. CLO

But one performer stands above the rest, like a tall crane gracefully navigating through a flock of pecking pigeons. Bruce Lee was more than just a dynamic actor and performer who made such legends of the genre as “Enter the Dragon” and “Fist of Fury.” He became an international ambassador for the martial arts, bringing kung fu to legions of karate kids around the world. For practitioners of the learning arts, there’s a useful leadership philosophy tucked in among Lee’s highflying feats that resonates in the age of networked organizations and machine-driven artificial intelligence. His advice: “Be like water making its way through cracks.” The thinking goes something like this: The key to victory is not to be rigid. Rather, success hinges on adjusting to the environmental conditions and finding a way through barriers and around obstacles. Skills and training are important but what is essential is to deploy them dynamically as the situation dictates. To draw a line to leadership development, the focus of our special report this month, the skills of a successful leader are increasingly fluid. Leaders need to be able to thrive in a variety of environments and work with a diverse set of people. They need be able to adapt to changing business conditions. Mike Prokopeak That process should begin with CLOs themselves. Editor in Chief To borrow a term I heard from Citi CLO Cameron mikep@CLOmedia.com 4 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

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APRIL 2019 | VOLUME 18, ISSUE 3 CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER John R. Taggart jrtag@CLOmedia.com

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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Krissi Barr Agatha Bordonaro David DeFilippo Michael E. Echols Sarah Fister Gale Elliott Masie Jack J. Phillips Patti P. Phillips Rosina L. Racioppi Cheryl Stokes Brenda Sugrue Randall P. White

WEBINARS

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Check them out today and keep the education going!

Lisa Doyle, Head of Retail Training, Ace Hardware David DeFilippo, DeFilippo Leadership Inc. Tamar Elkeles, Chief Talent Executive, Atlantic Bridge Capital Thomas Evans, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, PricewaterhouseCoopers Gerry Hudson-Martin, Director, Corporate Learning Strategies, Business Architects Kimo Kippen, President, Aloha Learning Advisors Rob Lauber, Vice President, Chief Learning Of ficer, McDonald’s Corp. Maj. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel, ( Ret.) U.S. Air Force, Director, Deloit te Consulting Justin Lombardo, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, Baptist Health Adri Maisonet-Morales, Vice President, Enterprise Learning and Development, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Alan Malinchak, CEO, Éclat Transitions LLC Lee Maxey, CEO, MindMax

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CONTENTS A

pril

2019 10 Your Career Jesse Jackson of JPMorgan Chase shares his career journey; EY’s Brenda Sugrue talks about user-driven learning strategies; and people share what they’re reading these days.

32 Profile Putting People First

Agatha Bordonaro At Discover Financial Services, Jon Kaplan infuses learning with humanity and humility.

56 Case Study The Success of Lex

Sarah Fister Gale Infosys’ open-source, user-friendly learning platform draws 10,000 learners daily and enables the company to drive a culture of continuous upskilling.

58 Business Intelligence Seeking Targeted Talent Development

Ashley St. John Women and minorities are scarce in leadership roles. Lack of targeted leadership development offerings could be a contributing factor.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO PROVIDED BY DISCOVER

8 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

April 2019

CONTENTS

44 24

Features

24 38

Experts 16 BUSINESS IMPACT

Uncertainty: Learning’s Final Frontier Randall P. White Learning leaders can help prepare their people to feel comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty.

A Tale of Student Debt

Michael E. Echols Organizations have a stake in mounting student debt issues. Better investment decisions can help individuals and companies.

20 ACCOUNTABILITY

18 IMPERATIVES

Elliott Masie Take the Humdrum Out of Homework

Jack J. Phillips & Patti P. Phillips Predicting Learning Success

22 ON THE FRONT LINE

SPECIAL REPORT: SPECIAL REPORT LEADERSHIP Leadership Development Across Gender and Generation DEVELOPMENT

44 Searching for a Higher Purpose

David DeFilippo Friends and Family Feedback

62 IN CONCLUSION

Ave Rio Understanding millennial expectations around leadership development can help learning leaders retain more young workers.

Michael E. Echols Uncertainty Is the Future Certainty

Krissi Barr Sniffing Out Strong Leaders

Resources

Debunking the Meritocracy Myth

4 Editor’s Letter

Rosina L. Racioppi Developing women leaders requires an all-in mentality.

Kung Fu Leadership

61 Advertisers’ Index

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Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

YOUR CAREER

Career Advice from

Jesse Jackson CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER OF CONSUMER AND COMMUNITY BANKING, JPMORGAN CHASE

Jesse Jackson, CLO of consumer and community banking for JPMorgan Chase, shares his career journey and how he came into L&D.

the opportunity to transition into the chief learning officer role emerged. It allowed me to meet and work with another set of leaders within business focused on some of the same goals and objectives as we think about truly enhancing and transforming the experiences that we deliver to our clients across the globe.

What has been your career path?

What attracted you to and continues to excite you about learning and development?

My role as a CLO for JPMorgan Chase, specifically with our consumer community banking business, is a bit nontraditional. I didn’t come up through a normal HR program; I had the privilege to enter the bank through our management development program. I spent time in our consumer community banking group as a general manager moving through various roles, predominantly for our branch banking business. I also had the opportunity to move into our commercial bank, where I served as an underwriter and as a commercial banker lending to hallmark names in the New York marketplace. Additionally, I supported the business, specifically the commercial bank, as a client service manager for our global network. Having worked within the commercial bank for a number of years, I also transitioned back into business banking, which is one of the sublines of businesses within the consumer community bank. It was in that role where

JPMorgan Chase 2005 – 2010: Client service executive – middle market 2005

10 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

JPMorgan Chase 2010 – 2012: Client service executive – commercial banking 2010

Learning is so exciting right now because it is bringing together so many dynamics that we see in the broader economy. Whether it is the technological revolution as we look at the learning management systems or as we look at more digital learning modalities. It is that capability that is helping us shape our competitive landscape. Equally important is how we partner with other disciplines to ensure that we are arming our employees with the right tool sets, the right procedures, the right systems that are going to enhance their careers in the various job families that we deliver value across. What lessons have brought you here? Lessons really manifested themselves at key transitions. Specifically, moving from one job role to the other. They’re more memorable, because that’s where there was more stress on me individually, more stress on the enterprise in terms of ensuring that I had the requisite skills and knowledge to perform effectively within the context

JPMorgan Chase 2012 – 2014: Client service executive – business banking 2012

2014

JPMorgan Chase 2014 – present: Chief learning officer of consumer and community banking 2019

of that new role. As with any transition, there’s a material learning curve in many cases as individuals move to do other activities. Understanding that we recognize that learning curve, that we accelerate our ability to move up that learning curve, in many respects allows us to differentiate ourselves and deliver value faster to our customers and to the enterprise. I think about those transitions in my role from teller to branch manager, from branch manager to sales manager. Certainly, from leaving the consumer community bank going into the commercial bank as a credit underwriter and moving through credit training. Those are experiences that I draw on today as I face new challenges, as I think about bringing together the right team members to address those challenges. What will the CLO role look like in five or 10 years? The CLO role in five or 10 years will continue to evolve in a way that allows the chief learning officer to work much more in an integrated fashion with our chief information officers and chief marketing officers. This notion of lifelong learning, this notion of continuous learning, what some call learning agility, has never been more critical. It’s not just what it is we’re teaching, but it’s also critically important how we’re teaching it. What are the learning modalities that we are maturing and delivering across the enterprise? To do that effectively, the chief learning officer and the partnership with our chief information officers, with our chief marketing officers within the enterprise, will become even more critical and certainly I believe will enable us to deliver transformative value to our enterprise by really enhancing the performance of our people and increasing their success and ability to contribute effectively to our customers. What is your most important career advice? As I think about career advice, I think about it not necessarily through the lens of multiple jobs that individuals need to navigate through, but more through the lens of the skill sets and capabilities that need to be matured. I also view it in a more pragmatic way, in terms of a T-shaped diagram, where the broad horizontal are the soft skills that we need to navigate effectively. Specifically: communication, collaboration and executive presence. I’ve used the deep domain expertise as those types of capabilities that’ll allow us to be much more consultative and allow us to partner with the C-suite as we attempt to understand their key performance objectives and deliver learning capabilities that allow us to progress toward them, if not exceed them. CLO Know someone with an incredible career journey? Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you. Send your nomination to Ashley St. John at astjohn@CLOmedia.com.

S E T I B ALL

estions. -fire qu id p a r r ers ou on answ s k c a J e Jess

The most important part of learning is: The beginning, the middle and the end. Learning is lifelong, and we should all maximize each part of the journey.

The most overrated trend in L&D is: Virtual reality. While it has significant promise, current price points make wide adoption impractical.

The most underrated trend in L&D is: Microlearning. This capability has the ability to incorporate learning into the flow of work, providing just-in-time, anytime, anywhere talent development.

Learning is essential to an organization because: It future-proofs talent while providing ongoing organizational agility.

The biggest industry misconception is: That it is not a strategic driver toward the attainment of organizational objectives. Companies that are learning organizations are more innovative, adaptable and better able to exceed client expectations.

I got into the L&D space because: I wanted to positively contribute personalized added value to the enterprise at scale.

Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

YOUR CAREER

What Are You Reading? Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box By The Arbinger Institute Our leaders are highly encouraged to read this book. We have currently put 300-plus leaders though the Outward Mindset with Arbinger workshop and plan to continue to put the rest of our leaders through it in 2019. This book refers to being “in the box,” which is being self-focused, and “out of the box,” which is being people-focused. I’ve used the principles in this book in my professional life and also my personal life, especially in conflict resolution. It is important to focus on the relationship, build trust and not play the blame game if I want true resolution. — Chanda L. Frenton, learning and development officer and vice president, Park National Bank

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence By Max Tegmark

Applied Empathy: The New Language of Leadership By Michael Ventura We are learning that the skill of empathy is a precursor for leadership, design thinking, change, etc. Michael’s book is the first I’ve seen that practically shows how to classify and build empathy skills in context. — James Engel, chief learning architect, SEAC

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress By Steven Pinker I read this book because I read “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. That book got me hooked on the power of cognitive biases and got me thinking how using that science could improve learning and development. I’m learning that our exposure to information, particularly negative information, has given us, thankfully, a biased impression of humanity’s future. I’m learning that my children will grow old in a world less beset by hunger, death and disease, which makes me incredibly happy.

How will artificial intelligence affect jobs? The author provides insight to the general reader on how AI is increasingly mimicking the human brain and what the repercussions can be to organizations, the workforce and humanity at large depending on how we train, treat and talk about AI. As Elon Musk describes, the book is a “compelling guide to the challenges and choices we need to consider in our quest for understanding and leveraging AI.” This is of particular interest to CLOs and L&D teams because it provides a solid background on AI and arms CLOs with answers on how AI can and will impact learning and development.

— Chris Barker, strategic relationship manager, Allen Interactions Inc.

Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What’s at the top of your reading list? Send your submissions to Ashley St. John at astjohn@CLOmedia.com.

12 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Marina Theodotou, — learning faculty, Defense Acquisition University

A UNIVERSITY THAT WORKS FOR YOU: UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND UNIVERSITY COLLEGE The future of learning is here. A leader in adult higher education innovation since 1947, UMUC provides flexible, accessible and experiential learning that enables students to gain competencies they can apply in the workplace right away. We achieve this by

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YOUR CAREER

Top of Mind Balancing Guidance With User-Driven Learning Strategies By Brenda Sugrue Brenda Sugrue, EY global chief learning officer and Chief Learning Officer magazine’s 2018 CLO of the Year, explains why and how the learning organization provides guidance for learners.

Brenda Sugrue EY

s the volume of learning content explodes, how do we guide learners to make good choices? How do we ensure that fast content, like fast food, has the nutritional ingredients that the human mind, like the human body, needs? How do we avoid empty calories and wasted time spent searching for relevant material? How can we engineer the fastest path to expertise and avoid cognitive overload? Recent research by global research and advisory firm Gartner indicates that when organizations move to self-serve and user-driven content strategies, learning and performance suffer. Learners are overwhelmed and confused. This reaffirms academic research published in the 2006 Educational Psychologist article, “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Doesn’t Work,” which concludes that, when left to their own devices, learners do not know what learning activities are best for them. How can we solve this problem? Wisdom-ofcrowd techniques such as artificial intelligence-driven recommendations based on user ratings and consumption can help, but they still assume that users know what is good for them. It may be that high-quality video, charismatic presenters or easy assessments create an illusion of competence and inflate user ratings. It may be that learners avoid challenging content that requires more time and effort to build deeper knowledge.

According to

Brenda 14 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Content curation that combines domain and design expertise is the answer, according to a 2013 Science article, “Instructional Complexity and the Science to Constrain It.” Domain experts select the content that best represents the skills needed on the job. Instructional designers sequence the content to support the cognitive processes involved in learning and identify missing ingredients, such as context-relevant examples and practice. Off-the-shelf content often needs to be supplemented with custom elements such as overviews, examples and practice activities. On-demand content may need to be interspersed with facilitated content previews, reviews and discussions. In the end, the learner is guided through a coherent experience that guarantees a consistent level of knowledge and confidence to perform certain tasks. The time and resources required to build the guidance is more than offset by the time and cognitive overload avoided by learners. At EY, we balance guidance through learning for role and business-critical skills with freedom to explore based on personal interests and career aspirations. We assign content to individuals who fit particular profiles. We carefully curate small collections of the most relevant and best internal and external content for technical and nontechnical domains such as data analytics and personal leadership. We design blended programs which control and track progress through a sequence of self-directed and facilitated activities. We leverage learning platform functionality to provide all this guidance in one place. Guided learning coexists with sophisticated search-and-recommendation functionality so people can also consume a la carte. It’s the best of both worlds. CLO The views reflected here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.

Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What are you thinking about? Send your thoughts to Ashley St. John at astjohn@CLOmedia.com.

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BUSINESS IMPACT

Uncertainty Is the Future Certainty We need a strategy to face it head on • BY MICHAEL E. ECHOLS

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.

ncertainty — it’s the one thing in our future that is certain. Look to our politics and financial markets for affirmation. But what does it mean for learning? And what are the issues learning leaders need to address to set priorities in the face of growing uncertainty? The driver is a darling of our contemporary world: innovation. Innovation is not new. It has always been a part of life in America. Agriculture at the time of our nation’s founding was more than 90 percent of the U.S. economy. Today it is less than 2 percent. That massive shift is compelling evidence that something big has been going on for a very long time. Now change is accelerating. The shift from 90 percent to 2 percent occurred over more than two centuries. Today huge changes take mere years. The other driver is the scope of change. Entire industries are being wiped out in less than a decade. The behemoth of innovation today is the digitizing of nearly everything. Learning is no exception. Let’s begin with training for specific skills.

Because it is free, massive in content and extremely easy to use, trial-and-error learning has become common. In the 20th century, most assets were built by trained artisans working with their hands. Highly experienced craft persons built buildings, roads and factories. They were the steel workers, the pipe fitters, the bricklayers, the electricians, the roofers and the welders with the skills needed to put complex things together. Creation of things required additional skills, including detailed planning, financing and project management, to name a few. The resulting physical assets often took years, even decades, to complete. They were designed to last decades. We could see, touch and feel what they built. All this made for a more certain world. In the digital world, the builders are the software engineers and the programmers. Coders are the craft persons creating and assembling the digital assets of today and tomorrow. It increases uncertainty when we cannot actually see, touch or feel what they are build16 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

ing. The assets are literally all around us, yet invisible. One implication for learning is the need to train more coders and software engineers — and fast. The result will be an even more invisible world. In financial markets that day has already arrived. Algorithmic trading programs trade the stocks of companies in our 401(k) retirement accounts, all without ever being touched by a human hand. The results are both invisible and uncertain. The fear is of bots of the future. These forces are causing skills acquired over a lifetime of experience to become obsolete. This rapid obsolescence of our valuable human capital is one of the major uncertainties of the new order. There is much anguish over the destruction of jobs. All the while the learning community is challenged to train more and do it faster. We must rebuild our human capital to address the unknowable changes already in motion. There are many other shifts going on in learning. In the past, to learn we went to a library, took a course or attended a conference. What do we do today? Google a search phrase or search for a video on YouTube. We learn on demand while sitting at a desk or interacting with our smartphones. It is change in both what we learn and how we learn it. YouTube is functioning like a huge, largely unmanaged LMS, and it’s not just about content and its delivery modality. The role of credentials in learning has changed. The credentials of the teacher used to be important. When is the last time you even reviewed the credentials of a presenter in a YouTube video? My guess is never. We click on the search results, open the video and, if not satisfied, move on to the next search result. Because it is free, massive in content and extremely easy to use, trial-and-error learning has become common. The reduction in the value of credentials introduces even more uncertainty for those in the learning community. But this massive new LMS is only one example of a new order in learning. There are critically important universal skills needed for both innovation and the reaction to innovation. Critical thinking and problem solving are enduring capabilities, more so now than ever in this world of rapid change and uncertainty. However, I would argue we do not currently have a very good strategy for developing these critically important capabilities. CLO

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IMPERATIVES

Take the Humdrum Out of Homework Making workplace homework effective • BY ELLIOTT MASIE

S Elliott Masie is CEO of The Masie Center, an international think tank focused on learning and workplace productivity, and chairman and CLO of The Masie Center’s Learning Consortium. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

tudents have come to expect and accept homework as an element of the learning process. But what about homework for learners in the workplace? If we imagine homework as a reading assignment or a lesson, our learners generally will not respond well. A great example of this includes the pretraining readings that many organizations send out to participants in leadership development programs. If I am one of those participants, I will probably skim the articles on the plane ride to the leadership retreat. Your colleagues are busy, distracted and often are not confident that the assigned readings are essential to their learnings. But homework for workplace learners can be effective if we design it in a creative, engaging and user experience-validated format. There are many reasons to design great homework for our learners. It can build motivation, create context for the content and help personalize the learning experience. It also can trigger learner curiosity, facilitate learner interaction and support the transfer of new skills and information into workflow. But what does a great homework assignment look like? One alternative homework model that can be quite effective is a short message service or social system question. Rather than requiring an in-depth learner survey as part of homework before a structured learning experience, consider sending each participant a short question to think about or answer. Some options might be, “What behavior most annoys you as a listener in a meeting?” “Which feature do you hope is easier to use in the new sales system?” Or, “What are three words you would use to describe our new product?” These types of short questions give workers a targeted and easy way to reflect on the content focus of the learning program. Sometimes a single question will instantly raise the learner’s curiosity and engagement. Another potential homework assignment is to ask your learners to observe a process in the workflow over the next day or week. Ask them to be anthropologists of how a procedure or action takes place — and have them bring it into their class, webinar or learning module. Here are a few examples: For a time-management course: Observe what times of day you are most awake, send the most emails and are most distracted. For a safety program: Watch how your colleagues navigate the shop floor when a new rig is installed.

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For a leadership program: What notes do you take in a meeting and how often do you refer to them after? For a data analytics self-study program: Note how many times managers use the word “data” and see how it is contextualized. For a public speaking program: Watch a random TED Talk and note how the speaker is similar to or different from you.

Make homework assignments short, targeted and personal. Watching and observing is a powerful way to trigger the interest of workers. Don’t give them a form or input page; instead, ask them to observe and comment. You will be amazed at how engaged they become when making such observations face-to-face or online. Finally, consider trying a “suggested conversations” homework assignment. Give each learner a single card (print or digital) with a conversation you hope they have with one, two or more people. Make it a targeted and engaging conversation that is easy to start with a colleague in the workplace or elsewhere: • Talk about how you learn differently today than when you were in grade school. • Ask colleagues about their most difficult-to-please customers. • Speak with co-workers about their fears or hopes for AI in the future. Conversations yield “cognitive rehearsal” to support learners exploring the context or story side of a new skill or information set. You can expand homework for workplace learners using other nontraditional suggestions, assignments or even competitions. Maybe you have learners watch a 15-minute clip from a famous movie and consider its message as it relates to your new topic. I suggest making homework assignments short, targeted and personal — and not to grade or evaluate the answers or responses. Entice your learners to extend their learning. CLO

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Predicting Learning Success

Predictions of success should be part of the evaluation mix • BY JACK J. PHILLIPS AND PATTI P. PHILLIPS

Jack J. Phillips is the chairman and Patti P. Phillips is president and CEO of the ROI Institute. They can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

art of the evaluation mix should be the predictions of success. Predictions serve as leading indicators of success and facilitate process improvement. Think about the logical chain of value from any learning program: level 1, reaction; level 2, learning; level 3, application; level 4, impact; and level 5, ROI. We know from experience that programs are evaluated infrequently at level 3, less often at level 4 and rarely at level 5. Unfortunately, these are data sets executives would like to see. But can we use the lower levels to predict the higher levels? The answer is yes, but first, there are four issues that should be explored. Precondition versus prediction. Sometimes, one level is a precondition to another, but not necessarily a predictor. For example, learning is a precondition for application, but just because a participant learned doesn’t mean there will be application. Barriers and enablers. For any program to achieve success, there are often barriers, which get in the way of actually using the learning. Enablers help participants learn and apply that learning. Barriers and enablers can inhibit or distort predictions. Learning should produce a business impact. To supporters and sponsors, success is not achieved when there is learning. There must be application and then impact. Beginning with the end in mind. Many programs don’t begin with the end in mind, an impact measure. For most sponsors, the end of a program should be the impact it has on the organization, individual or community.

application: (1) Will you use the knowledge and skills in your work? (2) Will you recommend the program to others? (3) Is this program important to your success? (4) Is this program relevant to your work? These are usually good predictors of success because they are content-related measures, not experience. It is the content that will make the difference later, not necessarily the experience. Can level 2 predict level 3? Learning can influence reaction if the content is important to participants, relevant to their work, and something they will use or recommend. This reaction, which comes from learning, can be a predictor. The learning itself is not a good predictor because of the barriers that often inhibit the transfer of learning. A significant correlation between test scores and application may not be common. Can level 3 predict level 4? Application will normally predict impact if the program started with the impact and the learning is the appropriate solution to improve the impact measure. Finally, can level 1 predict levels 4 and 5? Reaction can predict impact if the program starts with the end in mind (impact) and participants and stakeholders clearly envision the end to be at level 4. If it can predict level 4, it can predict level 5, the ROI, because the ROI calculation is based on improvements in the actual impact. In some programs, participant feedback at level 1 includes a prediction of application and impact, and this can be used to create a forecasted ROI. This becomes very powerful, particularly when there is some concern about the program delivering business value. An increasing number of executives and sponsors are requiring a forecast of impact or ROI before the program is implemented. Given tight budgets and scarce resources, this is a reasonable request. For most programs, this can be achieved with minimal effort by experts who know the content of the proposed program and experts who understand the context (the role So, can level 1 predict level 3? Reaction will predict of participants, the environment where they work and application. Individuals in a program will usually de- the impact measure they are influencing). Application cide to use the content (or not) based on their reaction and impact objectives are created by these experts. Estito what they are learning (i.e., learning influences reac- mates of impact are developed and error adjustments tion). Reaction drives application and this becomes a are made to produce credible forecasts. predictor, but not every reaction will cause application. There you have it. You can predict success using Based on our research (as well as the research of learning analytics. CLOs must use predictions and foreour clients), here are the predictors, listed in the or- casts, particularly when the resources are not available to der of strength of correlation between reaction and routinely measure success at levels 3, 4 and 5. CLO

It is the content that will make the difference later, not necessarily the experience.

20 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

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Friends and Family Feedback

Expanding the 360-degree assessment process • BY DAVID DeFILIPPO

A David DeFilippo is principal of DeFilippo Leadership Inc. and an executive coach at Harvard Business School. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

s part of the learning and leadership development portfolio, the practice of 360-degree assessments or multisource feedback is a tried-and-true method to identify strengths and weaknesses. Simply put, I think of the 360-degree assessment process as a way to help individuals understand the actions they should keep taking to become more effective and also to identify those behaviors to stop doing or change that get in the way of their success. Tracing its commercial beginnings to the ESSO Research and Engineering Co. in the 1950s, the multi-rater process entails gathering feedback from subordinates, peers, supervisors and customers in order to provide insight into employees’ strengths and weaknesses for the purposes of professional development. Further popularized as a leadership development and performance management best practice among firms, a 2016 Forbes article by Jack Zenger estimated that more than 85 percent of Fortune 500 companies use 360-degree feedback as part of their human capital development portfolio. With the 360-degree process being focused on work performance and knowing that our individual effectiveness is influenced by and expands beyond our work life, I have been wondering whether using a “friends and family” 360-degree assessment would yield even more effective developmental benefits. When I think back to memories of growing up and the pointers and advice I received from family members, teachers and even friends, there were similar and lasting themes. And over the years when I have received positive and constructive feedback at work and discussed it at home, there has also been consistent validation, even if to my chagrin. Further, when something goes awry on the home front and I get feedback, it is typically uniform across this combination of historical and job-related behaviors. Should we really be surprised by this consistency between our personal and professional selves? We likely receive more accurate feedback in our personal lives. Consider how generous and unfiltered our siblings, spouses and children are when dispensing criticism. This recognition could lead to innovative ways of expanding the 360-degree feedback process to yield a more holistic assessment and action plan. First, as part of the 360-degree assessment, include input from friends, family members and even people

22 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

with whom you have regular interaction. For example, I am sure that my colleagues could provide valuable feedback on the degree to which my office and workspace are organized as part of my daily work routines. Making fun of my “day of the week” files that I use to track daily progress doesn’t hurt my feelings, but instead emboldens me to perfect this technique. Consistent with that tendency is the feedback my wife gives me about being compulsively organized, which I contend is a good practice for two busy people.

Think about the last time you had a bad day at work and the impact it had on your personal life. Second, implement an action plan that integrates practices across these two worlds. To do this, identify context-specific changes that are relevant to each setting. For example, for the person who is often late to work meetings and personal appointments, identify and implement the visible actions to demonstrate respect for work colleagues and family members. This could mean better schedule planning, leaving earlier to be on time or notifying colleagues by phone or text when running late. Last, part of evaluating the 360-degree assessment process is to check back with the individuals who provided feedback. For this progress check, ask for feedback on the focus areas to evaluate the efficacy of your respective professional and personal outcomes. How have these areas improved in both domains? Where are they distinctly different? How does one inform the other? By using the 360-degree assessment process in both work and personal contexts, there can be a high degree of congruence between the two as progress is made. While this may seem like a work practice that intrudes on your daily life, think about the last time you had a bad day at work and the impact it had on your personal life. Then, evaluate the relationship between the two and consider how employing changes in both contexts can lead to increased professional and personal effectiveness. CLO

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UNCERTAINTY: Learning’s Final Frontier Learning leaders can help prepare their people to understand and feel comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty — and their organizations will reap the benefits.

BY R ANDALL P. WHITE

he opening of the sci-fi television series “Star Trek” told us space is the final frontier to which only a few elite travelers would “boldly go.” It was inferred that the rest of us would stay safely on Earth where living was as stable and predictable as NBC’s programming schedule. In 1987, well before the end of the 20th century, Michael Stipe, of the band REM, wrote the lyric, “It’s the end of the world as we know it,” assaulting us with a dizzying kaleidoscope of world-changing events that we were all powerless to alter.

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Fast forward to the attacks of 9/11, Arab Spring followed by Arab chaos, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election and unorthodox presidency, social media concepts growing out of control, and all of our most private and marketable data being tossed to the digital wind. We can’t ignore uncertainty today. It’s harder than ever to pretend anything is certain. Have we reached the final frontier? Will we be continually forging into the unknown of occurrences, consequences and disasters that nobody can predict? Yes, and we need to come out of denial about it.

Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Unpacking Uncertainty George Binney, leadership consultant and co-author of the book “Breaking Free of Bonkers: How to Lead in Today’s Crazy World of Organizations,” says our increasing uncertainty is often articulated in this simple real-world question: “Who is my boss this week?” “There’s so much upheaval that people are experiencing in the organization now,” Binney said. “We’re constantly restructuring; big change initiatives come through repeatedly. It’s been the case for a long time, but I think there are more of them, partly as a response to the volatile times. It’s the frequency of it that we’re noticing.” Binney, who is based in London, has seen this firsthand in his work untangling the reorganization of the U.K.’s National Health Service after it reorganized in 2012 under the Health and Social Care Act. “Everybody found themselves in a new organization,” Binney said. “Pretty much ever since, the system has been seeking to live with that reorganization and find ways of working with it, but it’s been a struggle. People didn’t want another reorganization to correct the errors in the previous one, so they’ve adapted and found ways of working with the system even if it was unsatisfactory. A lot of the ways that are now functioning are in spite of the formal organization.” Binney’s approach to deconstructing uncertainty has been focused on a practical approach of watching people work and observing where efforts fall apart in the chaos that comes from ambiguity. The growing chaos organizations face is the result of complexity, according to Cheryl Stokes, a partner specializing in leadership development at the executive search and consulting firm Heidrick & Struggles. Stokes cited former Big Three automaker General Motors as an example of a company that is navigating complexity and reinventing itself to be more agile than most people expect a megacompany to be. (See “A Look at General Motors,” p. 28.) “Absolutely, uncertainty has increased,” Stokes said. “We’ve all heard the term VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) and in my experience it’s not just the uncertainty in the world, but it’s the complexity — we’re at a tipping point in terms of the degree of complexity that leaders and organizations face today.” That complexity is a drain on performance. “We’ve done a lot of research around this area of building agility,” Stokes said. “We look at organizations that are super accelerators — those that outperform their peers in the market and who can adapt and pivot faster than their competitors. Complexity has been shown repeatedly to be one of the top fac26 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

tors that negatively impact an organization’s performance. So one of the things we work with our clients on in becoming more agile is the idea of simplicity. Being less complex is one step toward simplicity and accelerating performance, which actually helps you have more certainty in an uncertain world.” Observing uncertainty as it affects individuals in their day-to-day progress, and understanding it as the opposite of simplicity, are ways of deconstructing the challenge of uncertainty.

Using Uncertainty to Our Advantage All-knowingness and certainty are conventions of human organizations. However, to our credit, as we’ve become more democratic in life and government, leadership has evolved to a point where it’s not about knowing everything, but rather about learning everything. Or at least getting as close as possible to this goal. Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” calls uncertainty the opposite of knowledge or the complete lack of it, as he alludes to specific moments of near total ignorance in history just before major unexpected events, such as World War I and the stock market crash of 1929. In the book’s prologue, he writes: “This is a book about uncertainty; to this author, the rare event equals uncertainty … I don’t particularly care about the usual. If you want to get an idea of a friend’s temperament, ethics and personal elegance, you need to look at him under the tests of severe circumstances, not under the regular rosy glow of daily life. … Indeed the normal is often irrelevant.” This turns the monster of uncertainty inside out. If bad things can befall us at any time, isn’t it just as likely that something wonderful could drop into our laps? In this scenario, learning and its ability to prepare people to engage amid uncertainty has never had a more important role in corporate missions.

Developing Uncertainty Leadership Historically, each style of leadership defined certainty in its most advantageous way. In the command-and-control style, uncertainty is assumed away. In empowered or participative leadership, the leader has a vision of a future or a vision of what’s to be done, but can’t do it all by herself. The job may be too large, or she lacks technical expertise. Either way, the leader needs committed followers. In learning leadership and with today’s evolving styles, nobody knows for sure and the leader is the designated arbiter, creating the environment for everyone to maximize their potential to perform — this presupposes an environment where learning is the coin of the realm. The successful leader enthuses all to

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A Look at General Motors General Motors is a 110-year-old car manufacturer. It’s also a company that has positioned itself ahead of its competitors and continually transformed the auto industry. In 1996, GM introduced EV1, the world’s first modern electric car built by a major automotive manufacturer. Though EV1 was unsuccessful, it helped GM develop the institutional knowledge to later create the electric Chevy Volt in 2010 and the pure-electric Chevy Bolt in 2016. GM’s early efforts in the rental car market also gave the auto manufacturer the confidence and experience to invest in car and ride sharing. In 2016, GM acquired the failed ride-sharing company Sidecar and relaunched that business as Maven, a car-sharing platform serving the gig economy. Shortly after, GM invested $500 million in ride-sharing company Lyft. By focusing on experimenting with technology and understanding consumer needs, GM put itself on the early path to being an industry disruptor.

—Cheryl Stokes This contains information from “Goliath’s Revenge: How Established Companies Turn the Tables on Digital Disruptors” by Todd Hewlin and Scott Snyder.

experiment with new situations and information. Fail if you have to, because we’ll all learn from that too. Actor and film director Orson Welles was a leader of arguably great success who relished what “might happen.” He famously inspired and flabbergasted colleagues with his quest for “divine accidents,” ad libs and unintentional flubs that looked more authentic than scripted action. The leader is there to remind us how much fun we’re having as we fail! But it’s not always fun. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been summoned by heads of state over issues of privacy and espionage, and much of his response has been vague. He can’t really be blamed for this because no one predicted some of the outcomes. At this writing, it’s not clear where Facebook is headed. A medium has been born from our hungry vanity to tell the world everything about our lives. What will it become? Will it survive? How can business take advantage — hopefully in an ethical manner? Still, it all comes back to the crisis and opportunity of uncertainty and to leaders who don’t get hung up on 28 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

having to be the source of all the answers, who can inspire organizations to observe, experiment and learn. To facilitate this, Binney advocates more freedom and space in the workplace. In his experience, uncertainty creates chaos, but the answer is not to inflict order. Too often, when bosses feel the pressures of ambiguity, they want to calm things down with plans, strategies and measurements. It’s time to rethink this. “One leader of a health system was interested in finding new ways of working with patients and developing the service,” Binney said. “The idea we offered her was to say, ‘If you’re going to develop the organization, you need to have some sort of open space where people can come up with new ideas.’ You can’t put it all in the plan. Because if you try to get it all in the plan, things won’t happen. “You have to pose questions to people,” Binney said. “This is the issue we’re faced with, now what can we do about it?” It was a huge shift for this leader to realize she needed to provide some free space in which people can develop themselves and their ideas for the future.

Mastering Uncertainty as an Organizational Effort At the individual level there are instruments that accurately assess a person’s degree of comfort with uncertain situations. Our own studies and others suggest that those who are more comfortable with uncertainty are more likely to be high performers. We have also seen that a person can develop their ability to grapple with the unknown more effectively. “CLOs have to be prepared to offer learning experiences that give the conditions for learners to be agile, engage in sense-making and activate purpose,” Stokes said. “This means having learning experiences that are integral to the employee’s life and not just one-off training events. It’s helping leaders have good insight into both their strengths and their areas for development. “This comes from multiple means, including formal learning programs, online learning, just-intime content, coaching, collaborative learning experiences, and allowing learners alternate experiences,” Stokes continued. “For example, giving sabbaticals so employees can go and work at a notfor-profit or work in an area that is seemingly unrelated to the job but where they will stretch themselves as leaders and see innovative connections.” At the organizational level, Stokes suggests creating learning ecosystems. Here, participants are allowed to draw from and connect with a variety of resources where they can benefit and learn while UNCERTAINTY continued on page 60

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The reality is many emerging leaders may move to other companies. Sometimes, then, the best choice is to hire externally. This could potentially yield great results, like bringing in fresh perspectives and preventing stagnation of thought within an organization’s talent pool. On the other hand, when you develop people for those future leadership positions, younger workers might become more likely to stick around because they see they have potential to grow. Internal development of talented employees is a great way for organizations to groom leaders who understand and fit the company’s culture, and it also sends a good message to the rest of the team that the organization is committed to their future. According to Deloitte, 83 percent of surveyed executives indicated that ‘careers and learning’ were ‘important or very important.’

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Profile

Putting People First At Discover Financial Services, Jon Kaplan infuses learning with humanity and humility.

BY AGATHA BORDONARO

hen it comes to learning, Jon Kaplan truly understands the importance of emotional engagement. Growing up south of San Francisco, the self-described “terrible student” found himself, in the fourth grade, unable to read — but hid it from everyone he knew, including his teachers. “I was really good at faking people out,” he said. “I was able to pay attention to social cues, and I learned how to cheat on multiple-choice tests.” Kaplan finally confessed his secret to a classmate and got the remedial help he needed, but by then he had become “incredibly ashamed” and his academic performance suffered through grade school. However, that all changed when Kaplan made a new friend in high school — one who “was very driven academically,” he recalled. “And I remember a light went off in my head: ‘Oh, I can try.’ I started trying, and I did really well after that.” Inspired and motivated, Kaplan went on to attend Stanford University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations and a master’s in international policy, followed by an MBA from the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “I got that input that if you try hard, it’s actually more fun,” said Kaplan, who now serves as vice president of training and development for Discover Financial Services in Riverwoods, Illinois. “You’re more engaged; it’s more interesting.” It is this focus on emotional engagement, paired with a genuine humility and openness to feedback fostered by his early childhood experiences, that define Kaplan and his approach to learning today. “He is humble and open-minded, and that helps bring multiple ideas to the table and creative resolutions to problems,” said Teri Hart, director of learning strategy at Discover. “He has a growth mindset about himself as well as about others, and he sees everyone for their potential.” 32 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

The Road to L&D Now a 25-year veteran of the L&D industry, Kaplan always pictured himself in the learning space — just not the corporate learning space. Having been bitten by the academia bug en route to Stanford, he had his sights set on becoming a college professor. But he soon discovered that while he enjoyed teaching undergraduates, he didn’t enjoy other aspects of higher education. So after earning his master’s, Kaplan switched gears and turned to high school education, spending a few years teaching economics, government and U.S. history in several California schools. He even became a founding member of a charter school and led the institution for about two and a half years, but he soon concluded that the learning wasn’t being developed in a way that could be replicated for a wider audience — and that frustrated him.

“He has a growth mindset about himself as well as about others, and he sees everyone for their potential.” —Teri Hart, director of learning strategy, Discover “That’s when I decided to leave,” Kaplan said. Kaplan moved into the corporate world, taking a position writing software-development training materials for PeopleSoft. He climbed the corporate ladder there and subsequently at Visa until a recruiter called and told him about a job opening at Discover. “One of the reasons I came to Discover is our profound commitment to our employees,” he explained, referring to the company’s 16,500 personnel who service the company’s credit cards, bank accounts and loans. “My career objective has always been about expanding opportunity, especially for people who haven’t

PHOTOS PROVIDED BY DISCOVER

Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Profile had access to high-quality educational resources and study. About half of [our employees] work in our call centers. For most of them it’s their first job in corporate America. To have an opportunity to really deeply impact that group of people, to help them be successful on day one of their employment, [to] really change the entire trajectory of their careers — that makes me proud of the work we do.”

Education for All

they’d need to move up the ranks and help fill Discover’s talent pipeline. However, only a few hundred of the company’s employees were taking advantage of the program. Kaplan wanted to know why. So he partnered with the Lumina Foundation, a private organization focused on increasing post-secondary education, to study the program. The results first reaffirmed its positive impact: For every dollar Discover invested in tuition reimbursement, the company would get that dollar back, along with an additional $1.44 in both savings from lower attrition and absenteeism as well as increased skill and managerial potential. But the survey further revealed that it was too financially burdensome for many employees to pay upfront for their tuition and wait to be reimbursed, plus they still paid out of pocket at least 10 percent of the overall cost thanks to their books, materials and other fees. Another barrier was the paralysis of choice: So many schools were marketing to the employees that they felt overwhelmed and unable to determine which program would offer them the greatest benefits. Kaplan and his team digested all this feedback and, in June 2018, rolled out the new Discover College Commitment program. “We pay directly to universities so employees don’t have to shell out the money. We pay 100 percent of tuition and 100 percent of fees, required books and supplies — we even provide our employees a tax gross up if they exceed the maximum federal shelter of $5,250 per year,” said Kaplan, adding that the program is open to U.S.-based employees, regardless of length of employment. “You can come to us on day one: You’re eligible.” The program offers three universities for employees to choose from, with all courses delivered online to allow for flexibility. “The response here has been overwhelming,” Kaplan said.

As the head of Discover’s learning and development group and founder of the company’s Training Center of Excellence, Kaplan leads a team of about 160 L&D professionals who are segmented into four different practice areas: learning strategy, which comprises the architects of the company’s overarching L&D goals; curriculum development, which consists of the designers who build the learning solutions; instruction, which includes those who lead and facilitate the training; and technology and infrastructure, the group that manages the LMS, workflow, metrics and reporting. Kaplan inspires each group with his direct, humble style and ethical approach. “Jon is purpose driven, principled and persistent,” —Jon Kaplan, vice president of Hart said. “He will work totraining and development, Discover ward driving what he thinks is right, even in the face of adversity. When you work for Jon, you feel supported and like someone has your back.” “I appreciate Jon’s commitment to doing the right thing and, specifically, his commitment to helping all of our people reach their potential,” added Clint Morley, a vice president of customer services at Discover. In fact, one of Kaplan’s most successful initiatives at Discover is a perfect example of his overall L&D philosophy. Several years ago, Kaplan had correctly concluded that Discover’s customers would increasingly turn to the internet to solve their simple problems; they would seek out live customer service only for more complex issues. That meant that in order to stay competitive, Discover would need to attract and retain the best and brightest call center talent. One of the company’s existing methods to achieve this goal was its college tuition reimbursement program. Not only did it help attract motivated, ambitious individuals, but it provided Jon Kaplan, vice president of training and development at Discover Financial Services, them with the training and credentials has made it a career objective to expand opportunities for the company’s employees.

“It’s really easy for the humanity to get bled out of your training and to end up with a sterile, inhuman product.”

34 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

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Profile In fact, the Discover College Commitment program is what clinched the deal for a potential Discover vice president who’d been interviewing with three other companies around the same time, Kaplan noted. “He called us and said, ‘If that’s the way you take care of your call center employees, that’s the place I need to be.’” It’s no surprise that in 2018 the company was named a top place to work for millennials by Indeed and one of the best places to work in IT by IDG’s Computerworld, as well as ranked highest in customer satisfaction among U.S. credit card companies by J.D. Power for the fourth time in five years. Another recent initiative Kaplan helped develop is a leadership development program. The approach is quintessentially Kaplan: It focuses on humbleness and openness to feedback. One of its core elements is a management simulation that highlights participants’ weaknesses so they can experience them firsthand and work on improvement. “We feel at Discover that it’s incredibly important to lead from a place of humility,” Kaplan said. “The types of managers who lead from a place of, ‘I know all the answers’ don’t succeed consistently and end up with worse and worse talent on their teams. We felt it was really important to put our managers in a situation where they could see their worst tendencies as a leader. For most of them, it’s a really humbling experience. It leads to self understanding.” Hart added: “One thing I learned from Jon is that it’s not a leader’s job to have all the answers, but rather to create space and capacity for [development].”

A Human Touch Given his own experience in school and coupled with his interest in the neurobiology of learning, Kaplan is a deep believer in the importance of creating an emotional connection for learners. “It’s really easy for the humanity to get bled out of your training and to end up with a sterile, inhuman product,” he said. “We work really hard at Discover to create an individual connection with people. “ One way Kaplan and his team accomplish this goal is by recruiting the company’s best call center agents to lead the onboarding training for new hires. “A call center agent [can say], ‘I’m getting trained by someone who had my job; I can learn from them what it means to be successful in this environment,’” Kaplan said. “You have that emotional relevancy because you’re getting to know what the instructor struggled with when he or she was in your place.” Discover also incorporates as much video as possible into training and uses real photos of the company’s people and facilities so trainees can recognize their own colleagues, managers and mentors on the job. 36 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Kaplan stresses the importance of leading from a place of humility.

Because some of the biggest companies in the financial services space are much larger than Discover and can leverage more revenue and a larger employee base, Discover’s ability to foster a culture that encourages and nurtures these kinds of relationships is one of its key competitive advantages, Kaplan said. But this emphasis on relationships is also the learning team’s greatest challenge: Each piece of content must be tailored not only to the learning need, but also to the business itself. “All of our content has to be culturally relevant, so we have to build a lot of our own content,” Kaplan said. “We don’t have a lot that comes off the shelf. But we feel it’s a worthwhile expense because our culture is our competitive differentiator.”

Looking Ahead Going forward, Kaplan is working on implementing a “matrix environment,” where he and his team identify value streams within the organization and pair people together from different areas to service those value streams and meet specific needs. “It allows people to collaborate much more effectively,” he said. He also plans to leverage Discover’s university partnerships to roll out more degree programs for employees, such as graduate degrees and stackable certificates, to help build out the company’s talent pipeline for the future. “What I’m interested in doing is figuring out how to use these university programs to build strategically relevant skills and key capabilities that we know we need in the next five to 10 years,” Kaplan said. No matter what his endeavors, though, one thing is clear: Kaplan will continue to lift up everyone who works with him. “His passion, intellect and desire to do the right thing, regardless of attribution, are things that I not only respect, but that have inspired me as a leader,” Morley said. CLO Agatha Bordonaro is a writer based in New York. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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38 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

“I

t was the best of times, it was the worst of times” — so it is with learning today. What can be done to increase the best while dialing down the worst? Companies have a stake in the results as well as an active role to play. The $1.5 trillion in student debt represents both the best and the worst and serves as the foundation for this conversation. On the best side, it represents the willingness of young people to invest personal capital in themselves. The eventual potential cost to American taxpayers of $600 billion, however, is part of the worst. How individual investments in education are being made is a real problem. The initial corporate impact of these personal decisions is the critical issue of finding and recruiting new workers with needed skills. And companies are not helping themselves.

The Debt Dilemma Historically, investment in a college degree has been viewed as a matter of individual choice largely paid for by the individual. Governments were the primary source of public funds for these investments in the form of state-subsidized tuition at land grant schools and federal student loans. For a long time, the system worked. In the twentieth century, state budgets could subsidize tuition costs. These public subsidies made a college degree affordable for students and their families. Those days are over.

Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Demands on states to fund Medicaid, prisons and property tax relief have forced a significant reduction in the funds available to support higher education. Tax dollars allocated to higher education have declined as a percentage of state expenditures. At the same time, the published cost of tuition has increased at a rate well above the rate of inflation. This, combined with the decline in state tax dollar subsidies, has increased the tuition burden and shifted it to students and their families. Simultaneously, personal income has been essentially flat. CNBC reports that 78 percent of full-time workers live paycheck to paycheck and 71 percent of all U.S. workers say they are now in debt. There is not enough money available to stay on the current path, no matter who pays. Evidence of a breaking point is readily available. Only 25 percent of students with federal student loans are repaying the principle on their loans. Current trends indicate that approximately 40 percent of those with outstanding student loans are set to eventually default on those loan obligations, thus the shift of the $600 billion debt onto the backs of taxpayers. While all this is happening, companies are growing increasingly desperate for young educated individuals with the problem-solving and critical-thinking skills needed for the increasingly uncertain future. The implications definitely fall in the “worst of times” category. Student debt is already having a direct negative impact across our society. Family formation, home purchases and retirement savings are all declining. Recent Federal Reserve research estimates that by 2014 student debt had reduced home ownership among young adults by 400,000 units. Student debt will further negatively impact family funds available for the education of children and grandchildren.

What This Means for Companies There is a mismatch between the demand and supply of specific human capital skills. Our world is shifting from product and local to digital and global. This creates rapid growth in the demand for new skills. This is happening at a time when there are more unfilled positions than unemployed individuals in the United States. We need more young workers with critical-thinking and problem-solving skills — those same individuals who are increasingly burdened by personal debt in the form of student loans. Shifting human capital investment increasingly onto individuals and their families is no longer a viable capitalization strategy. Investment funding requires improved productivity to be viable in the future. But all is not lost. One element of the best of times is the fact that there are enough jobs for those who wish to work. This is not an insignificant development. In addition, more corporate capital is available than 40 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

ever. There is record growth in company earnings and cash flow. There is ample corporate capital available for companies to invest for a very different future for their employees, stockholders and customers. Virtually every company is looking for specific skills required to compete in this rapidly emerging global digital economy. And there are opportunities for these companies to differentiate themselves among those competing in the war for talent. Recruiting is one area of opportunity. There are hundreds of thousands of talented, well-educated college graduates out there. Many are struggling to service their own student debt. Offering them financial help to service that debt in a hiring offer is a chance to become a highly differentiated employer. But there is also significant opportunity in corporate learning. The needed shift is in the narrative of education as an employee benefit to education as a managed strategic imperative.

Targeted Human Capital Investment Companies have stayed in an arms-length relationship with individuals’ education investment decisions. This includes choices about college attended, major, career and the means to finance these learning choices. This has preserved the principle of free choice in education. Placing the requirement for education investment on the state, the family and the individual relieves a company of the burden of putting its own funds toward human capital investment.

There is not enough money available to stay on the current path, no matter who pays. This is changing. A recently reported “best practice” was published in the Jan. 4 issue of The Wall Street Journal, in an article titled “Now Hiring, With Attractive New Perk: Free College Degree.” I do think the “free college degree” bit is somewhat misleading, but the content makes up for the lameness of the title. The article describes an important development: In May 2018, Discover Financial announced it would pay tuition “to attend the University of Florida, Brandman University and Wilmington University and pursue one of seven online degrees — in business, cybersecurity, computer engineering or organizational management, all fields where the company has urgent hiring needs.” This represents targeted human capital investment of the first order. It is a model worth studying.

Discover has prequalified three specific universities and negotiated tuition costs. It further targets skill needs of the company by only paying for online degrees of strategic significance to the company. This improves quality and lowers tuition costs. It redefines education from an HR benefit to a strategic human capital investment. And Discover willingly shared the strategic initiative for all to see, a transparent move that can help us all. Of course, students incurring substantial debt for majors in medieval studies or dance may have dismal prospects for repaying their student loans. And I’m not suggesting that anyone choosing to secure a degree in any area of their choice should be precluded from doing so. However, my recommendation is that the people who are making education-related choices have the potential to make better decisions with better information. And it is critical that such information be available before student debt is incurred, not after when job searches are taking place with degree in hand. Another area where good information is extremely valuable sooner rather than later is in the area of actual tuition paid. Pricing incentives for colleges and universities are to position the institutions with high list tuition. An implicit assumption of American consumers is that if it costs more, it must be worth more. Low list tuition has the inverse implication: Low tuition must mean low value. This is not universally true. In fact, it is strongly in corporate interests for actual tuition to be lower, not higher. There are many good higher-education institutions that don’t have nosebleed list tuition prices. Another pricing opportunity is in negotiations. In many ways colleges and universities follow “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” The list tuition price is the starting point for price negotiations. If the prospect will pay the full list price, so much the better for the college. Unfortunately, the least informed — especially those from families with little or no education — are the most vulnerable and the least likely to be able to gain access to the education they need to improve their lives. For first-hand evidence of this, visit tuitiontracker.org and enter any college you may want to explore. Look at the tuition graphs. So, the opportunity is for prospective students to know what the real cost of tuition is at any and every college or university they are considering attending. The irony is that this data does exist and is readily ac-

cessible. The problem is that the average student and their family do not know where it is or how to access it. Last, we want to explore future opportunity. In this area, the behavior of companies is key. In the name of competitive advantage, companies are reluctant to publicize their own future human capital needs. Beneath the surface the fear is that by revealing future skill needs, the transparency will alert competitors in the same markets of real needs and by doing so create competitive disadvantage. Forget it. The best competitors already have found out that marketing managers should be proficient in chat blasts, lookalike campaigns and keywords. The ones who need and can productively use information about your company’s future human capital needs are the learners committing the $1.5 trillion and more to finance their own education. Knowing that your company will need experts in supply chain management earning a salary of $X per year could be very helpful to a talented individual considering life choices.

A shift is needed in the narrative of education as an employee benefit to education as a managed strategic imperative.

42 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Good Investments Require Good Information Who are the influencers in these personal learning investments of young people? We, as a society, have abdicated the giving of advice on colleges and majors to professionals ill-equipped to provide good advice. High school guidance counselors simply do not have the direct experience in careers in the rapidly changing world to give good career advice. Yet it is those guidance counselors along with college professors who are giving most of the direction on where the $1.5 trillion plus is being spent. In the end, if we want to help individuals make better human capital investment decisions, we need to provide them with better information. Much of the data is available from highly reliable sources. The challenge is to get that information to the individuals making their own learning investment decisions before they incur massive student debt. Discover Financial is demonstrating a true best practice. Others should follow. Better human capital investment decisions help individuals, companies and our country. CLO 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.

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Searching for a

HIGHER PURPOSE Understanding millennial expectations and perceptions about leadership development can help learning leaders retain more young workers, improve company culture and benefit the bottom line. BY AVE RIO

tacey Engle worked her way up to become the president of the company she began her career with almost a decade ago. In 2009, she joined Fierce Conversations as an account executive/marketing lead, and as of November 2018, she was running the leadership development and training company that focuses on helping clients have effective conversations. And she’s only 33. While Fierce, a small, growing company, doesn’t have a formal leadership development program, Engle said company leaders and mentors taught her how the business works and gave her a sense of connection to the company. But this single-company career progression isn’t common for millennials. A recent Gallup study found that only half of surveyed millennials see themselves at their current employer in

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Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

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one year, and 60 percent reported they’re currently open to a new opportunity. Almost equally uncommon is millennial satisfaction with learning programs. In fact, Harvard Business Publishing’s “The 2018 State of Leadership Development” report found that only 40 percent of millennials and younger leaders — ages 36 and younger — described their organization’s L&D programs as “excellent” compared with 67 percent of baby boomers ages 56 and older.

The more companies stereotype by saying millennials will keep job hopping, the more it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Millennials aren’t getting what they want out of leadership development programs and learning leaders need to know why. By understanding millennials’ expectations and perceptions regarding leadership development, companies can retain more millennials, improve company culture and benefit the bottom line.

A Sense of Purpose Diane Belcher, senior director of product management at Harvard Business Publishing and author of the “State of Leadership Development” report, said they heard loud and clear that millennials felt L&D programs lacked relevancy and application to real work and were unsatisfied with the core content of the programs. Belcher said millennials need a sense of purpose in their work and a sense of connection to the organization. “The opportunity to make leadership development programs relevant, contextualized to the organization and contextualized to the individual’s place in the organization are great ways to make that connection and to appeal to that sense of purpose,” she said. The HBP report found that only about half of millennials said they see strong alignment between program content and the business issues facing their organization, including transformation efforts in progress. On the other hand, up to 75 percent of those ages 56 and over saw such alignment. To address the relevancy problem, Belcher suggested developing more teamwork and business impact projects — considering at the beginning of a program how it aligns to strategic initiatives across the organization. “Then thinking about the goals of that initiative and how you can create action learning projects to make that applicable,” she said. “Creating tools that allow learners to take what they’re learning in a pro46 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

gram and immediately cascade it to their team so they can become leaders — so they are teaching their teams as well as learning themselves.” Belcher said giving millennials a chance to hear personal stories from leaders can help too. “It’s a chance to connect their own personal stories with the key strategic initiatives that they’re tasked with accomplishing,” she said. “Connecting work to the broader organization mission makes that work more relevant and gives them a sense of purpose.” She said the more often millennials can make that connection with senior leaders, the more they trust what they’re learning and the more they can make a connection to the broader imperative. She added that millennials also have higher expectations in terms of innovation, in the modalities of the experiences they go through, in the level of personalization and in the types of learning content. That higher level of expectation can be attributed to the world they’ve grown up in, according to Belcher. She said baby boomers grew up and developed in their careers in much more of a top-down, command-and-control hierarchal organization. In that context, leadership sets the path and the employees execute against that path — versus millennials who have grown up in times of constant change. “They were raised in a different world and they are much more likely to have a desire to understand that broader vision, to consider the best path to execute against that vision,” she said. “It’s not just that millennials have this desire to have a sense of purpose just because that’s who they are. They want to have purpose because it’s how they’ve developed in their career; it’s what they know.” She said if leaders can understand the reason behind millennials’ desires, it can be easier to make a connection and understand where the relevancy question comes from. “But at the end of the day, it’s incumbent upon all of us in L&D to understand that, because otherwise they are going to leave,” she said.

Relevant Content Lindsey Pollak, a multigenerational workforce expert, said companies could benefit from simply refreshing their examples in learning programs. “Talk about email, Slack and instant messaging rather than business letter writing,” she said. “It just makes it feel more modern and relevant as opposed to feeling like you’re doing an exercise that people have been doing for 20 years.” Engle agreed that what she wants as a millennial is relevancy. “I want to be able to immediately use it after I get trained on something,” Engle said. She said most development programs are lacking relevancy — and employees deserve more from the programs.

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LEAD THE

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Thank you, Matt. You TEACH us a lot about the strategic value of activating and retaining talent!

devryworks.com • 866-606-8349 In New York, DeVry University operates as DeVry College of New York. DeVry University is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission (HLC), www.hlcommission. org. DeVry is certified to operate by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. Arlington Campus: 2450 Crystal Dr., Arlington, VA 22202. DeVry University is authorized for operation as a postsecondary educational institution by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, www.tn.gov/thec. Nashville Campus: 3343 Perimeter Hill Dr., Nashville, TN 37211. Unresolved complaints may be reported to the Illinois Board of Higher Education through the online compliant system http://complaints.ibhe.org/ or by mail to 1 N. Old State Capitol Plaza, Ste. 333, Springfield, IL 62701-1377. ©2019 DeVry Educational Development Corp. All rights reserved.

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“A lot of companies have used the same training programs through the years, and they’re just not cutting it,” she said. “They’re not modular enough, they’re not pragmatic enough and they don’t engage the whole head and heart of their employees.” Engle said L&D teams must develop more modern, relevant programs, not just for millennials, but for all employees. “I would want more than 67 percent of baby boomers to say L&D programs are excellent as well.” She said L&D needs to drill down with the senior leaders on making the company values come to life and develop training that is tied to the company’s expectations and what it means to be a part of the company. She said one of the challenges with millennial retention is that they expect that the conversation they had during the recruiting process is going to come to life, but then it doesn’t. “You said working here would be X, and it’s Y; this gap is too much for me,” she said. “L&D can help by solidifying what is most important for the company and developing the people to live and work in the way that matches the vision of the company.” Engle said the more often companies stereotype by saying millennials will keep job hopping, the more it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

what is coming next, they’re going to go get a job with a company that is going to provide them with that learning,” she said. In fact, the “Deloitte Millennial Survey” found that 46 percent of those intending to stay at their current organizations for at least another five years say they receive help with Industry 4.0. Of those planning to leave within two years, the figure drops to 28 percent. Pollak said training and skills have currency with the younger generation. “Skills that you can add to your LinkedIn profile, certifications and knowledge that can be measured are remarkably appealing to this generation because it’s not realistic that a young person in their 20s, let’s say, will work for the same company their whole career,” she said. “If they’re building skills that become marketable in the future either within their company or for another job, that has a lot of value.”

The ability to talk about what matters and make hard decisions has significant top- and bottom-line implications.

Skills for the Future Pollak said there’s a lot of understandable fear and concern about which skills will be relevant in the future and to pretend that doesn’t exist would be a mistake. She said L&D leaders need to be clear about what skills seem to be the most important to the success of the business over the next few years. “You might not be able to predict five, 10 or 20 years in the future, but whatever you know now, tell people,” she said. “Whether you are starting to recruit more people with knowledge of data analytics or Python or whatever it is in your industry that’s coming.” According to the 2018 “Deloitte Millennial Survey,” just 36 percent of millennials and 42 percent of Gen Z respondents reported that their employers were helping them understand and prepare for the changes associated with Industry 4.0, which is defined as “the marriage of physical and digital technologies, such as analytics, artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and Internet of Things technology.” Pollak said identifying the future skills needed for the industry is critical for retention. “If people feel that their own organization is not helping them prepare for 48 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Don’t Ignore Soft Skills With the coming automation, Pollak said soft skills may become even more important, as well. “Those are the things the computers can’t do: personal skills, leadership, communication,” she said. “We have to be clear about all the factors that make somebody successful in the organization and teach those and reskill people and remind them of that importance.” She said L&D teams too often assume people know how to communicate on the phone, how to write persuasively or how to manage another person, but, in fact, those skills need to be taught. “The companies I most admire are the ones who don’t take anything for granted,” she said. “Those who say, these are the skills that are critical to the success of the organization — one might be Python, but another might be communicating across generations or getting along with colleagues.” More than a third of millennials in the Deloitte survey said it is “essential” to a company’s long-term success that its employees and leaders have strong interpersonal skills, but only 26 percent are offered much help or support in developing them. Engle said that’s a problem. She said the ability to talk about what matters and make hard decisions has significant top- and bottom-line implications. Additionally, she said leaders need to become more comfortable talking about emotions. “A lot of training programs miss out on the power of emotion because HIGHER PURPOSE continued on page 60

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Facts matter.®

Luck seems intangible, one of the few parts of life that we have no control over. That’s why people think of gambling and sports when they think of luck in the random aspects of those endeavors: it’s only in those situations where we can clearly see which elements our beyond our control. In real life, we have no idea how much our actions will influence the outcomes, so it’s adaptive to assume that we can control a lot more than we realize. This motivates us to focus on our part and improve what we bring to the table, which can only help the ultimate outcome.

OFFICIAL KEYNOTE AT SYMPOSIUM

Can You Learn to Be Lucky?

WED | APRIL 3 11:30 AM

You help organizations foster “lucky traits” in their employees and business practices. What have you found most surprising when dealing with executives? Our need for certainty makes everything seem inevitable in hindsight, but the real world is so complex that it’s impossible to know each factor influencing a situation. Innovative, thriving organizations manage to incorporate experimentation into the company DNA, and encourage it at all levels. Knowing this is one thing, but actually putting it into practice is another. A lot of executives admit that they appreciate openmindedness and flexibility. There’s a key term in psychology that’s really interesting here: the bias blind spot. Quite simply, we don’t know what we don’t know. We can’t see our own biases. Executives might be willing to be flexible about which orientation information to give new recruits, or which incentives to offer to midlevel employees. But it’s hard to take that extra step: Would an orientation guide be better than a shadowing program? Do we need incentives? In your book you write about nailing first impressions. How might an introvert nail a first impression? The same way as anyone else! People who identify as introverts tend to get anxious or easily overwhelmed in social situations. They might feel awkward because they don’t have as much experience wooing others or lack charisma. In other words, the bulk of their attention is focused inward, which is a recipe for an uncomfortable social situation. This is exactly what happens when athletes choke: they overthink simple behaviors, without realizing that thinking about not messing up is precisely what makes you mess up. The fix is the same, whether you want to sink a free throw or nail a first impression: Turn your attention outward at the target. Great first impressions require us to simply focus on the other person. My favorite suggestion is to pretend like the person you’re meeting is attractive and fascinating, and then make it your job to find out how. Think about how you’d act toward someone you found attractive who showed some interest. We’re automatically drawn to warm, expressive behaviors that show genuine engagement. Don’t be self-conscious. Focus on making the other person smile — think about giving them reasons to not be self-conscious. You also talk about cultivating confidence. How do you differentiate between confidence and competence? Confidence is the result of competence. When we’re competent and can demonstrate the ability to do something well, people evaluate us highly. Being concerned with other people’s opinions of us isn’t vanity, it’s necessary for survival; humans are social creatures who need other people to live. Those positive evaluations stick with us and make us stand up a little straighter and more assured of our place in a group. When we’re unsure of what to do in a group, we take cues from people who look like they know what they’re doing: they’re not asking, they’re just doing. They’re behaving confidently, and they look like leaders.

On the flipside, think if you had to attend an intro class for something you know very well, like using a laptop. If the teacher asked everyone to type an email on their laptop, you’d start immediately. People would look to you for tips and clues because you obviously know what you’re doing. In their eyes, you’re behaving confidently. If asked why you were opening up your laptop, you’d answer confidently. You’d be confident because you know that you would be rated highly by others. Knowing that we’re going to be rated highly by others is like extra octane in our tank — it’s what helps us act with confidence. The trick is to internalize the feeling that everything is going to be okay; tell yourself: I got this. There was an article published a few months ago in which you talked about some ﬁctional characters who make their own luck (https://www.readitforward.com/authors/karla-starrluck/). Can you share a few of your favorites here? One of my all-time favorites is Alice, from “Alice in Wonderland,” because her predicament is such a good metaphor for life in general. She’s never told precisely where she is, why she’s there or what her real quest is, but she constantly makes the most of what she has. She excels at capitalizing on life’s inherent randomness. She makes fast friends with the characters she encounters and is willing to take risks. Sometimes, what seems like madness is actually quite normal. The people who can stay flexible and run with it are the ones who always land on their feet.

After hearing Karla Starr’s Keynote you’ll learn, 1.

Why Karla doesn’t view luck as being synonymous with randomness or uncontrollability. She believes everything has a cause and we don’t always see all of the factors that influence the outcome.

Why she usually describes luck through the board game Chutes and Ladders, where the players all race toward the finish line and face obstacles along the way.

How the word “luck” always felt too mystical for her analytical mind, and she soon realized that it was simply a positive way of describing randomness.

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Debunking the

MERITOCRACY MYTH Developing women leaders requires an all-in mentality.

BY ROSINA L . R ACIOPPI

few years ago, I was the keynote speaker at a women’s diversity conference. That morning, I was chatting with Annie McKee, director of the University of Pennsylvania CLO program. We are both from the same generation, having entered the workforce with the hope of a more promising future for women in corporations. As we got ready to go into the conference, Annie asked me, “Why aren’t we seeing more success in advancing women? Did we drop the ball?” I’ve often thought about Annie’s question and my best answer is that there are a lot of us who have dropped the ball and even more who didn’t realize the ball was in play. That being said, we have made progress, and my goal is to help corporations continue to do so.

The Meritocracy Fallacy Unfortunately, many women and corporate leaders continue to cling to what I call the “meritocracy fallacy.” It’s the belief that female talent will be noticed and promoted to leadership roles and, as a result, gender parity will be achieved. If that were the case, we would have been at parity years ago, since large numbers of talented women have been part of the workforce for almost half a century and, today, the workforce is more than 50 percent women.

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Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

SPECIAL REPORT: LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

Yet those numbers get smaller and smaller as we move up the corporate ladder, with only 26.5 percent of executive or senior-level positions in S&P 500 companies held by women and just 5 percent of CEO spots. In fact, women buying into the meritocracy fallacy has actually deterred their advancement. It has often led them to keep their nose to the grindstone and to overlook a crucial career-advancing reality: It’s not what you know. It’s who knows you know. The good news is that senior leaders are becoming increasingly aware that change will happen only when they pick up the ball Annie alluded to. More and more, they are prioritizing retention and advancement of female talent as a major corporate objective.

2. Share Facts, Figures and Findings to Get Buy-In.

After 25 years of working with leading corporations, I’ve identified five key strategies that support the development and advancement of female talent into leadership roles.

Data is objective. Opinions are not. Sharing facts, figures and findings, including the disparities between men and women in the organization, as well as attitudinal misconceptions, can move gender parity initiatives forward at every level. Additionally, numerical data can help the entire organization progress to a culture of conscious inclusion, based on hard facts about what needs to change. For example, a 2018 study by my organization, Women Unlimited study of more than 5,000 talented women and their male managers on the breadth and depth of the developmental support women receive showed wide disparities. Managers overwhelmingly gave themselves significantly higher marks than the high-potential women. Forty-seven percent of managers felt they helped women “explore other roles for growth and development” as opposed to 28 percent of the women surveyed. Fifty-four percent of managers were confident they “provided stretch assignments.” Far fewer of the women thought so, at 26 percent. Seventy-two percent of surveyed managers believed they helped women explore ways to “apply key learnings” from development programs. Only 33 percent of the women agreed. These disconnects are indicative of how women and their male managers and colleagues view the corporate landscape differently. Data is crucial in helping bridge that divide.

1. What Gets Measured Gets Attention.

3. Feedback Is Not a Nicety. It’s a Necessity.

Numbers are the language of business, telling the corporate story and understood by managers throughout the organization. Yet until recently, data regarding attracting, developing and retaining female talent was almost nonexistent. In order for gender parity to move front and center and for more women to reach leadership roles, initiatives must be objectively measured. Organizations need to compile facts and figures at all levels. How many women are hired? In what departments? At what locations? In what roles? How many are promoted? How does that compare with their male counterparts? Reviewing data of this kind over a three- to five-year period helps companies understand where and how they are succeeding with gender parity and where they need to increase their efforts. Additionally, managerial performance needs to be tied to measurable results in attracting, retaining and advancing female talent. Managers must understand, as communicated from the highest levels, that they are expected to meet specific, tangible goals that proactively move the needle of gender parity.

Lack of honest, career-developing feedback is a long-standing barrier to women achieving leadership roles. Too often, the feedback doesn’t go beyond, “You’re doing great, just keep doing what you’re doing.” In our Women Unlimited survey, only 52 percent of women felt they received needed feedback from their managers. Without feedback that specifically spells out strengths, as well as areas of growth needed for advancement, women stay stalled in the same positions, often for their entire careers. Receiving needed feedback is a two-way street. It is as much up to the women as it is to their managers. Women need to look at their career aspirations and understand how to recalibrate their skills and capabilities for future positions. Then they need to ask their managers and others in the organization for the best ways to hone those skills so they are in sync with corporate needs and goals. Women need to be willing to hear and accept criticism as well as praise. And they need to seek out feedback not just when their performance is being reviewed, but regularly.

More and more, senior leaders are prioritizing retention and advancement of female talent as a major corporate objective.

54 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

4. P&L Responsibility: Start Early. Without profit and loss experience, it is virtually impossible for women to advance to positions of corporate leadership. Statistically, women are much less likely than their male colleagues to hold positions with P&L responsibility at early and midcareer levels. They are disproportionately in staff roles and they do not tend to gravitate to line positions at anywhere near the same rate as men. As a result, women are at a major disadvantage in their path to advancement. Aside from the obvious skill sets, a number of additional career-boosting benefits accrue from P&L positions taken on early. These positions are more likely to result in visibility among corporate power players, upping the possibility for being noticed by potential sponsors and advocates. P&L skills are applicable across virtually any industry and any specific job. Mastery of financial issues builds strategic decision-making prowess — exactly what is needed at top leadership levels. To ensure that more women have this needed P&L experience, corporations must actively and intentionally pinpoint high-potential women early in their careers and help them navigate to positions that build their financial expertise.

5. Relationships Matter. Women are often less likely than their male colleagues to understand the importance of mentoring relationships, especially early on in their careers. Unlike their male counterparts, they don’t unleash the power of mentors as sounding boards for success. They don’t look to mentors to provide insights on their career goals and on navigating the corporate landscape based on those goals.

Success will not happen piecemeal. In my independent research, compiled in a white paper, “Women’s Mentoring Wisdom,” I found that midlevel female talent who experienced the most successful mentoring relationships displayed three similar characteristics. First, they prepared for the meetings with their mentors by defining their career goals and what they wanted from the mentoring relationship. Second, they took to heart the insights their mentors provided even when challenging behavioral changes were required, and they “showed up” in new ways at work that advanced their growth and development. And third, they leveraged their learning from the mentor relationship to build organizational relationships. As a result of being intentional in these ways, they were able to develop career-advancing strategies that would have been impossible to develop on their own.

Where Do Sponsors Fit In? I am often asked how sponsors fit into a woman’s career-building strategy. My answer is a simple one: They are vital, and that’s why women need mentors first. The mentor is a form of insurance that the sponsor relationship won’t be blown. Sponsors are internal power people and it’s never easy to capture their attention. However, it gets a lot easier when a career-conscious woman has been successfully mentored — when she has learned, from and through her mentor, the skills and strategies that will get her noticed by a needed corporate sponsor. Once a high-potential woman, with the help of her mentor, has changed and adapted her behaviors to align with corporate goals, her chances for connecting with an appropriate sponsor skyrocket. Far from being at odds, mentors and sponsors are the one/two punch on a woman’s journey to the C-suite.

— Rosina L. Racioppi

Additionally, in Women Unlimited’s research of 2,500 high-potential women and their mentors, we found that women benefit from having both male and female mentors. Corporate leaders (especially male leaders), when they mentor women, also gain insights and empathy for the challenges women face. They then apply these insights to their own organizations, improving both their leadership roles and their advocacy for women. In other words, the benefits of effective mentoring relationships have proven to be far more pervasive than career advice and support for mentees. Both empirical and anecdotal research have repeatedly shown that mentors, corporate leaders, their teams and the corporation as a whole are all also beneficiaries.

All-In: Developing More Female Leaders As I look at the small number of high-level female leaders, I am not inclined to play the blame MERITOCRACY MYTH continued on page 61 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Case Study

The Success of Lex BY SARAH FISTER GALE

nfosys has always been committed to continuous education for its employees. The global IT business consulting and outsourcing services firm headquartered in Bengaluru, India, has more than 200,000 employees in 87 countries, and they rely on a continuous stream of content and learning opportunities to stay up to date on the latest technology, business and leadership trends. “Everyone who works at Infosys has to upskill continuously,” said Thirumala Arohi, Infosys vice president and head of education, training and assessments in Bengaluru. “It has always been part of who we are and what we do.” But for years, Infosys’ learning delivery was decentralized, with multiple apps offering a subset of content targeting different employee groups or learning needs, including an app offering just tech training for service delivery people and another for client-facing staff who needed to rapidly review a topic or trend. But in October 2017, the learning and development team decided they needed a more centralized learning platform to keep up with everyone’s learning needs. They envisioned a single destination for learning content where every employee could pursue all kinds of training and managers could see what their people were learning and where there were gaps. “We looked at what was in the market, but there wasn’t anything that covered our learning experience needs,” Arohi said. So they decided to build it themselves. The idea came from Nandan Nilekani, chairman and co-founder of Infosys, who spent many years working outside the business on innovative government projects, including deployment of India’s national biometric identification system, said Tan Moorthy, executive vice president and global head of education training and assessments in Plano, Texas. “[Nilekani] recognized that a lot of what we’re doing at Infosys could be scaled to create an anytime, anywhere learning environment.”

Lex Is Born In April 2018, Infosys rolled out Lex, an opensource mobile platform that offers thousands of 56 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

SNAPSHOT Infosys’ open-source, user-friendly learning platform draws 10,000 learners daily and enables the company to drive a culture of continuous upskilling.

courses and pieces of content developed internally and curated from third-party learning content providers. Within the first eight months, 90 percent of the company (180,000 employees) had tested the platform, and more than 10,000 employees now use the platform every day for 30 to 40 minutes, Arohi reported. “We’ve seen a fantastic response, with about one-third of employees using it on their own time at night and on the weekends.” The learning and development team encouraged early adoption through marketing campaigns, emails and leaderboard challenges for service lines to be the first to complete a certain number of courses or hours. This helped drive early interest in Lex; however, its ongoing success is attributed to the platform’s design and clear links between learning and career development. The team that built Lex aligned every design decision to four key tenets. First, it had to be convenient — every employee must have access to all content anytime, anywhere, online or off. Second, it had to be relevant to every user’s roles, experiences and career goals. Third, it had to be engaging and fun. Finally, it had to matter in the learning team’s ability to land new projects, meet client needs and gain recognition from management. “It wouldn’t be valuable if it didn’t solve specific user and business needs,” Arohi said.

Spotify for Learning All of the content offered via Lex is curated to address current business trends and skills that employees will need in the near- and long-term to enable Infosys’ ongoing success. When users enter the platform, if they know what they want to learn, they can search for specific titles or topics and create a

learning playlist that they can return to again and again. These searches also deliver a graphic showing courses on related topics. For example, if an employee searches for a course on machine learning, the graphic will include related courses on artificial intelligence and natural language processing. “This way the learner can figure out what other content will be relevant to their interests,” Moorthy said. If users aren’t sure what they want to learn, the platform offers an AI algorithm that make recommendations based on a user’s role, past training, professional interests and courses that other people with similar roles or interests have taken. For users who have no idea what training to consider, a central navigation feature provides access to learning road maps that are linked to specific roles and project types to guide their learning journey. Users can also click the “Build on What You Know” button for instant suggestions of what else to try. These guided learning tools are helping Infosys employees expand their knowledge base and identify learning paths that will help them move into new roles or better meet the needs of clients, Arohi said. For example, Jennifer Darkazalli, associate engagement manager for Infosys in New York, first used the platform to learn about agile project management and open-source software. “These were hot topics for our clients, and I didn’t understand them as well as I felt I should,” she said. After completing those courses she was hooked, and she now uses the platform roughly five hours a week to enhance her knowledge and stay up to date on business and technology trends that are of importance to her clients. “It’s so user-friendly because it was designed with the user in mind,” Darkazalli said. She now has a playlist of courses that she accesses every morning and afternoon on the subway, which range from traditional sales training to content on supply chain management, manufacturing automation and financial technology. “It’s like Spotify for training.” However, her favorite feature in Lex is the live broadcasts by company leaders, which can be watched on any device. “Even though we have 200,000 employees, it feels so personal,” she said. “It’s almost like being with them on FaceTime.”

You Gotta Learn to Earn For employees on the tech side of the company, Lex offers the option to use Lab on a Cloud, which is a virtual development site where learners can instantly access any software to practice a new skill,

rather than having to acquire and download the software to their own computers. “It makes all the difference in their ability to learn,” Moorthy said. Once users complete courses or a predefined set of content, they receive digital tags indicating certification, which they can display on their social profile for peers and managers to see. “It is how we choose people for new engagements,” Moorthy said. Creating a culture where managers seek out staff for assignments based on

“Learning has a shelf life, and if our people aren’t using new skills, no one benefits.” — Tan Moorthy, EVP and global head of education training and assessments, Infosys their learning profile has been a key component to the success of Lex. “Learning has a shelf life, and if our people aren’t using those new skills on an engagement, no one benefits,” he said. Because employees know that learning is a factor in these project decisions, they can see the direct relevance of learning to their continued career development. It also creates a culture of competition, where learners see what their peers have accomplished and it motivates them to do more, Moorthy said. “It’s pushing people to seek out more learning so they can be a part of exciting projects.” That excitement is translating into new business for Infosys. Moorthy noted that the company has seen growth in digital revenues as more employees take courses on these technologies and are thus able to take on new projects. In September 2018, the company also launched Wingspan, a commercial version of Lex that the company now offers to clients who want to leverage the benefits of the learning platform. “It’s an easy way for large and midsized companies to get their employees excited about learning,” Darkazalli said. Moorthy agreed that having a single source of learning content with a user-friendly interface and guided learning paths is vital in today’s fast-paced economy. “Technology evolves so quickly, if you have a distributed workforce you need a single place where they can access learning.” CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com. Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Business Intelligence

Seeking Targeted Talent Development BY ASHLEY ST. JOHN

n Feb. 26, Chicago voters narrowed the giant field of 2019 mayoral candidates from 14 to two in an historic election that will send two African-American female candidates to an April runoff election. The winner will be the city’s first African-American female mayor. It’s an exciting time, as more women and people of color are moving into leadership positions in both government and business. But it’s safe to say there’s still plenty of room for improvement. According to 2019 data from Catalyst, women — particularly minority women — are still scarce in corporate leadership roles: In S&P 500 companies, women represent 26.5 percent of executive and senior-level officials and managers and 5 percent of CEOs. Women of color represent only 4.7 percent of executive and senior-level roles. Additionally, according to the “Missing Pieces Report: The 2018 Board Diversity Census of Women and Minorities on Fortune 500 Boards,” while there have been a few gains for some demographic groups in terms of women and minority representation on corporate boards, advancement is slow. In 2018, 66 percent of Fortune 500 board seats were held by white men, 17.9 percent were held by white women, 11.5 percent were held by minority men, and 4.6 percent were held by minority women. The study is a culmination of a multiyear effort by the Alliance for Board Diversity in collaboration with Deloitte. The slow advancement of women, minorities and particularly minority women can be attributed to an abundance of factors and barriers. According to data from the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, only 27 percent of surveyed learning organizations offer specific leadership development for women, and 15 percent have leadership development offerings specific to racial, ethnic or cultural groups (Figure 1).

58 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Additionally, only 22 percent of those surveyed said diversity and inclusion is seamlessly integrated with the design and planning of leadership development at their organization (Figure 2). Twenty-four percent said their organization does not integrate D&I with leadership development at all, and the majority (54 percent) said they are still in the process of integrating the function. The Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board is a group of 1,500 professionals in the learning and development industry who have agreed to be surveyed by the Human Capital Media Research and Advisory Group, the research and advisory arm of Chief Learning Officer magazine. Research shows that leadership development is critical to helping women and minorities move into leadership roles. The “KPMG Women’s Leadership Study,” conducted in 2015, identified confidence building and leadership training, as well as the ability to network with women leaders, as key to expanding women’s leadership. According to the study, when asked what skills were needed to help move more women into leadership roles in the future, professional working women cited leadership training, confidence building, decision-making, networking and critical thinking most often (Figure 3). It’s widely understood that a diverse workforce provides many immediate and long-term benefits to businesses. And companies with more women in leadership have been shown to outperform competition significantly. Offering development programs specific to women and minorities could help grow representation of these groups on our leadership teams, leading to a stronger company culture, extended market reach and even increased recruiting opportunities. CLO Ashley St. John Is Chief Learning Officer’s managing editor. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

Figures’ Sources: Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, N=500, and “KPMG Women’s Leadership Study,” 2015. All percentages rounded.

Women are scarce in leadership roles. Lack of targeted leadership development offerings could be a contributing factor.

FIGURE 1: TARGETED LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT OFFERINGS 65%

42% 27% 15%

High performers

Business units

Women

Racial/ethnic/cultural groups

13%

Nation or geographic unit

FIGURE 2: INTEGRATION OF LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT INTO D&I 22%

54%

24%

It’s a seamless process

Still in the process of integrating

Does not integrate

FIGURE 3: SKILLS WOMEN SAY THEY NEED TO ACHIEVE LEADERSHIP ROLES 57%

Leadership training

56%

Confidence building

48%

47%

46%

Decision-making

Networking

Critical thinking

Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

UNCERTAINTY continued from page 28

HIGHER PURPOSE continued from page 48

they also contribute to the learning and growth of others in the ecosystem. Similarly, Binney says workers need to be provided space (time and place) in which to share and discuss the ways uncertainty may be negatively affecting their efforts. In this same space, they can collaborate on solutions, even if they’re operating in parallel to the formal processes of the company. Binney points to the classic example of IBM developing the first personal computers. The leaders knew they couldn’t develop something so innovative through the usual channels, so they had the foresight to set up a skunkworks. “Watch the patterns,” Binney said. “What people crave are thinking spaces. Set up some of those thinking spaces within the organization. Support peer learning and regular groups where people can think.” Thinking spaces don’t have to design the next big thing, but they can help people do their jobs better. They can cover a range of issues like information overload, helping people say no and better management of email and other forms of connectivity. It’s a grassroots approach to managing uncertainty. “I see it as a different pattern of personal leadership development rooted in realities rather than an idealized approach of how I can deal with uncertainty,” Binney said. This can come through the classroom but absolutely must be applied on the job as well. Making an organization become “good with uncertainty” can yield strategically competitive results, so it may take more top management buy-in than other learning initiatives. It’s time to fundamentally change the way people approach their work. If my organization can learn faster than your organization, we will beat you in the marketplace.

it’s a taboo topic,” she said. “Talking about where there’s frustration, where there’s opportunity and where there’s disappointment needs to be pulled into training and leadership development. It’s the humanity in work.” Engle recalled one client telling her that he never went through a leadership development program that prepared him for how to respond when his employee confided in him that her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer. “There’s no training for that,” Engle said. “This idea of showing up as the whole person and bringing emotion, that’s truly lacking in a lot of training programs — and millennials realize that gap more than others.”

Boldly Go Forth Learning — as a corporate function — owns this mission. To boldly go and master the perpetual uncertainty in our world requires a two-prong approach: (1) Drive development to help individuals manage uncertainty so they can perform better and become more agile, entrepreneurial and creative. (2) Liberate the organization to benefit from uncertainty — what better time to discover a new competitive advantage? It’s up to learning leaders to create an environment that’s less constricted by processes and channels and that rewards collaboration and creativity. CLO Randall P. White is a consulting psychologist and founding partner of Executive Development Group. He is on the faculty at Duke Corporate Education and is head of leadership in the eMBA at HEC Paris. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com. 60 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

Experimentation and Personalization The HBP study also found that millennials expect more choice and autonomy than prior generations did. Pollak agreed that learning leaders must offer a variety of learning options for people’s schedules or preferences. She said asking people what they want, focus grouping and surveying is an old school strategy that’s still relevant. “I encourage learning leaders to experiment,” she said. “We’re often very nervous to try something new, but sometimes a small tweak can make a big difference.” Belcher said they are experimenting with aspects like “following” colleagues — if a learner in a cohort experience likes the point of view of one of their colleagues in another region, can they choose to follow what that person is reading or learning post-program? “It’s more passive of an option than engaging in a discussion forum,” she said. “We’re playing around with things like that and seeing what moves the needle.” She said L&D leaders should consider what aspects of millennials’ social behavior make sense in the workplace. “We’re all likely to share our most private stories on Facebook for all the world to see, yet it’s hard to get a learner to engage in a discussion forum following a program that they’ve gone through,” she said. “In the workplace setting, the same things that motivate you to park a little further away from the mall to get your steps in don’t quite work the same in a learning environment.” Similarly, Belcher expected gamification to be a key feature that millennials desired, but in gathering learner research she found that personalization, motivation and reminders to engage in learning were more important. “It’s about understanding what elements are going to resonate most to achieve the goals of the learners themselves, because you need to meet them where they are,” she said. CLO Ave Rio is an associate editor for Chief Learning Officer. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

MERITOCRACY MYTH continued from page 55 game or analyze who dropped the ball. I am much more predisposed to think of success as an all-in reboot. No one is exempt, no matter their department, their position or their location. Obviously, some have more responsibility than others to move initiatives forward. Corporate leadership needs to be the driving force behind requiring change, accountability and metrics, because if the boss wants it to happen, it will happen. Managers must be willing to step up, offer women high-visibility assignments and provide them with the same type of straightforward, career-advancing feedback they provide the men on their teams. CLOs and their teams need to assess the right mix of internal and external development programs that help women at all levels prepare for advancement, keeping in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all and that development must start early. Organizations must foster an environment where talented women move into

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P&L roles as seamlessly as their male colleagues. They need to help facilitate the mentoring process and encourage both men and women to take on mentoring roles. Finally, women themselves must take responsibility for their career growth and development without waiting for someone to invite them to step up. They need to actively seek out feedback from their managers and to develop relationships that help them understand how their advancement will contribute to corporate growth and profitability. Most important, success will not happen piecemeal. Latching on to one or two strategies and claiming victory will continue to stall the development of the large number of female leaders corporations will need in the years ahead. “All in” has got to be the name of the game. CLO

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

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Rosina L. Racioppi is president and CEO of Women Unlimited. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Drexel University 43 as326@drexel.edu Explorance 21 explorance.com/products/metrics-that-matter GP Strategies 2nd Cover gpstrategies.com/innovation-kitchen OpenSesame 29 opensesame.com Principled Technologies 49 principledtechnologies.com/clo_win Saba 3rd Cover saba.com SNHU 37 snhu.edu/clo Pearson 35 pearson.com/education-for-employee-development Penn CLO Back Cover pennclo.com Purdue University Global 27 educationpartnerships.purdueglobal.edu UMUC 13 umuc.edu

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IN CONCLUSION

Sniffing Out Strong Leaders Unleash your development efforts • BY KRISSI BARR

T Krissi Barr is a keynote speaker, executive coach, strategic planner and co-author of “The Fido Factor.” She can be reached at editor@ CLOmedia.com.

he leadership wisdom of dogs. Those are five words most chief learning officers likely never thought they’d see in a professional setting. Don’t worry, your career hasn’t gone to the dogs — just your inspiration for leadership development. That’s because great leaders — and great dogs — share some of the same traits. • Faithful leaders earn loyalty by wearing their positive emotions front and center, and doing what they say they’re going to do when they say they’ll do it. • Inspirational leaders move people to do the extraordinary with their optimism and passion. • Determined leaders focus on what matters most, shake off setbacks and keep moving toward their goals. • Observant leaders spot problems and opportunities sooner by sensing things other people miss. These four traits spell out FIDO, a new way to connect abstract leadership concepts with something furry and tangible that everyone can relate to. Faithful leaders are dependable. Sit, stay, deliver the report by first thing Thursday morning. It isn’t easy to develop an “I’ve got your tail no matter the circumstances” attitude. Words are good, but they only convey some of the message. Dogs don’t rely much on the exact words you speak, and your employees don’t either. It’s what you do that has the biggest impact. That’s why faithful leaders wear their loyalty on their collars. They defend their pack at every opportunity. Employees, like dogs, can sniff out a fake from across the conference room. So, is it OK for the big dog to show emotional vulnerability at work? Woof yes! That’s because authenticity exudes confidence. And confidence is seen as competence. Inspirational leaders help others believe they can do what they used to think was impossible. They lift spirits with their passion and energy. And sometimes they just wag their tails to show how happy they are. Attitude is everything. That’s why inspirational leaders approach every task with enthusiasm. Attitude is contagious and a lot less dangerous than kennel cough, so go ahead and spread some around your workplace. Inspirational leaders also set the overall vision for the organization. It doesn’t have to be grandiose, just aspirational. All that’s needed is a simple statement that defines what the organization wants to become.

62 Chief Learning Officer • April 2019 • www.CLOmedia.com

An effective vision will remind your teammates that they’re making meaningful contributions every day. Determination is the secret sauce of leadership. When you combine a clear focus with a never-give-up mindset, you get a team that can achieve virtually anything. Of course, a dog is the personification of perseverance, like when it’s trying to pull a bag of jerky snacks through a cracked pantry door.

Is it OK for the big dog to show emotional vulnerability at work? Woof yes! When you truly own something, you’ll follow up and follow through to make sure the job gets done. Responsibility can get fuzzy when there are many people working on a project. But if you really own the outcome, you are the one ultimately responsible for making sure everyone does his or her part. Observant leaders know that information is king. Like a hungry Labrador, they use all their senses to take in as much as possible to make the best decisions. Observant leaders feel momentum shifts and read body language. They identify patterns quickly because they look at things from different perspectives. They listen intently, act when something doesn’t smell right and sense things others miss. Great leaders are also great askers of questions. They pepper their conversations with phrases like “And then what?” and “Tell me more” to glean additional information. Most importantly like dogs, observant leaders are great listeners. The benefits of improving leadership are clear: You’ll attract better applicants, innovate faster and generate superior results. It’s just hard to get people engaged on the subject. Like Dorothy with her ruby slippers, dog lovers have had the answers to great leadership all along. So unleash your team with the leadership wisdom of dogs, ultimately benefiting your entire organization. CLO

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PennCLO is a 3-year executive format program designed for working professionals and features convenient scheduling, highlyspecialized course offerings, and research projects that are directly tied to a studentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s professional life.

PennCLO Program, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsyvlania Email: penn-clo@gse.upenn.edu Telephone: 215.573.0591

Application Deadlines: June 1st, 2019 - to join the

October 2019 Evidence Block Oct. 1st, 2019 - to join the February 2020 Technology Block