October 2016 | CLOmedia.com
➤ Expert Advice ➤ Getting in on the Ground Floor ➤ Make Learning Viral-worthy to Make It Last ➤ How Learning Leaders Win Friends and Influence People ➤ A Day in the Life of a Learning Objective ➤ DaVita: It Takes a Village
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JUDY WHITCOMB
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EDITOR’S LETTER
Pop-up Learning R
ecently, on the busiest day of the week, the lights at my local newsstand went dark. But it wasn’t the changing economics of the newspaper industry that forced the doors to close. The Chicago-Main Newsstand in Evanston, Illinois, is actually doing a brisk business. Stop in any given night and you’ll find folks flipping through an array of hundreds of consumer and specialty magazines. Have a passion for the design of early 20th century homes? The latest issue of American Bungalow feeds your need to “promote and maintain the uniquely American phenomenon” of this architectural gem. Think print magazines are going up in smoke? Chicago-Main clears that up right away. Established titles like Cigar Aficionado and up-and-comers like Tokewell, dedicated to legalizing marijuana, get you your fix. The reason the doors were locked that recent Saturday had nothing to do with an outdated business model. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The doors were locked to set up for an interesting new way of doing business: a one-day pop-up retail store for the worldwide launch of Grammy-winning R&B singer Frank Ocean’s newest release. In that story, there’s a smart marketing lesson for savvy chief learning officers.
Make a splash with your corporate learning.
store and creating a magazine, Ocean started a live video stream, released a 45-minute “visual” album and inked an exclusive music distribution deal with Apple. In Ocean’s case, the value isn’t in selling the actual product in a store. We swim in an ocean of streaming music from services like Spotify and Pandora and dip in and out of a constantly flowing stream of information. Creating a limited-time event is a powerful way to own a much more precious resource: attention. Did it work? Ocean’s new album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard charts. Collectively, the songs on his new album were streamed more than 65 million times in the first week, earning Ocean nearly $1 million according to Forbes. Not a bad week’s work. There’s a lesson in all this for CLOs. Your content and courses compete with a staggering amount of free information. The challenge isn’t creating and distributing content to employees. It’s getting their attention and converting that into action. Consider a pop-up learning model to make a splash. Take some learning dollars and instead of putting it to work for a traditional e-learning course create a limited-time learning event tied to a critical business issue or exciting new development in your industry. Lost out on a critical sale? Put together a pop-up learning blitz on honing negotiation skills. Struggling to retain young workers? Develop a multimedia event on managing millennial careers. Get your business leaders involved. Ask employees to contribute. Deploy technology that gets your organization’s attention. Financial services giant Vanguard took that insight a step further. They designated 2015 the company’s “Year of Learning” and used collaboration technology, gaming and a series of learning events to promote innovation across the organization. Those efforts in part led the firm to be named No. 1 on the Chief Learning Officer list of Learning Elite this year. Sometimes the best ROI isn’t in dollars saved or courses delivered. It’s in heightened awareness and genuine excitement for learning. It’s in inspiration and innovation. Think differently to put some pop in your learning. CLO
Even die-hard music fans might need a refresher on Frank Ocean. Ocean made his name with the 2012 release of “Channel Orange,” his first studio album, which reached No. 2 on the Billboard chart, garnered six Grammy nominations and won two. Vibe named him the magazine’s Man of the Year in 2012. He then disappeared from public view, spending the next four years deep in work and only occasionally surfacing with hints about new music and teases for album release dates that quickly went unmet. That is, until recently. It’s strange that a suburban Chicago newsstand would be ground zero for a major international music event. Ocean picked just four locations to serve as pop-up stores for the release of his new album and art magazine, titled “Boys Don’t Cry.” Pull back the cover and you see the logic. With a combination of social media, viral marketing and creative distribution deals, individual artists are grabbing headlines Mike Prokopeak and enlisting their most ardent supporters to convert by- Editor in Chief standers into fans. In addition to setting up a pop-up mikep@CLOmedia.com 4 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
A PUBLICATION OF
October 2016 | Volume 15, Issue 10 PRESIDENT John R. Taggart jrtag@CLOmedia.com
EDITORIAL ART DIRECTOR Anna Jo Beck abeck@CLOmedia.com
VICE PRESIDENT, CFO, COO Kevin A. Simpson ksimpson@CLOmedia.com
EDITORIAL INTERNS Sarah Foster sfoster@CLOmedia.com AnnMarie Kuzel akuzel@CLOmedia.com
VICE PRESIDENT, GROUP PUBLISHER Clifford Capone ccapone@CLOmedia.com VICE PRESIDENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF Mike Prokopeak mikep@CLOmedia.com EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Rick Bell rbell@CLOmedia.com GROUP EDITOR/ASSOCIATE EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Kellye Whitney kwhitney@CLOmedia.com CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Frank Kalman fkalman@CLOmedia.com ASSOCIATE EDITORS Lauren Dixon ldixon@CLOmedia.com Bravetta Hassell bhassell@CLOmedia.com Andie Burjek aburjek@CLOmedia.com COPY EDITOR Christopher Magnus cmagnus@CLOmedia.com
VICE PRESIDENT, RESEARCH & ADVISORY SERVICES Sarah Kimmel skimmel@CLOmedia.com RESEARCH MANAGER Tim Harnett tharnett@CLOmedia.com RESEARCH ANALYST Grey Litaker clitaker@CLOmedia.com
EVENTS MARKETING MANAGER Anthony Zepeda azepeda@CLOmedia.com
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION MANAGER Melanie Lee mlee@CLOmedia.com
WEBCAST COORDINATOR Alec O’Dell aodell@CLOmedia.com
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EVENTS GRAPHIC DESIGNER Tonya Harris lharris@CLOmedia.com BUSINESS MANAGER Vince Czarnowski vince@CLOmedia.com REGIONAL SALES MANAGERS Derek Graham dgraham@CLOmedia.com Daniella Weinberg dweinberg@CLOmedia.com
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CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Cushing Anderson Josh Bersin David J. DeFilippo Michael E. Echols Randy Emelo Sarah Fister Gale Bill George Bravetta Hassell Jack J. Phillips Patti P. Phillips Darin Rowell Lynn Schroeder Lisa M. Shapiro
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CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Cushing Anderson, Program Director, Learning Ser vices, IDC Frank J. Anderson Jr., ( Ret.) President, Defense Acquisition Universit y Cedric Coco, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Lowe’s Cos. Inc. Lisa Doyle, Vice President, Learning and Development, Lowe’s Cos. Inc. Tamar Elkeles, Chief People Of ficer, Quixey Thomas Evans, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, PricewaterhouseCoopers Ted Henson, Senior Strategist, Oracle Gerry Hudson-Martin, Director, Corporate Learning Strategies, Business Architects Kimo Kippen, Chief Learning Of ficer, Hilton Worldwide Rob Lauber, Vice President, Chief Learning Of ficer, McDonald’s Corp. Maj. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel, ( Ret.) U.S. Air Force, Director, Deloit te Consulting Justin Lombardo, Interim Chief Learning Of ficer, Baptist Health Alan Malinchak, Executive Advisor, Talent and Learning Practice, Deltek Universit y Lee Maxey, CEO, MindMax Jeanne C. Meister, Author and Independent Learning Consultant Bob Mosher, Senior Par tner and Chief Learning Evangelist, APPLY Synergies Rebecca Ray, Executive Vice President, The Conference Board Allison Rossett, ( Ret.) Professor of Educational Technology, San Diego State Universit y Diana Thomas, CEO and Founder, Winning Results Annette Thompson, Senior Vice President and Chief Learning Of ficer, Farmers Insurance David Vance, Former President, Caterpillar Universit y Kevin D. Wilde, Executive Leadership Fellow, Carlson School of Management, Universit y of Minnesota Chief Learning Officer (ISSN 1935-8148) is published January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, November/December by MediaTec Publishing Inc., 111 E. Wacker Dr., Suite 1200, Chicago IL 60601. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Chief Learning Officer, P.O. Box 8712 Lowell, MA 01853. Subscriptions are free to qualified professionals within the US and Canada. Digital free subscriptions are available worldwide. Nonqualified paid subscriptions are available at the subscription price of $199 for 12 issues. All countries outside the US and Canada must be prepaid in US funds with an additional $33 postage surcharge. Single price copy is $29.95 Chief Learning Officer and CLOmedia.com are the trademarks of MediaTec Publishing Inc. Copyright © 2016, MediaTec Publishing Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Reproduction of material published in Chief Learning Officer is forbidden without permission. Printed by: Quad/Graphics, Sussex, WI
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ONLINE EVENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS OCTOBER 2016
44
50
38
Features
20 34 38 44
Expert Advice Randy Emelo The most appropriate advisers aren’t always atop the learning heap. That ideal adviser may just be a step or two above the learner.
Getting in on the Ground Floor Lynn Schroeder Attracting, cultivating and retaining entry-level talent helps ensure a long-term pool of skilled employees.
Make Learning Viral-worthy to Make It Last Bravetta Hassell The fast-moving, changeable nature of the marketplace requires organizational agility and skilled workers to power it forward. Ensuring learning investments make a splash is imperative.
How Learning Leaders Win Friends and Influence People Bravetta Hassell If learning leaders want to make an impact, they have to leave their offices, be curious, connect and be deliberate in how they add value to the business.
50
ON THE WEB
A Day in the Life of a Learning Objective David J. DeFilippo and Lisa M. Shapiro Effective learning is targeted, focused on business objectives and the employees who are tasked with carrying them out. In this context, the learning objective is the unsung hero of development strategy.
8 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
The Week That Was Each week, we compile a list of the top five stories on CLOmedia.com as well as the week’s top business and industry news so you can catch up on what your peers are reading. Look for this section in every Friday’s newsletter, or visit us on the web and tell us what you’re reading. ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY JEFF MILLIES
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TABLE OF CONTENTS OCTOBER 2016
24
20
Departments
34
Experts 12 BUSINESS IMPACT
24 Profile The Power of Storytelling at Vi Bravetta Hassell Vi learning and HR leader Judy Whitcomb loves a good story, and those connections — those potential lessons — reveal, shape and enhance learning’s impact in the organization.
Michael E. Echols Learning in an Uber Economy
14 PERSPECTIVES
Darin Rowell GVTs — Necessary Evil or Strategic Tool?
16 BEST PRACTICES
54 Case Study It Takes a Village
Sarah Fister Gale DaVita has built an organization with community as its goal.
18 ACCOUNTABILITY
58 Business Intelligence Outsourcing: Satisfaction Is Up, Spending Is Down Cushing Anderson Organizations are happy with the outsourced training services their providers offer, but they’re not tapping out budgets to get them.
Josh Bersin The Growing Role of Microlearning
Jack J. Phillips and Patti P. Phillips Feed the Gorilla
66 IN CONCLUSION
Bill George Reflect on Your Life’s Journey
Resources 4 Editor’s Letter
Pop-up Learning
64 Advertisers’ Index
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BUSINESS IMPACT
Learning in an Uber Economy The Uber economy for learning is about having more choices • BY MICHAEL E. ECHOLS
F
Michael E. Echols is principal and founder of Human Capital LLC and author of “Your Future Is Calling.” To comment, email editor@ CLOmedia.com.
or over a decade I have argued that we should look at investments in learning the same we look at investments in assets on the balance sheet. Savvy leaders know we don’t have much choice. Much is changing. The world is seeing a drop in all investment, not just human capital investment. It’s worth a learning leader’s time to look at a competing model for corporate learning. Note, this is not an investment model, but what I call an Uber model for learning. The Uber economy has taken on the immense power of technology and apps to do important things previously done by humans. Uber facilitates the movement of a person from here to there, transportation in other words. To keep some perspective, this transportation task is but one of billions of tasks humans engage in every day. But as narrow as this is, there are important lessons to be learned. The Uber app resides on our smartphones, tools we visit dozens of times each day. Our smartphones provide at-a-glance stock quotes, they let us check our text messages, learn what our friends are doing on Facebook, “talk” with Siri, Google for the answer to a question and yes, even occasionally make a telephone call. Uber essentially lives where we go every day. Learning must do the same, go where the learner is, and that includes offering learning choices on the smartphone. But let’s scale back from course options for a moment. When you open the Uber app the technology takes over tasks formerly done by a human. It identifies where you are through GPS mapping. It tells the driver where you want to go. It introduces the driver and what vehicle they’re driving. It even shows where your driver is as soon as they accept the job. At the end of the ride the app takes over the financials. The driver takes no money. The passenger merely exits the car. The experience is incredibly simple. This represents a massive shift in who does what in transportation. But what is central to the learning conversation here is not the Uber technology, as impressive as it is, but the Uber driver. The driver’s motivation and behavior is a focal point for an interesting corporate learning conversation. Let me explain. Typically, the Uber drivers I’ve met are articulate, thoughtful and more than willing to share their answer to the question: “What is the most important thing to you about this job?” Overwhelmingly the answer is that it gives the driver
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the flexibility to do whatever they need precisely when they need to do it. One driver shared that he has a 14-year-old daughter with a complicated schedule. He wants to be there for her when she needs him. Whenever that need occurs dad turns off the Uber app off without any negative consequences to himself or his daughter. When he’s ready to work again he simply turns the app back on. It’s convenient, it’s easy, and it makes good sense for all stakeholders involved.
Learning has shifted to an Uber app-like functionality that lets employees know what skills are in demand and helps develop them. The Uber economy for learning is all about enabling employees to have more choices. The shift is a departure from the historic learning strategy advocating “thou shalt:” thou shalt take this learning when instructed, in the format offered, with no exceptions. That no longer works. The Uber learning strategy highlighting learner choice works far better. It increases engagement, knowledge retention and ultimately, when learning is a choice, it encourages learning application on the job. In an environment of choice, the learning organization’s role shifts from curriculum development and delivery to an Uber app functionality that lets the employee/learner know what skills are in demand now and in the future, and readily invests in the cost needed to acquire the valued skills. This builds a culture of resource support designed for employee choice that motivates the employee/learner to acquire the skills that best fit both them and the enterprise. The return is increased motivation, high priority skills development and more targeted human capital investment — all of which is a benefit for the enterprise. CLO
PERSPECTIVES
GVTs — Necessary Evil or Strategic Tool? Global virtual teams are rarely claimed as a strength. That’s a mistake • BY DARIN ROWELL
G
Darin Rowell is CEO of BlueRock. All contributors to Perspectives are current students or alumni of the PennCLO Program, the University of Pennsylvania’s doctoral program for senior-level talent and learning executives.
lobal virtual teams are a common reality for companies with global operations and partnerships. In spite of their presence as a tool for global commerce, few organizations claim GVTs as a core strength or competitive advantage. In fact, many companies approach GVTs as a necessary evil for conducting global business and/or as a strategy to reduce travel expenses. However, there are specific practices that can shift GVTs from being a necessary evil to a strategic tool for an organization. Over the past five years, I have helped to launch, support and evaluate 34 successful, project-based GVTs whose memberships span 15 countries. The lessons I learned from them demonstrate that despite inherent complexities, the strategic benefits associated with GVTs are available to any organization. Realizing the benefits, however, requires a structured and intentional approach to both team launch and ongoing support. The most critical step to building and sustaining effective GVTs is related to how the teams build and sustain team relationships. Teams that prioritize relationships throughout the project lifecycle demonstrate the highest performance and member engagement. Further, these teams exhibit specific practices that enable them to develop and sustain healthy relationships. The three key practices identified are: building and sustaining trust, establishing role-based relationships, and embracing and navigating conflict.
Trust can be a significant mitigating factor against the many complexities facing a global virtual team. The presence of trust can be a significant mitigating factor against the many complexities facing a GVT. Conversely, the absence of trust could render an otherwise high-potential team completely dysfunctional. Although trust can be multidimensional, the most important dimension is a team’s ability to create a psychologically safe environment where members feel comfortable taking risks and displaying vulnerability. There are three reasons why safety is especially important in GVTs. First, English is likely a second language for many team members. Therefore, there may be a natural hesitancy to actively engage in a dialogue 14 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
outside their native language. Second, teams may be multidisciplinary, and members are asked to engage with topics outside their typical expertise, such as financial forecasts or supply chain optimization. Third, there is geographic, cultural and temporal distance inherent in most GVTs. The virtual aspect induces a reticence that psychological safety can mitigate. Establishing trust creates a solid foundation upon which to establish role-based relationships. Establishing clear roles and corresponding accountabilities allows members to set clear performance expectations. Then, as discrepancies in performance or expectations occur, members can refer to their explicit commitments for their respective roles. This practice also allows members to distinguish their personal relationships from role-based relationships, which sets the stage for the third practice: embracing and navigating conflict. Working in a GVT environment presents many opportunities for conflict. The most effective teams embrace the conflict and remain engaged as they find ways to productively resolve them. These teams do not allow the conflict to become personal. Instead, they frame it within the context of their shared goals and commitments. Conversely, teams that base their relationships solely on personal dimensions tend to avoid conflict, even if that results in a deterioration in performance. One team member I worked with said, “I really love my team; we never argued. However, I’m not sure that we challenged each other enough. I now wonder if we did our best work, and if I learned as much as I could have.” Although GVTs have many inherent complexities, they can also be a strategic tool for organizations. The lessons learned from the aforementioned 34 teams indicate there are clear factors that learning practitioners can tend to in order to support GVT performance. As you evaluate the performance of existing GVTs and/or prepare to launch new ones, consider what structures, practices and tools will help the team establish a psychologically safe environment, clearly defined roles, and ways to proactively engage in and navigate through the conflict that is inevitable in high performing teams. With an intentional approach to launching and sustaining GVTs, organizations have opportunities to shift their mindset away from necessary evil, and view GVTs as a competitive advantage. CLO
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BEST PRACTICES
The Growing Role of Microlearning Immediate gratification demands that learning be short and sweet • BY JOSH BERSIN
L
Josh Bersin is founder of Bersin, known as Bersin by Deloitte, and a principal with Deloitte Consulting. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.
earning organizations today are dealing with a lot of change. LMS and learning platforms are evolving into video learning solutions; employees want consumer-like learning experiences; experts in all domains are creating videos, MOOCs and YouTube lessons. And of course, companies are reinventing employee skills around digital disruption, unconscious bias, new leadership models, and dozens of operational topics. All this has created a complex problem: How do learning leaders build and curate all the content employees need? How can we blend all the content we have into meaningful programs that stick? How do we deal with our employees’ ever-increasing demand for dynamic, “just what I need” content online? Despite the fact that we spend more than $130 billion on L&D around the world, research shows that training departments are not keeping up with these challenges. Degreed released a study, “How the Workforce Learns in 2016,” that showed among 500-plus respondents, people rate their training department with a minus 31 percent net promoter score; that’s not good. But the biggest change we’re dealing with is the disintegration of learning content, what one might call the “growing role of microlearning.” In the early 2000s when the internet was young, online training was invented to eliminate the need for instructor-led training. We took four- or eight-hour courses and reauthored them to work online. We built long programs with fancy media and interactivities designed to mimic a multiday instructor-led course. This first generation e-learning was revolutionary, and companies like Skillsoft, NetG, Click2Learn, DigitalThink — my alma mater — and others were born. This market grew rapidly, and the LMS market adapted to help us manage, administer and track these courses. As learners, we were excited to see this content online because we could learn whenever we wanted; we didn’t have to travel for days at a time and our companies could save money. All of that worked, until the world took a new direction. In 2007, Apple introduced the iPhone and essentially killed flash technology with its implementation of iOS. Suddenly we had a new set of low-cost tools like our phones to capture video, pictures and sound. This opened the door to video-based learning, YouTube, expert-led MOOCs, and the millions of in-
16 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
structional videos we have today. Companies like Udacity, Udemy, Lynda.com, General Assembly and others grew as next-generation content providers. While we still have long e-learning courses, they are most often used for compliance training. We are too impatient and twitchy to sit still for long, and it’s getting worse. Now we have live video streaming available online, spend more than five hours a day on our phones and interact more than 8 billion times in a single working day.
The way people want to learn today can be described in one word: fast. The way people want to learn today can be described in one word: fast. We want entertaining videos that make a point quickly; and we want systems that let us find and consume content with the click of a button. New LMS systems from companies like Workday, Oracle and others are designed to curate and deliver small video objects; learning infrastructure is shifting to help manage this new immediate-gratification way to learn. A few months ago I met with a large L&D organization. They told me their learners now tell them that “TED videos are too long.” It was TED that taught many of us to shrink videos down to 18 minutes. Now we want them to be five minutes or less. This new world is called microlearning, and it represents one of the biggest and most important changes coming. It will stress our design principles, force us to refine content, and give us the opportunity to get closer to employees’ needs. We can now produce content that immediately teaches what we need to know, that inserts itself at the time of need, and is so interesting that we remember it after only a few minutes. The world of technology-based learning is always changing. I look forward to microlearning becoming a wave of the future, and helping all of you understand how to make it work for your organization. CLO
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ACCOUNTABILITY
Feed the Gorilla Feed it executive-friendly learning scorecards • BY JACK J. PHILLIPS AND PATTI P. PHILLIPS
W
Jack J. Phillips is the chairman, and Patti P. Phillips is president and CEO of the ROI Institute. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.
e are living in a world of economic uncertainty. Although the economy is growing in the U.S., some industry segments are not doing well. Across the globe, uncertainty exists in many areas. For instance, the Brexit vote is causing significant uncertainty in the UK and Europe. The price of oil is causing uncertainty and reducing budgets in oil producing countries. Economic uncertainty also has an effect on executives who are preparing for the future. To be safe, these executives often curtail expenses, particularly variable expenses that are not absolutely necessary. Whereas they invest in projects they believe have future value. This is a good time to reflect on how executives see the learning and development budget. Is it a cost, an investment, or a combination of the two? If they perceive it as a cost, they can easily trim it or eliminate it in the worst case. If it is seen as an investment, it may not be reduced. Executives may actually invest more. Although most executives will proclaim that people are their most important investments, their actions speak much louder as they cut staff when there is the least bit of uncertainty. In the past two decades, we have tried to convince executives that the best time to invest in learning is when there is an economic downturn. In these situations, employees must be at their best and are usually multitasking more because of a smaller staff. Learning needs more budget not less.
ecutive as the “gorilla” who has shown up at the door and is demanding to be fed. The gorilla wants data. In many cases, the gorilla has concluded that a program — usually an expensive one — is not adding value, so maybe it should be eliminated. The gorilla is willing to listen to us if you have data that shows these programs delivered a positive ROI. Unfortunately, when the gorilla shows up, you are in a precarious position. Three things happen: 1. You have a short timeline to show results, often weeks — not months. Changing some of the processes so that you can measure the results may take much longer. 2. You now have ROI on an executive agenda. It needs to be on your agenda. You need to be driving this issue. 3. You are now defensive. You need to be on the offensive. If the program that you evaluate is not adding value, it is hard for you to make the argument that you would like to change it to make it better. You are defending what you have accomplished. If you are on the offensive, and the evaluation is not where it needs to be, you can make some adjustments without a problem. You need to feed the gorillas to keep them away from your door. You feed the gorilla by having an executive-friendly learning scorecard, along the lines that we have presented in a previous column. This scorecard cannot be dominated by input data counting people, times and costs, nor should it be filled with reaction or learning data. It must have some application and impact data, detailing how people use what they have learned, and the impact it has on the organization. Major projects or programs need financial ROI showing they were a good investment. When this is routine, the gorilla will be happy and will not come to your door. We have two major recommendations. One, don’t wait for the request for a particular project’s value. Be proactive. Remember, when showing program value, hope is not a strategy, luck is not a factor and doing nothing is not an option. Two, feed the gorilla often with important data that is meaningful to executives During these uncertain times, we are often contacted to help them see the value in this important learning by HR or learning leaders who need help quickly. A and development investment. We must change the senior executive questions the value of a certain pro- ways we evaluate and report results. Change is inevitagram and wants to see the results. We refer to this ex- ble. Progress is optional. CLO
How do executives see the learning and development budget? Is it a cost, an investment, or a combination of the two?
18 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
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EXPERT
ADVICE The most appropriate advisers aren’t always atop the learning heap. That ideal adviser may just be a step or two above the learner.
20 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
BY RANDY EMELO
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hen US LBM, a collection of building material distributors across North America, took shape in 2009, organizational leaders knew they wanted to create a culture where success was driven by the knowledge, effort and passion of their colleagues. One element of this focused on operational excellence, and the Buffalo Grove, Illinois-based organization designed ways to encourage its growth through Lean Six Sigma, which became even more important as the company grew rapidly through acquisitions. “Our three-day Lean Six Sigma training event has been going on for two years through the University of Wisconsin,” said Amy Brown, director of learning and development for US LBM. “Each training group comes together for in-person training as Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belts. We offer these training sessions four times a year, and have roughly 40 people in each class.” The training events have been successful for the company, but participants have asked for ways to stay connected with one another after their three days of in-person training conclude. Learning leaders at US LBM realized there was an opportunity for them to continue employees’ development through the use of mentoring and social learning software to support peer learning groups. “They asked for ways to connect, network and share with classmates after their training, and we wanted to give them that opportunity,” Brown said. “They especially need that sup-
port as they go back to their jobs and begin to utilize their new knowledge out in the field. Every time people go through classes, they still need to reach out afterward to people who speak the same language.”
Belting It Out Using learning groups via social collaborative learning technology provides a powerful way for people to connect, share ideas, ask questions and continue their learning experience. US LBM has begun offering access to peer learning groups for their Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belts that are designed specifically with Lean Six Sigma Green Belts as the group advisers. Green belts are a step up from yellow belts, and Brown said they are an ideal fit since they have already been successful in their fields and in applying Lean Six Sigma principles. “These peer learning opportunities are something US LBM does that is unique in our sector, and we do it to empower our employees,” said Brown. Many people mistakenly think that learning group advisers need to be the extreme experts in their field. The truth is that the ideal adviser often is one or two steps above the learner. Too much cognitive distance between learners and advisers creates an environment where the extreme expert focuses on “telling” the learners what they need to know, rather than creating an environment that is open to exploring the topic and other possible solutions or ideas. As peer learning gains ground, learning leaders need to be able to help their employees find the right people to aid their development efforts. People are
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often inclined to look for the top expert to answer their questions, but this overlooks an entire middle area of advisers who might be a better fit.
The Experience Continuum Learners and experts fall on an experience continuum that spans beginners, practitioners and experts. An extreme expert typically does not make for the best adviser to someone who is a beginner, despite what many people may think. Beginners need advisers who are only a step or two ahead of them in terms of proficiency.
An extreme expert typically does not make the best adviser for a beginner. They need the advisers who can show them the basics, teach them a few tricks, and give them a process to follow as they build their skill area. This allows extreme experts to be free to advise those who are more seasoned practitioners on the expertise continuum, but who have not yet achieved expert status. It also keeps the extreme experts from getting bogged down with ineffective learning relationships that do not make the best use of their skills or expertise. “Learning occurs in all kinds of environments, not just in the classroom,” said Brown. As a result, US LBM continues to explore options for how to bring their Lean Six Sigma trainees together to learn from one another and from their near peers who are a level above them. Cognizant Technology Solutions also makes great use of peer learning. So-called “learning solution architects” at Cognizant are responsible for learning design throughout the company. They create learning tracks and activities for employees based on individuals’ roles and growth paths. They help people take part in formal learning, and help them find social learning groups and communities that can support them beyond the classroom. The expectation is that the instructors will continuously review trends in the L&D space, like digital technology options or neuroscience applications, and introduce those into Cognizant’s programs. They also partake in social learning themselves, forming learning networks with their peers. “We’ve found that social learning can be one of the 22 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
most engaging means of learning. Cognizant leverages social learning by infusing a meaningful, purposeful context within which employees seek help, or more importantly, help others to learn in effective ways,” said Hariraj Vijayakumar, global head of learning and development at Cognizant. The biggest problem organizations face is the perceived lack of experts. Organizations that operate on the assumption that only extreme experts should teach or advise others are missing the power of peer learning to increase their employees’ competency. But when learning leaders begin to apply the expertise continuum model for learning groups, they soon realize that they have a plethora of experts available. Providing intentional ways for peers to connect in collaborative social learning relationships can help them build support networks and increase the flow of knowledge across the organization. Utilizing peer-topeer learning can help: • Create better contextual understanding. • Give access to advice from people who understand their position in the organizational hierarchy. • Allow learners to see another point of view that is relevant to their work. • Establish peer networks for ongoing support as people strive to build similar competencies and skill sets.
Engaging Learners Throughout the Employee Lifecycle The employee lifecycle spans from people entering the workforce as new hires and finding their feet as emerging leaders, to honing their skills as experts in a certain field and then one day leaving the company. While each phase is not tied to a specific employee age (meaning employees entering your workforce are not necessarily young, just as people leaving your organization are not necessarily older or retiring), each phase of the lifecycle holds a unique opportunity for organizations to engage employees in learning, and to using their near-peers in learning groups to achieve success. Here are a few ideas on how organizations can leverage collaborative peer learning to support employee development at all stages of the employee lifecycle. 1. Entering: Onboarding is a natural starting place for peer group learning. Upon entering the organization, employees of all ages need multiple learning opportunities to help them gain the necessary knowledge to perform their new role. Help new employees tap into the knowledge resources of the organization from day one by having them connect with advisers and peers who can help them assimilate culturally as well as gain the right
insights and skills to help accelerate their speed-to-performance. 2. Emerging: As employees mature, some will begin to emerge as natural leaders. Organizations can use learning groups to help make leadership, managerial or similar training stick by allowing participants to connect with their fellow trainees before, during and after the training events. This allows people to learn through each other’s applications, successes and failures with the material or subject at hand. 3. Expert: Once employees have developed to the point of being an expert in their area of focus, they can help facilitate the development of others. Experts can take on the role of adviser and engage in learning groups to help other employees increase their level of skill in the expert employees’ specific areas of mastery. “Leaders from different operational groups and from US LBM leadership are potential mentors and advisers for our Six Sigma trainees,” said Brown. This allows people at different levels, from different functions, and with different focus areas to give back to the organization and share what they know; and it offers
employees the opportunity to learn from these experienced and trusted experts. 4. Exiting: Employees have a vast array of insights to share before they leave your organization. Peer learning groups can be used in support of succession planning or other programs aimed at sharing the tacit understandings and insights of people poised to exit the company. In fact, people should expect to spend 30 to 40 percent of their workday giving back to organizational learning and mentoring networks so that critical competence is not lost when they leave. Learning leaders need to form learning groups and help facilitate connections between learners and their near-peer advisers. Encourage employees to branch out and look for connections in all areas of the company. Don’t allow barriers — real or imagined — to hamper exploration and innovation. Instead, provide the tools to support employees in their efforts as they build a vibrant learning network. This is a practical way to begin to stimulate effective expert learning. CLO Randy Emelo is chief strategist at River, a mentoring and social learning software company. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.
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PROFILE Judy Whitcomb
The Power of Storytelling at Vi BY BRAVETTA HASSELL
Vi learning and HR leader Judy Whitcomb loves a good story, and those connections — those potential lessons — reveal, shape and enhance learning’s impact in the organization.
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t says something when a company brings its people together to share in departmental wins. At Vi, a Chicago-based senior living facilities company, Judy Whitcomb, the organization’s senior vice president of HR, learning and organizational development, can be credited with sharing important feats of learning. At Vi, which employs roughly 2,900 people, learning isn’t seen as an autonomous function, tapped into only when a need arises. Instead, Whitcomb said everyone sees learning as their responsibility, and everyone treats it and celebrates it as such. “We’re not a large company, but there’s a lot of pride.” As much as Whitcomb said learning’s success at Vi has only come as the result of a group effort, her role has been central to the function’s evolution. Ask, involve, share and celebrate, that’s her approach. It can be a game changer, and a key reason why some companies contract out for their learning needs rather than looking internally first. Not so at Vi. Whitcomb said learning celebrations, the culmination of another job well done, are symbolic, communicating: “This is something that we all share, that we all work toward because it improves our business results, it improves what we do, it improves the lives of the residents we serve.” It also reinforces the organization’s learning brand. It becomes a point of conversation among employees and senior staff as well as an item in the company newsletter and yet another success story Whitcomb can share. And for her, stories are important. Whitcomb’s personal and professional story features a love of travel, a nearly 20-year career in the airline industry, her family, a penchant for learning about and using people’s passions to understand any number of issues, and to deliver the greatest possible impact at Vi. She began college as a journalism major because she loves to write. But once she got into human resources — she studied human resources and learning and development at DePaul University in Chicago and earned her MBA with a focus on management from
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the city’s Roosevelt University — she said she knew it was there she could make a difference. Her 19 years at United Airlines affirmed this; her father made a long career in the airline business as well; it was part of what attracted her to it. At United she worked in a variety of roles across human resources including employer relationships and compensation and benefits, and she spent a great deal of time working on learning and development programs. While there Whitcomb also took a mentor’s advice to spend some time working on the company’s business side. She said the experiences that time offered continue to provide value for her.
“I feel like as a leader, I’m constantly teaching, I’m constantly learning.” — Judy Whitcomb, senior vice president of HR, learning and organizational development, Vi After she left United, Whitcomb spent nearly four years in financial services, then led the accounts management function at an employee benefits company. At all of these junctures, she said she never lost her fascination with the learning and development part of the picture. “Even when you’re in business, I feel like as a leader, I’m constantly teaching, I’m constantly learning.”
At Vi, Learning Has a Narrative Vi, which serves about 4,500 residents, is driven by a mission to provide quality environments, services and programs to enrich older adults’ lives. Whitcomb said the company’s staff is central to bringing that mission to life. It is the cornerstone of her work, as well.
PHOTO BY JEFF MILLIES
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PROFILE Judy Whitcomb
When she came to Vi in 2007, changes in the economy forced leadership to examine how well the company was focusing resources on areas like learning and development. The company wanted to ensure these investments made a difference to the broader organization. At the time, learning was decentralized. It belonged to and was managed by Vi’s individual functions. There was no strategy, no infrastructure, no institutional learning: “It was like a start-up department,” Whitcomb said. Despite her substantial background in learning and development, Whitcomb stepped into her new role with a measure of reserve. She wasn’t just new to Vi, she was also new to the health care hospitality industry. But she recognized early that there was a high level of passion and interest around learning across the organization. “Rather than — Judy Whitcomb, senior vice take control and say ‘This is president of HR, learning and what we’re going to do,’ I focused on inclusion and organizational development, Vi looking for the business partners to be part of the solution,” she said. Because she saw a lot of energy and commitment for learning, Whitcomb said it was just a matter of getting that passion around a common table. First, she established a learning council to begin involving her business partners in the new, centralized learning function. But uniting all the excitement around learning didn’t happen overnight. Whitcomb said it took time before she felt any traction, and winning buy-in initially required very deliberate steps. Now, that investment in learning’s work at Vi, its vision and scope, is nearly a given. Vi’s employment tagline, “Bring Life to Your Career,” reflects the company’s active commitment to employee development and the career advancement
“My job is to enable, it’s to cultivate my team. It’s to serve them.”
Judy Whitcomb and Sophia Salvador, concierge, enjoy the flowers in the English Garden at Vi’s Glenview, Illinois, community.
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that frequently accompanies it. Business partners are visibly engaged in learning. So is the C-suite. Vi’s chief financial officer, Gary Smith, leads business orientation webinars and helps new leaders understand the company’s economic engine. The head of operations, sales and marketing, Bill Sciortino, leads Vi’s Breakthrough Leadership program sessions, and the vice president of operations, Cary Maslow, meets with Management Development program participants when he visits Vi’s various locations. “Learning is a partnership with our business partners,” Whitcomb explained. “It’s part of the fabric of our organization, and our learning has become an employment differentiator.”
Turning the Page on Retention Whitcomb said learning has done much to improve employee retention. Vi belongs to an industry where turnover among staff can range from 43 to 75 percent. In 2011, its organizationwide attrition was 27 percent, but at that time, 75 percent was among the company’s nurse leaders. “A lot of nurses went into that role and never had experience in a leadership role. We felt like we were failing them and that was one of the reasons why we were losing nurse leaders.” A few years ago, the company developed a nurse leadership program in response to the problem. Based on focus groups and exit interviews, the one-year program included assessments, coaching, classroom learning and virtual learning. Within a year and a half, attrition was down to 10 percent. With such tremendous gains in this area, Whitcomb and her team put together a program called Breakthrough Leadership. “Judy’s really good at looking at something and doing the deep dive on it,” said Sciortino, who’s worked with Whitcomb since her start at the company and partnered with her to raise nurse leader retention. The new program iteration explored what made its
Whitcomb and Bill Sciortino, senior vice president of operations, sales and marketing, discuss upcoming sales strategies.
predecessor a success — more than just how many leaders were promoted, or how many of them enjoyed the class or completed it. Leaders are nominated for Breakthrough Leadership by the executive director at their respective location and participate in a cohort of about 25 leaders. A third cohort is planned for 2017. The program begins with a series of assessments and pre-work. Then there’s a weeklong class taught by company executives as well as DePaul University staff and Vi’s learning department. Following that is a sixmonth virtual program also hosted by company executives, which Vi delivers in partnership with Harvard Business Publishing. This leadership program also includes assessments, study groups, virtual learning sessions and reading assignments — “It’s a significant investment of learner time but company time as well,” Whitcomb said. Program participants and their leaders receive assessments, including one that measures emotional intelligence, to gauge their progress from program start to graduation. Whitcomb said her team is working to improve this and other programs using metrics that a DePaul University faculty member helped identify, including: supervisor support, learner readiness, changes in learners and ROI.
The Context of the Work Whitcomb doesn’t just lead learning at Vi. She also runs its human resources department, which might be a boon to some learning leaders but a headache for others. It’s the former for Whitcomb, and even with her role above human resources, she said she’s always thinking about the education component, about what the learning department can do to shift behaviors, communicate, educate and manage change. It’s how she’s wired, she said, and it’s through the partnerships with leaders on her team that all the work gets done. She called herself a working manager. “My job is to enable, it’s to cultivate my team. It’s to serve them. It’s those things.” And she said she believes in her own continuous development as a leader, as well. She balances a focus on learning and development with ongoing development in business, by taking accounting, marketing and finance classes. “It makes you more credible with your business partners,” she explained. “It helps you make better decisions.” These experiences also broaden her perspective and give her different vantage points from which to view things. The different perspectives and the various stories therein are important to her. Each year, Whitcomb and her family travel to a city or country they haven’t been to before. She said she thinks this all goes back to her desire to learn. She
Whitcomb and Rodrigo Armento, Vi at the Glen’s lead line cook, at a fine dining action station for residents.
enjoys stories. So much so that when she worked at United, she took a screenwriting class, flying out to California once a month for creative writing. Whitcomb said she’d like to get back to that. “People have stories and perspectives, and that helps give you a better perspective of what people are going through, the challenges, what motivates them,” she explained. Her genuine interest in her employees, business partners and colleagues’ experiences helps to make the learning function so influential at Vi. Sciortino said that Whitcomb, who spends a lot of time visiting the company’s various communities, often finds out things from employees they might never tell him. Maybe his title is intimidating, he said, but Whitcomb’s has a different tenor. She has a way of disarming people. “Stories are very powerful in the workplace, and there’s a lot of learning that comes from them,” Whitcomb said. “You can go to a class, you can participate in a webinar, you can read a book. But what you can learn from listening to a person’s story, that connection that you make and what you learn from people — a lot of times you get more learning from that.” CLO Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com. Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
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BEST PRACTICES IN ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING
PERSONALIZED LEARNING IS A TWO-WAY STREET It starts by giving your employees the keys to developing themselves. BY T IM H A R N E T T
How can organizations scale their development initiatives and support both managers and employees to foster true learning cultures that drive performance and agility? One hot topic in today’s L&D dialogue is the idea of personalized learning at scale. “Personalized learning really is the next generation of learning and how we’re going to empower our workforce to own their careers,” says Demetra Anagnostopoulos, Chief Strategy Officer for SurePeople. “There are several factors driving the demand for personalized learning— scalability and retention among them. At its most basic, personalized learning is about using tools to help individuals build self-awareness so they can leverage insights to grow and develop.” “When executed successfully, personalized learning also takes the pressure away from managers,” Anagnostopoulos says. “We all agree that a co-located team is an ideal but rare scenario. Most managers lead dispersed teams, and when the numbers grow to 10+, with multiple layers of management (in some cases), it becomes much more difficult to effectively communicate and develop the workforce. At
SurePeople, we’re thinking about personalized learning from both perspectives: the top down and the bottom up. We provide a technology platform that empowers employees to take shared responsibility for their own development, and give managers the framework and tools they need to truly guide their people to personal and performance success.”
How can personalized learning at scale develop your workforce? Partly by encouraging people to develop themselves, which Anagnostopoulos says starts with career empowerment. Empower people.“Training your workforce to seek out their own opportunities is vital for medium to large organizations,” Anagnostopoulos says. “Once your organization gets to a certain size, training everyone is time and cost prohibitive. How then do you effectively develop people at all levels of your organization, creating talent pools you can draw from without having to continuously “buy” new talent? While there are times your organization will need to recruit outside talent, you may have many of the needed skills inhouse. But without the ability to know who or where those people are, beyond the usual suspects of high-
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BEST PRACTICES IN ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING potentials who everyone knows, you are likely staring into a black box and wondering who is being left on the sidelines. Leveraging your employees’ desire for self-improvement and giving them a mechanism to lead part of the design of their own development will empower them to seek out opportunities they may have never considered. When a pro-active framework is combined with smart analytics, visibility suddenly is gained from the bottom-up and the top-down— helping organizations increase the ROI they get on their employees. Leverage the desire to learn. “Technology-enabled processes now make it possible to have a total learning organization,” Anagnostopoulos says. “Employees don’t necessarily need to be told what to do, but they are looking for their employer to provide them tools and a framework in which to thrive.” “Younger generations are especially motivated by self-learning and truth be told, younger members of your workforce are skilled at finding information. They’re already used to personalized, self-directed learning and finding answers to their questions. What may be lacking is the ability to decipher good learning from bad once they find it. If they are given tools that are vetted by the CLO and their team, there is a high probability that employees will drive a lot of their own development, seek out new roles as their selfawareness increases and gain deeper insight into their own strengths and growth areas.“ A mindset shift. “Personalized learning at scale requires a shift in thinking both for employers and employees. Employees should be thinking differently about how to define success. This means going beyond thinking
about which “role” they should aspire to, and reframing that thought process to an expanded mindset that considers which experiences they need to have in order to prepare for potential future roles.” Surgical spend. “Personalized learning also allows you as an L&D leader to be more surgical with how you’re spending your L&D budget—not everyone needs the same skills training. By leveraging personalized learning combined with analytics, the learning function can focus in on specific things that matter to both employees and the business. Targeting learning at the group level, based on insights gained from individuals, will increase retention, decrease turnover and increase engagement—especially for people with specialized skills and capabilities.” Provide focus. How do you let employees pursue their own journey but also meet the needs of the business? How can your mid-level and line-level leaders develop themselves if they don’t necessarily have access to the kinds of programs normally reserved for executives? Anagnostopoulos suggests putting recommended content in front of employees that you know will really help them, whether it’s been curated by your learning team or employees themselves. “The content doesn’t necessarily need to be curated solely by the institution. Your employees already curate their own content in their daily lives. This will help people in your organization shift their mindset from focusing on job titles to developing skills and valuing experiences. Providing tools and resources for employees to curate their own content broadens the scope of L&D without increasing budgets.” 1
Deloitte. Global Human Capital Trends 2016
COMPANY PROFILE SurePeople is a cloud-based provider of intelligent learning, performance and hiring solutions. Our innovative offering applies qualitative and quantitative data to people development, with a foundation in emotional, relational and team intelligence (ERT-i®). Delivering an engaging experience in one integrated platform that’s scalable, measurable and actionable. Together, we can achieve extraordinary outcomes. To learn more about how SurePeople can help your organization craft a personalized learning strategy, visit www.SurePeople.com.
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BEST PRACTICES IN HR INVESTMENT
Building Executive “Buy-in” For Learning Investments BY ALAN A. MALINCHAK AND MARJORIE DERVEN B RO UG HT TO YOU BY T HE CE NT E R F OR APPL I E D LE A R N I N G A T A M E R I C A N P U B LI C U N I V E R S I T Y S Y S T E M
It is evident that to be successful as a learning leader, we need the buy-in of business function executives and other key stakeholders. Yet, learning leaders continue to express a perennial concern about obtaining a seat at the decision makers’ table. So why does the learning function continue to lack the influence and engagement that we should have? After talking to a number of prominent chief learning officers (CLOs) to find out what they do to obtain buy-in, we found they all use a systematic process to engage senior leaders and others to improve their professional results, and more importantly, the impact they are able to achieve in their organizations. Across four different industries (courier services delivery, hospitality, home improvement retailer and insurance), key themes were discovered forming interrelated components: alignment, structure and governance, resource allocation and results. ALIGNMENT To achieve buy-in, the learning function must be fully aligned with the corporate and business function strategy, requiring an in-depth understanding of the drivers of the business and how learning can support this. The language of business is “finance.” Learning leaders must be able to translate learning investments into top-line revenue growth, bottom-line cost savings, or both, and provide the financial metric related to the impact on the company’s net operating profit and future growth. Providing the business case for learning investments, regardless of the learning or leadership development program, keeps the CLO and their successors as an integral part of business planning and enhance the impact of their learning initiatives. For Annette I. Thompson, Senior Vice President and CLO of Farmers Insurance, this means weighing their solutions against the key business objectives of Gross Written Premium and Combined Ratios — the factors that enable us to judge the financial health of our organization. “We use a two-page quarterly scorecard, with simple traffic light scoring of red, yellow and green, for each of our business units, the CEO and executive team, aligning our results around organizational strategic imperatives.” According to Kimo Kippen, CLO of Hilton Worldwide, the alignment begins with five executive sponsors of Hilton Worldwide University. “They represent the key lines of our business,” he said. “These leaders help us to effectively make the necessary trade-off decisions. If it’s not on their list, then it’s not on ours.”
Bob Bennett, Fed Ex’s vice president of human resources and CLO, similarly expressed clarity about achieving a strategic focus on business drivers. “We make sure that right from the start we are aligned around shared objectives, beginning with our value chain of people, service, profit, ensuring that all of these are balanced — we don’t want to overemphasize one at the expense of another,” he explained. A learning function’s alignment to the business function is paramount for both employee and organizational growth. For business to succeed, employees must also have opportunities to grow and succeed. Learning investments further develop employees within their roles, both laterally and vertically, which enhance employee engagement and performance. STRUCTURE AND GOVERNANCE These four CLOs have a formal seat at the table to meet with executives on a regular basis at their companies, enabling them to understand and adapt quickly to changing market and business priorities. Kippen at Hilton Worldwide, said that he has “organized a council of senior leaders who provide overall governance, while we focus on four major deliverables: creating a scorecard, developing KPIs [key performance indicators] to measure results, telling the impact story, and creating an appetite internally for measurement.” Bennett emphasized ongoing interaction with leaders. “We meet with our senior executive team on a regular basis to determine business needs or changes in direction in order to focus our training,” he said. “After we identify needs, we look at appropriate ways to measure and assess where we will invest by making judgments regarding the anticipated impact to FedEx’s bottom line. The FedEx culture is based on the premise that if we take care of our people, they will in turn deliver exceptional service to our customers, which will lead to greater revenue and ultimately, profitability.” Companies need every edge they can muster to increase their effectiveness, win contracts, win business and increase net operating profit. Bennett’s comments regarding taking care of [their] people is indicative of a company that demonstrates employees are a valuable contributor to the financials. Employees develop and nurture relationships with customers and clients, maintain and foster the reputation and brand of their organization and without their continued development in their current roles and beyond, a company may fall victim to stagnation. Learning
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BEST PRACTICES IN HR INVESTMENT
leaders can become partners with leaders to transform the culture of their organizations and position it well into the future. Effective CLOs are not only asking for buy-in and funding; they are also obtaining the active involvement of senior leaders, who are essential to long-term sustained performance improvement.
goal to articulate ROI wherever possible.
RESOURCE ALLOCATION Emphasizing the need to be judicious stewards of organizational resources is another success factor for these CLOs. Being careful about making the necessary trade-off decisions about where to invest is going to be an ongoing commitment to emphasize mission-critical learning, according to Kippen. “We look at where is the pain point? Where are the challenges or opportunities? What does success look like?” he asked.
Creating buy-in is a continuous process that involves engaging with key stakeholders throughout the organization. When executed effectively, this ensures focus on the right learning initiatives and creates a virtuous cycle where demonstrated results improve buy-in, accessibility to decision makers and that coveted seat at the table.
“We want to track factors such as cost, time savings or incremental revenue, looking at results of learning at 30-, 60- and 90-day intervals.” A simple calculation determines where to invest, according to Thomas Spahr, Vice President of Learning at Home Depot. “Our criteria about where to invest in training are based on how many, how often and how complex — in other words, how important is this task or product to the business at Home Depot?” he said. The learning leader who can financially explain “why” a learning investment is needed as well as “how” it will be accomplished, and, “what” result it will have on business impact, will become the “who person” people will go to when they are aligning their business case within the company. RESULTS Providing compelling evidence of the value CLOs deliver to the organization is another key factor in obtaining critical buyin. “Since 2002, we have always emphasized measurement; all curricula are measured at Level 1 or Level 2, with 25 percent and 20 percent measured at Levels 3 and Level 4 respectively. We look at factors like quality, sales, retention and engagement,” Thompson explained. The consistent emphasis on accountability and tracking results has helped Farmers Insurance “to grow funding and investment for the University of Farmers because we are able to prove business impact.” Spahr said that throughout his tenure in the CLO role, measurement has been an important focus, with the
“With our store associates, metrics are more accessible, capturing product and project knowledge and impact on Home Depot sales; for our other major bucket of learning, leadership development, we conduct pre and post-assessments,” he said.
“We have balanced scorecard measurements within learning and development, incorporating employee satisfaction, culture indices, and turnover rates in addition to employee productivity and efficiency metrics,” Spahr said. “By measuring our training results, we obtain better internal customer support and interest — it has changed the way we operate and actually increased the demand for our services, as we demonstrate our value to the business.” SUMMARY For current learning leaders and those in the succession plan to become future CLOs, time and attention to their alignment, structure and governance, resource allocation and results of the business functions, will yield continued success, growth and a permanent seat at the table. Alan A. Malinchak is currently the CEO of Éclat Transitions LLC and STRATactical LLC, each a certified and verified (cVe) Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) serving transitioning public service and military professionals as well as offering leadership, change, learning and knowledge agility services and solutions. Marjorie Derven is managing partner at HUDSON Research and Consulting, Inc. Join Alan Malinchak and the Center for Applied Learning on September 26, 2016, at the Fall Symposium+PLUS for our workshop, “Onward and Upward: How To Design, Develop, Implement and Measure an Effective High Potential (HiPo) Program.”
COMPANY PROFILE The Center for Applied Learning (CAL) at American Public University System provides a wide range of online training and educational solutions to help public and private organizations attain their workforce development and performance goals. We are committed to providing relevant training, tools and resources to help organizations thrive. Our offerings help make your training and development programs more effective, efficient, and measurable – a win-win for your employees and your organization. To learn more about the Center for Applied Learning, visit www.apus.edu/CAL
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BEST PRACTICES IN EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
Beyond “Hi [First Name]”: Taking a learner-centric approach to reach employees anytime, everywhere BY TIM HARNETT
Whether greeted by name or shown relevant products upon visiting a website, personalization is everywhere. Yet personalization is more than just a marketing tool; its application in the learning space can make the experience more valuable to a learner, leading to higher levels of employee engagement and retention. By moving from an organizationcentric to a learner-centric philosophy, organizations can reach more members of their workforce with relevant content. “Taking a learner-centric approach to corporate learning is a hot topic right now,” says Skip Marshall, CTO for Tribridge. “However, when many people say learner-centric, they’re often referring to a very basic approach. Their system might acknowledge the person logging in and remember their job title, but offer little else beyond cosmetic personalization.”
Shift the mindset. Marshall says that learning organizations should begin to think about learners as consumers as a first step. “Today’s employees, especially millennials, expect that their interaction with enterprise technology will be similar to their experience as digital consumers of websites like Amazon and Netflix. A personalized user experience, alonˆg with content served based on interests, job roles and other identifiers are key to improving user adoption over the long-term. If they’re truly engaged in your learning system and visit on a regular basis because it’s tailored to their needs, then you’ll get more buy-in and higher participation rates in areas such as compliance training or other functional initiatives.”
“Taking a learner-centric view of L&D requires a multifaceted approach,” Marshall says. “On the technology side, the system should be optimized for today’s learning, while on the culture side, learner needs should be put ahead of organizational needs. That doesn’t mean organizational needs aren’t a high priority, but employees need to see the importance of learning before they can derive full value from it. If employees can’t see the benefits of what they’re learning, then they won’t use your system to learn and will instead pull content from elsewhere — or not at all. Having a learner-centric approach really opens up some of the roadblocks around the L&D function, giving people both what they want and expect from learning.”
“Learning shouldn’t be a burden or box to be checked for your workforce; you want to get your employees excited about learning.”
How can your organization create a learner-centric environment? Marshall suggests several ways, such as shifting the mindset within your organization, taking a proactive approach to learning and updating your technology to incorporate analytics tools and adapt to the ways employees actually learn.
How do employees feel about your organization’s current approach? “Typical pain points are lack of engagement with the LMS along with the overall belief that L&D doesn’t provide tangible benefits,” Marshall says. “L&D needs to be viewed as a value add by employees, instead of merely being functionary. Learning shouldn’t be a burden or box to be checked for your workforce; you want to get your employees excited about learning. A learner-centric approach is less about what the
a d v e r t i s e m e n t
BEST PRACTICES IN EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT
organization wants employees to learn and more about what employees need to learn in order to take the next steps in their careers. By providing employees with long-term development tools, the organization is better positioned to retain skilled, developed employees.” Take a proactive approach. Recognize how and where people learn — current trends point to learning done on mobile devices and in small chunks. “Right now there’s a disconnect between traditional LMS content and how a lot of employees really learn,” Marshall says. “Many people are looking to learn work-related content at point-of-need. Employees need to both access information on the fly and get content that will develop them over the long term, filling the organizational pipeline with employees who are ready to step into new roles.” Employees should champion learning initiatives, rather than approach workplace learning with trepidation or dread. Get employees actively curating and sharing content for maximum engagement. “Employees are quick to find and rate content, both on their own time and when they’re using a responsive system that adapts and adjusts to their needs,” Marshall says. “They’ll quickly jump on high-quality content and dismiss anything that isn’t worth their effort. When employees learn on their own time they’re pulling from many different content sources and your learning approach should reflect that. Ideally your system should adapt to your employees, recognizing and pushing quality content out to users. A responsive system can also recommend quality content to others who may find the content useful. If three marketing managers have engaged with
1
a piece of quality content (and rated it useful), then the system can recommend it to others in the same role.” Evaluate your current system. Does your learning technology need a refresh? Was it built to handle today’s ubiquitous smartphone use? Studies show that the average US employee uses at least three devices a day for work, while the UK is shifting to a mobile-first society.1 “We’re seeing a greater move to mobile learning as employees search for content on their mobile devices when and where they need it,” Marshall says. “Yet legacy systems that are even 15 years old might not be designed or optimized for this type of learning, or be able to track completion and engagement rates. Today’s learning departments need sophisticated analytics that make it possible to link learning to performance and follow employees from device to device. Having analytics results readily available will make it easier to prove the business case for learning to executives and senior leaders within the organization.” “Ideally you want your learning system to be responsive,” Marshall says. “A system that connects to multiple learning sources and makes recommendations can give you the tools you need to track, share, and socialize that content among your workforce. Having a system that pulls in content from multiple channels means your employees don’t have to search on their own for outside learning sources. Rather than needing to look in fifteen different places, they can go to a single source where the experience is entirely personalized.” To learn about how Tribridge can help your organization, visit www.tribridge.com/contentsphere
Schweber, A. (2016). “Why Employees Use Multiple Devices.” Intelligence.
COMPANY PROFILE Tribridge supercharges your learning and talent strategy, engaging your people and growing your business. We’ve developed innovative solutions like ContentSphere, which unlocks the power of unlimited learning and puts learners in the driver’s seat. Our experienced team guides you from development and implementation through execution and support. See how ContentSphere can empower your learners at Tribridge.com/ContentSphere.
Getting in ON THE Ground Floor Attracting, cultivating and retaining entry-level talent helps ensure a long-term pool of skilled employees. BY LYNN SCHROEDER
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T
he debate is long over about the value of companies investing in their workforce to ensure access to the very best talent possible. After all, the workforce is the face of the company. They are the ones creating the products and delivering the services that define value to customers. Traditionally, companies would focus most of their workforce cultivation efforts on mid-level or senior management, training college-educated workers and grooming managers. Most companies typ-
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ically overlooked investing in entry-level workers, usually pointing to the high turnover rate of lower level employees as justification. That has changed thanks to a forecasted labor and skills shortage. According to estimates from the federal government, by 2020 a college degree will increasingly be a necessity as 35 percent of job openings will require at least a bachelor’s degree, and 30 percent will require some college or an associate degree. But the current higher education graduation rate is stagnant, and the economy will face a shortage of 5 million workers with the necessary education and training by 2020, say researchers from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. To address the projected shortage, many companies are rethinking their approach and are creating innovative new ways to attract the best entry-level employees and train them with the knowledge and skills they need to advance within the company. Companies investing in front-line employees are benefiting from a better trained workforce and a steady stream of talent who can move up and fill open positions within the company. For example, to help it recruit the very best entry-level employees possible, insurance giant Aon is building an apprenticeship model in the United States that mirrors the success of its longtime apprenticeship work in the United Kingdom. According to Aon Chief Talent Officer Aaron Olson, to launch its apprenticeship program, the company is partnering with City Colleges of Chicago’s Harold Washington College to offer students the opportunity to earn their associate degree while also getting on-the-job experience. Students in the apprenticeship program will spend 20 hours in the classroom and 20 hours working each week over a two-year period. The students involved will be paid for the work they do, and their education will be subsidized. Aon will be launching its U.S. apprenticeship program in January 2017. Olson said the apprenticeship program delivers a host of benefits back to the company. “Most companies are competing for the same students who are attending traditional four-year institutions, but thanks to our partnerships with these colleges, we can create a compelling brand on campus and really stand out as a company,” he said. “Students see it as an opportunity
to get experience and exposure by working and studying at the same time. They can avoid the high costs of college and focus on relationships instead of paying down college debt. It’s a great way for these students to stand out from their peers.” Aon has experienced a higher retention rate with these employees versus their four-year colleges, Olson added. “The program also reinforces our commitment to diversity in the workforce and helps us attract a wider base of employee candidates,” he said. Fast-food giant McDonald’s Corp. also is rethinking its focus on entry-level employees. The company recently unveiled its latest initiative, Archways to Opportunity, which builds upon traditional workforce development programs and offers options for all levels of workers. McDonald’s developed the program to lead the industry in promoting workforce education, helping participants learn English-language skills, get a high school diploma and move on to an associate or bachelor’s degree. The McDonald’s initiative is unique because it offers resources to workers in lower, entry-level positions unlike many workforce development programs that are typically directed at employees in higher echelon positions. It also offers education and career advising services, provided by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning, or CAEL, to help students at all levels meet their education goals. “We believe Archways to Opportunity allows people to work toward their goals at their own pace,” said Rob Lauber, global chief learning officer at McDonald’s. “We are proud our employees are enrolling in a program that helps them get the skills and education they want wherever they might be on life’s journey. Offering that flexibility was paramount as we wanted to ensure we were creating a program that worked not just for some of our people but for all of them.” The components of Archways to Opportunity include: • English Under the Arches — Provides an English as a Second Language program that teaches the English needed to communicate effectively and confidently with customers and staff every day. • High School Completion — Creates opportunities for employees to obtain a high school diploma at no cost. • College Connection — Helps employees find the
Companies investing in front-line employees are benefiting from a better trained workforce and a steady stream of talent.
36 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
most efficient and affordable path to a two- or school diploma assistance benefit provided by a four-year degree program. major hospitality company in the United States. • Advising Services — Helps students identify the The GED assistance program is available to all fullbest educational and career paths. time U.S. employees at Hilton-owned and manThe Archways to Opportunity program has been aged hotels and corporate offices with six months widely praised. of service or greater. The new benefit will provide “The progress McDonald’s has made with Arch- one-on-one advising and test preparation support. ways to Opportunity will have a profound impact on the lives of so many of their employees,” said GROUND FLOOR continued on page 64 Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren E. Buffett. “By providing free high school completion courses, assistance with college tuition and acaL E A R N L E A D I N S P I R E demic advising, McDonald’s is ensuring its workers have the tools to succeed throughout their careers and that in turn makes our entire economy stronger.” John Colborn, chief operating officer of Philadelphia-based nonprofit JEVS Human Services, said, “When companies like McDonald’s provide these kinds of programs, they not only enhance life opportunities for their workers, they also gain a more engaged and talented workforce.” The Walmart Foundation and Goodwill Industries International also recognized the importance of investing in front-line workers, which is why they developed their new career-training initiative, Careers in Retail. The Careers in Retail initiative is designed to equip experienced, entry-level retail employees with the skills and credentials they need to advance to in-demand, mid-level retail positions and was made possible by a two-year, $3 million grant from the Walmart Foundation. The program will be initiated by eight selected Goodwill agencies across the United States and will be facilitated by third-party credentialing organiLet Georgetown Executive Custom Programs provide a tailored learning zations including community colexperience to help shape the future of your organization. leges and career-training businesses. As evidence of its commitment to front-line employees, Hilton Worldwide recently unveiled a new industry-leading GED assistance benefit that will give thousands of eligible employees the opportunity to earn their high school equivalency diploma. The new program marks the Office of Executive Education largest, most comprehensive high
Transforming Leaders of the World, For the World.
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38 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
MAKE LEARNING
VIRAL-WORTHY TO MAKE IT LAST
The fast-moving, changeable nature of the marketplace requires organizational agility and skilled workers to power it forward. Ensuring learning investments make a splash is an imperative.
W
BY BRAVETTA HASSELL
ho would have thought a bucket of ice water could be so hot? It was for four straight months during the summer of 2014 when just about everybody was on camera, dousing themselves with freezing water. The outpouring of attention was all in the name of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. According to Facebook, in the phenomenon’s first three months, more than 17 million videos related to the Ice Bucket Challenge where uploaded to the social media platform and viewed more than 10 billion times by more than 440 million people. The cause — Lou Gehrig’s disease, also called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS — at times got lost in the frenzy, but the ultimate impact was unprecedented, earning more than $220 million in global support for research, according to the ALS Association. The Ice Bucket Challenge was a viral success. Substitute learning for any number of ideas or causes an
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organization is trying to sell, and it’s easy to chuckle at the thought of something like, say, an operations management course ever breaking the internet. But the premium on making an impact through learning is high. It gives companies a competitive advantage, improves employee retention and drives business performance.
Crafting a ‘Hit’ When something “goes viral,” the content has achieved an incredibly rapid rate of views and shares within a short amount of time — such as a 48-hour window, said Kerry Jones, associate marketing director at content marketing agency Fractl. She offered feminine hygiene brand Always’ 2015 #LikeAGirl ad campaign as an example of content gone viral — the minimalist yet evocative commercials cast an unforgiving light on persistent stereotypes about girls’ abilities has drawn tens of millions views. The emotional power behind the videos is among the reasons #LikeAGirl has been so successful. The campaign incorporates some key components that line up well against organizational behavior and change gurus Chip and Dan Heath’s SUCCESs framework, which Fractl uses to judge a marketing campaign’s ability to stay with the audience and be spread to others. When it comes to determining how “sticky” an idea or message is, its simplicity, unexpectedness and credibility are among the things that matter, Jones said. By incorporating these and other characteristics into learning, Jones said organizations can increase the likelihood employees will remember what they’re taught. “Better yet, it will be so compelling they’ll want to tell others about it.” Over the past decade, American Public University System’s Melissa Layne has seen several learning experiences attempt to depart from the “sage on stage” mold but fall short of achieving viral success. While the learning delivery method Above: Sebastien Lamiaux was new and innovative, Below: Margery Ginsberg the experiences were in40 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
structionally designed and executed around the traditional lecture-based format, said Layne, APUS’s director of research methodology. These learning experiences were often delivered through video conferences, PowerPoint presentations and online discussion boards, she said by email. But for learning to be so exciting and memorable — shareworthy — it has to break free from more traditional methods. Learning experiences that have viral potential are devoid of mundane, static, linear or textbased materials. “They are truly student-focused, socially-based, competency-driven and most importantly,
How to Create Sticky Learning
C
orporate learning content might not end up on the nightly news’ rundown of viral videos anytime soon, but that shouldn’t preclude learning leaders from aiming high when it comes to creating learning that begs employees to text their friends about it, and more importantly to take action because of it. Citing the SUCCESs model created by thought leaders Chip and Dan Heath, Fractl Associate Marketing Director Kerry Jones offered the following characteristics that make content “sticky.” • Simplicity: Keep the message simple. Cramming in too much information will overwhelm the audience and make them less likely to remember the main takeaways — or share them. • Unexpectedness: Pique the audience’s curiosity by sharing something counterintuitive or unexpected. • Concrete: Explain the message in concrete terms using sensory information the audience can imagine. This is especially important when presenting abstract ideas. The authors use the saying “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” as an example of using concreteness to explain something abstract. • Credible: The message should be testable. Can someone try it out for themselves to see it in action? • Emotional: To get people to care, make them feel something. Emotional resonance is a crucial ingredient behind why things go viral. • Stories: Use as many anecdotal examples as possible to demonstrate the message in action. The authors said “hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.”
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relevant and applicable,” Layne said. What’s more, such experiences are developed outside the confines of time and space. “Seat time” requirements don’t bode well for today’s learners, Layne wrote. Many learners value microlearning where the information is comprehensive but delivered in short, consumable bites. Developed around on-demand or self-paced courses, these learning experiences allow students to gain knowledge and skills while giving them more control in managing their learning. At StratX Simulations, for example, delivering a high-impact learning experience has a great deal to do with putting learners to work, said StratX Director Sebastien Lamiaux. About 90 percent of the programs the company develops for clients use simulation —
When it comes to determining how “sticky” an idea or message is, its simplicity, unexpectedness and credibility are among the things that matter. “it’s not role-play, it’s computer-based simulation,” Lamiaux explained — focusing on functional areas like marketing and sales as well as building leadership skills. The programs are also team-based, often with four or five people working together to manage a fictitious company. The group gets information and data to come up with a strategy, just like in the real world. “Then they have to make decisions, and they have to live with the results of their decisions,” Lamiaux said. The process can be strenuous, as it often is in the real world, but he said “through that decision-making experience and through the discussion of the team, and the fact that you repeat the process over five, six, seven simulated years … that’s how you accelerate the learning and that’s what makes the learning actionable and action-oriented, instead of us preaching from 9 to 5 for eight hours in front of people. Because people do remember.” Therefore, Kerry Jones the learning experience 42 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
is more likely to be memorable for employees and to have an impact on their work.
More than a One-Hit Wonder Layne said well-known insights about adult learning are key to creating effective, engaging, shareable learning. Learning experiences have to be relevant and applicable, experiences in which learners develop skills that help them be successful in their current or future professions, she wrote. Pragmatic adult learners want learning that makes them better at the things they value at work, at home and in their communities, said Raymond Wlodkowski, a professor emeritus of psychology at Regis University. Wlodkowski, along with Margery Ginsberg, developed a four-dimension framework to teach and enhance adult learning called the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching. The Framework Raymond Wlodkowski underscores how inclusion, attitude, meaning and competence are critical to creating a motivational learning environment for adults where the information sticks and employees are even excited to share it with others. The dimensions are based on 40 years of research in motivation and adult learning. “We design our courses as a whole motivationally,” said Ginsberg, a former professor for aspiring leaders at the University of Washington at Seattle turned author and independent consultant. “We design what we do each session motivationally, and we design all the activities within each session motivationally.” Of all the areas that work together to create an ideal learning environment, Ginsberg said organizations often struggle the most to build inclusion into learning. This is partly due to the time-limited environments in which learning often takes place — building a community takes time — and partly to do with society’s understanding of inclusion. “Some people have associated inclusion with what used to be called sort of a feel good kind of approach to teaching, and I don’t think that in the past we did a very good job to debunk that or to really teach what its significance is,” she said. “Its significance,” Ginsberg explained, “is a cognitive issue.” VIRAL continued on page 62
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How Learning Leaders
Win Friends and Influence People If learning leaders want to make an impact, they have to leave their offices, be curious, connect and be deliberate in how they add value to the business. BY BRAVETTA HASSELL
S
heer talent will only yield so much problem-solving capability. It’s one reason relationships are so important for business success. Michael Chavez, CEO of Duke Corporate Education, said leaders needn’t look further than this summer’s Brexit vote as an example of this. Increasingly complex problems will not be easily solved with a purely functional mindset. The relationships people will need to build in the British government moving forward will be far more important than arriving at
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the right answer when there are many pathways out of the predicament, he explained. That’s politics, but relationships are no less important in business. Learning leaders in particular have to be strong networkers and collaborators to be effective. Chavez said networking is probably a requirement for the job. If he had to hire a chief learning officer of his own, he said he’d be willing to trade off experience working with learning management systems, for instance, for a proven track record of building relationships based on the work. “Technical expertise in learning is not sufficient — necessary but not sufficient — to drive the kind of learning solutions that organizations need.” When learning leaders prioritize developing relationships at all levels of their organization, they’re positioning their department for success. Only through authentic relationships can chief learning officers build and maintain the influence that is central to making an impact.
“Those informal opportunities are really important.” — Judy Whitcomb, senior vice president of HR, learning and organizational development, Vi “Always make the other person feel important,” Dale Carnegie wrote in his 1936 “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” The book is still ranked among Amazon.com’s best-sellers, and it highlights some key areas learning leaders should consider if they want to get things done: care, be curious and add value to ultimately make an impact. The high value of relationship building was crystal clear during Kimo Kippen’s first few years at multinational hospitality company Hilton Worldwide; a reacquisition and a merger took place only a few years prior. “The role of learning in any organization is to enable,” said Kippen, Hilton Worldwide’s chief learning officer. “You’re supporting and you’re working closely with the business. This requires building the relationships to be part of the conversations to be able to help enable and support the business in any way.”
Be Curious “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” — Dale Carnegie, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” Massive transformation was occurring across the or46 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
ganization when Kippen arrived at Hilton in 2010. He said there were orange cones everywhere, not just for learning but for all of the enabling departments. In human resources, there was no common platform for team members to work from — among other things — and the learning organization needed to bring disparate training and development activities under one umbrella. Given the scale of the company — today operating more than 4,500 hotels worldwide — “you can imagine that there’s the constant need for training and upskilling of talent to do all this across the 13 brands we have as a company,” Kippen said. In addition to hiring some of the organization’s existing high potential employees to work for Hilton Worldwide University, Kippen set up a learning governance board of executive sponsors to ensure that learning aligns with the business. Members include Hilton’s chief financial officer, its chief human resources officer and the head of commercial services. The group meets quarterly to discuss its focus, successes, what’s on the horizon, what are people’s respective priorities and how can they coordinate with learning to address them. If learning is to effectively support and meet these tasks and business needs, relationships are critical. Judy Whitcomb, senior vice president of HR, learning and organizational development at Vi, a senior living facilities company, said relationships are how learning leaders accomplish goals. Whether that’s inside the business or working with external partners, learning leaders must know what their business partners want, and they can’t do that without getting to know them. “That understanding of what your colleagues are going through, whether that’s at a personal level or at a business level, helps you get things done at an organization.” When Whitcomb arrived at Vi in 2007, the company wanted to make sure its investments in areas like learning were making an impact on the business. At the time, the individual functions owned learning. Whitcomb said she realized early on that while there was a lot of passion and interest around learning and development, that wasn’t going to make her job winning leader buy-in to a centralized organization easy. “I couldn’t come into the company and say I’m taking your budgets away,” she explained. “I wanted to leverage their passion.” The leaders knew the business better than she did initially because she was a neophyte to the hospitality health care space. So she approached them with her intentions set on partnership. She made it clear that she wanted to know what mattered to her prospective business partners and how they could work together to address those things. The relationships didn’t spring up overnight, they were built incrementally. But now, due to learning’s successes and the partnerships Whitcomb championed to achieve them, the department is more
than a function in the business; it’s woven into the fabric of the company. Whitcomb’s not inclined to let up on her approach, however. She deliberately altered her route walking around the office, making time to speak with colleagues and to engage with people about more than just work. Also, by spending time at the company’s various communities across the country, she demonstrated her curiosity about what people have going on
her communications she said she makes sure to recognize people for the work they do, and she actively looks for ways to support her team members’ work, and ultimately help drive greater results. Kippen said as newer learning leaders build their credibility with leadership and internal customers they should actively demonstrate their ability to add value. But that requires business acumen. They have to know how to speak the language of the business and under-
“Learning leaders have got to be plugged into the business. That means they have to be extremely curious about the business and the problems embedded in the business.” — Michael Chavez, CEO, Duke Corporate Education and how she can support them. “Those informal opportunities are really important,” she said. Building these relationships might mean stepping out of a comfort zone for learning leaders who are more reserved, but it’s necessary for those who want make a difference. They’ve got to be in the business, know it, Hilton’s Kippen said. Just don’t have an agenda going into what should be informal conversations, Whitcomb said. There will be plenty of time for that in planning meetings and other formal situations. When engaging with people in and outside of their function, learning leaders have to get to know what their colleague/employee/business partner cares about. “You never know what you’re going to get, but I’ve found that you get more out of those unplanned interactions than you would sometimes out of the planned meetings,” she said.
Add Value “So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage.” — Dale Carnegie, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” With no expectations about what business partners might share, Whitcomb can learn what her team members are working on, what they’re thinking about and what challenges they may be experiencing. The rapport that develops makes her seem more approachable. “When they need something, a favor or an exception, or they need support, you’ve already got that relationship established because they know you care about them personally,” she explained. And it’s rare that she returns to her desk without a new idea, task or a new meeting to schedule. To sustain these relationships, Whitcomb said it’s important to ensure the value-add goes both ways. In 48 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
stand it. They also have to listen, a lot. “Listen, listen, listen, and get out there very quickly to start making those connections, working those relationships.” New learning leaders also should demonstrate their ability to get things done and execute on established plans. Kippen said start small, get some quick wins, “then start to tell that story, and then very quickly look to how then you’re going to build your strategy, structure, people, process and things,” he said. “Try to put together a roadmap so that people can see that you know where you’re going so that it doesn’t ever appear that you’re just kind of waffling and moving in one direction and then in another without intent.”
Make an Impact “If you want to know how to make people shun you … even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long.” — Dale Carnegie, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” In a 2006 study of more than 1,000 leaders, managers and executives, The Ken Blanchard Cos. found that a strong ability to communicate and emotional intelligence and empathy were ranked among the most important skills a leader needed to possess to be effective. The study is a bit dated, but those qualities are still quite central to authentic relationship building and ultimately to having influence. Without the relationships Vi’s Whitcomb deliberately fostered, she said she doesn’t think learning would have the impact and credibility it has at the organization. As a result, “we have more work not because we’re asking for it, but because people come to us. We have a good business,” she said. “You have a good, reputable brand because you’re approachable, and you’re there to solve problems.” INFLUENCE continued on page 62
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A Day in the Life of a
LEARNING OBJECTIVE Effective learning is targeted, focused on business objectives and the employees who are tasked with carrying them out. In this context, the learning earning objective is the unsung and develhero of development opment is a strategy. process not an event, and
L
the one constant aspect of this BY DAVID J. scientific process is the learning obDEFILIPPO jective. It’s at the center of the instrucAND LISA M. tional systems design process, which is a SHAPIRO core part of the way learning practitioners create courses. There are various methods used to design effective learning solutions. Robert Gagne’s foundational work during World War II with the Army Air Corps to effectively train pilots, and Robert Mager’s “Preparing Instructional Objectives” (1962), which defined a process to create effective learning objectives, to name a couple. The central part in these practices is a prerequisite to identify instructional goals for the program, course or lesson. With the learning objective as a common thread among these distinct approaches, the next question is, where does the learning objective come from? Simply, a day in the life of a learning objective spans the strategic aspects of an organization but remains focused on specific outcomes.
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The Target In its simplest form a learning objective is born from the desire to have someone accomplish a new task or complete an existing task at a higher level of performance. A proper learning objective must be performance-based and follow the guidelines that Mager’s “Preparing Instructional Objectives” and Benjamin Bloom’s 1956 Taxonomy provide. Bloom conceived the six levels of cognition and associated hierarchy to categorize instructional objectives based on specificity and complexity. Mager added to his work by establishing the use of observable and performance-based verbs so it is evident the learner has mastered the task. To put the complexity of a learning objective in the appropriate context, picture five concentric circles (figure 1) that work inward from the outer-most circle starting with the organizational objective. Then moving circle by circle, the path to the learning objective is navigated by clearly defining each of the following elements: 1) organizational goals, 2) roles for those who carry out these goals, 3) the competencies required for these roles, 4) the skills and knowledge that make up these competencies; and finally 5) the learning objectives. In this way, circles one through four precede the fifth where the learning objective comes from. For example, when a firm decides to add a new product line as part of its growth strategy, leaders complete the business analysis to define the product’s target market and design. Once the business plan is completed and the sales channel strategy is defined, the firm’s hu-
FIGURE 1: Concentric Goals
Roles
Skills and knowledge
Learning objectives
Source: David J. DeFilippo and Lisa M. Shapiro, 2016
52 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
man capital has to launch the product and develop market share. To carry out these tasks, employees have to acquire new skills and knowledge about the product, client base and marketing approach. Leaders have to
Learning objectives focus on alignment, outcomes and performance; their importance is not to be underestimated. align the organizational systems to move from the business goal to successful implementation. The precision required to hit this new target requires strong coordination that includes consultation, analysis and testing. With human performance as the target, there is a path from the strategic aim to the learning objective.
The Journey Organizations are regularly challenged to grow and innovate to keep pace with client requirements. As a result, the competitive differentiation for products is decreasing, which means that firms must develop products and solutions to enter markets more quickly and effectively. This dynamic sets in motion a systematic process to define and align the aforementioned five circles in order to maximize the role learning objectives play in effective curriculum design and development. First, the organizational objective can take the form of a new product launch, platform upgrade or merger/acquisition. These business goals emanate from the firm’s strategic planning process to reach long-term goals such as increasing market share, adding business capabilities or outpacing the competition. Once determined, this journey begins and learning objective creation is underway, though it may take a few more steps to fully define this goal. As in the previous scenario about a new product launch, once the business objectives are clear, the affected roles are defined. Answering questions such as, Who will need to sell and support this new product?, How will this product be marketed? and What are IT and system requirements?, for instance, all have implications that will determine the learning objectives, which are based on the business objectives. Next, the role requirements need to be defined in
order to create new positions, add capabilities to existing responsibilities or do a combination of both. For example, which roles are necessary to perform the new tasks, and what specifically do they need to be able to do? This step validates the current role tasks, determines the future state requirements and then defines the gap between the two. The outcomes of this gap analysis inform the newly defined roles, as well as the performance expectations that define the corresponding competencies. For example, when deploying a new product, use these gaps to define the new tasks the firm’s sales and service employees need to carry out and the actions IT has to perform with new processes and systems. Third — resulting from the role requirements — what level of competency do these roles need to possess in order to effectively perform the newly defined tasks? For instance, when launching a new product the window of opportunity may be limited to gain market share ahead of the competition so demonstrating proficiency with new product knowledge and client positioning skills is necessary. Whether with new or existing roles, the performance level is being reset and, as a
specific, measurable and constructed so that it is backward compatible with the aforementioned five rings. For example, in the launch of a new product the learning objectives for client-facing roles may look something like: the account executive will be able to describe at least three of the product features, evaluate the product features that meet the client’s needs, be able to compare the product’s benefits with competitive solutions. Using Bloom’s taxonomy, these learning objectives follow the attainment of higher levels of knowledge in order to achieve the business goals and performance outcomes for all associated roles. At this juncture, aligning the five circles that began with the organizational objectives now connects to the roles, competencies, knowledge and skills, and is completed by defining the corresponding learning objectives. To further test the alignment and systematic nature of this process, one can trace back from the inside of the circle out, testing the learner for knowledge and observing skill demonstration. By evaluating the level of individual competency through learning measurement approaches from Kirkpatrick, Phillips or
Simply, a day in the life of a learning objective spans the strategic aspects of an organization but remains focused on specific outcomes. result, these positions have new proficiency expectations. For instance, determining the new level of aptitude for client-facing positions to sell and service a new product is crucial to success. Further, developing new capabilities among support functions such as IT, HR and finance to reinforce new product implementation is common. Moving to the next ring in the circle, breaking down the competency requirements into the requisite skills and knowledge takes this process one step further. This entails defining the new or incremental knowledge for each role coupled with the necessary skills to put that new information to its most valuable use. Specifically, determine the progression of the new skills and knowledge by role to clarify the performance objectives. For example, when implementing a new platform, determining the skills and knowledge needed for each role and at the specific level of proficiency is vital to complete those new responsibilities and meet the expected outcomes. Acquiring these new facts and proficiencies defined by the learning objective is the final destination in this journey. To verify that this end point has been reached, the learning objective must be
Brinkerhoff, learning leaders can assess the change in the organization’s capability. Individual and team effectiveness when implementing the new product or using systems support validates its use. At the same time the organizational progress is obvious through business measures such as market share, sales pipeline volume or close rates. This may seem a long and multifaceted distance to travel, but a day in the life of a learning objective is a complex element of a talent development system. Learning objectives focus on alignment, outcomes and performance; their importance is not to be underestimated. Learning practitioners have to be adept at grasping business imperatives and connecting those priorities to roles and their performance requirements. In short, this voyage answers three questions: What is the organization trying to achieve? What roles are critical to reach those objectives? And what do the employees in those roles need to be able to do? CLO David J. DeFilippo is the chief learning officer for Suffolk Construction, and Lisa M. Shapiro is an instructional systems design consultant. To comment, please email editor@CLOmedia.com. Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
53
CASE STUDY
It Takes a Village BY SARAH FISTER GALE
A
lot of companies talk about how important their culture is to business success, but DaVita HealthCare Partners takes a totally different approach to shaping it. Executives at the Fortune 500 kidney care services company refer to the organization as a village where community is the goal, and the business is the economic driver that makes it work thanks to 65,000 employees nationwide. “We didn’t create a culture to drive better business results,” said Dave Hoerman, DaVita’s chief wisdom officer. “We decided what we wanted the community to be, and we use work to sustain it.” It wasn’t always this way. In 1999 the company, formerly known as Total Renal Care, was on the verge of bankruptcy when Kent Thiry took over as CEO. Thiry came in with a vision. “He didn’t just want to fix the business. He wanted to make DaVita a healthier place for people to live and work,” Hoerman said. That meant completely rebuilding the corporate culture to help employees live better, more productive lives — at work and at home. Thiry — referred to internally as the Mayor of DaVita — created the wisdom team to drive this new culture, with Hoerman as its leader. Wisdom teammates build and maintain the community vibe through programs, training, company events, contests and regular check-ins with teammates to make sure they are living the DaVita vision.
What’s Your Credo? To reinforce this cultural transformation, DaVita reinvented its leadership development to focus on the core tenets of the village concept. Rather than sending executives to seminars on business strategies and how to drive and measure performance goals, most of DaVita’s learning programs focus on self-improvement and life skills to help participants improve their relationships, set personal goals, and find their inner ambitions. For example, Hoerman said DaVita University’s Academy program, with its core leadership workshop, is a “face-first plunge into the distinctly un-corporate culture that is our hallmark.” The academy course be54 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
SNAPSHOT Meshing culture, wisdom and learning, kidney services company DaVita HealthCare Partners has built an organization with community as its goal, and business as the economic driver that powers it.
gins with the history of the village, how it works, why it’s important, and why its tradition and programs are vital to its success. Then, executive speakers help participants figure out their place in the village and how they can embody some of these traditions, often by telling their own stories. “These unscripted stories help teammates see the executives as people,” said Jo Rude, senior director of the wisdom team. Participants are then encouraged to develop a personal credo around what they stand for as a leader and a person, and to pick the one thing they are going to do to move forward in their lives today. “We don’t care if it has to do with work or their personal life; we just want them to leave with that plan,” Hoerman said. He said one leader left the course with a plan to reconnect with his brother who he hadn’t spoken to in years, and another decided to quit because the program helped him realize that his true calling was doing mission work overseas. “We want everyone to find their passion, and the first step is speaking it out loud.” For the most part, academy course participants become more committed to the company. Hoerman said retention rates are 10 percent higher among executives who complete the training. “They are becoming more self-actualized, and they see that leadership cares about them.”
Dancing is Optional Kevin Downey is one of those participants. Downey was hired as lead crisis communicator in November 2015, and he completed the Academy course the following June. He said initially he was a little nervous about participating. The wisdom team is known for being vocal and boisterous, often breaking into song and
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donning hats and swords to celebrate an employee’s achievements. Downey said he’s more of a behind the scenes kind of guy, and he wasn’t sure he would be comfortable. But by the second day he was one of the guys dancing in the aisle. “It was really inspiring.” Like many executives, he said he was surprised how much the program focused on self-assessment and introspection rather than on the business. Even when course leaders talked about DaVita values, it was all about slowing down and being aware of one’s purpose. “It felt more like a TED Talk than a corporate class,” he said. Downey said he was most impacted by an executive speaker who shared how he was close to losing his job because he used to get so frustrated every time someone came to him with a new initiative or project when his plate was already full. But through self-reflection and teammate support he was able to acknowledge that life is all about change, and to be happy and productive he had to embrace new ideas rather than fight them. “Through his own humility and self-assessment he has now risen to the highest ranks in the company,” Downey said. Despite the fact that his job is to deal with crises, Downey said he has a similar attitude about unexpected changes in his schedule. “Every time I get a call about a new problem I get frustrated because I don’t have the time to deal with it,” he explained. After hearing this executive tell his story in the academy course, Downey is making a conscious effort to not get hung up on interruptions. He even sent a note to that executive thanking him for sharing his story. DaVita’s approach to leadership development has had a similar impact on a lot of leaders in the company, Rude said. It also can be a little overwhelming. “They come out of it really excited, but then they don’t know what to do.”
An Intentional Life To ensure participants can apply these concepts, three years ago, Rude built a follow-up orientation course for new leaders to put the village and what its members learned in the academy into context. The program is taught almost entirely by company executives, including Thiry, who regularly spend 90 minutes or more leading the course. “When they see senior executives taking time to talk about the mission and values of the company it has an impact,” said Rude, who acts as the course’s master of ceremonies. “They see that the C-suite isn’t untouchable.” Participants in this course learn about village tools that can help them create a community culture, such as the mission/value report card that leaders use to rate how well they are aligning their behavior with the DaVita mission, and check-ins where leaders are encour56 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
aged to take a few minutes when meeting with teammates to get present with each other. They also learn about the many village programs, including Tour DaVita, a bikeathon to raise money for kidney research, and the Village Network, where employees donate money and goods — matched by the company — to help co-workers in crisis.
To reinforce its cultural transformation, DaVita reinvented leadership development to focus on the core tenets of its village concept. At the end of the class, participants are encouraged to think about which tools and strategies they will use to create a more community-focused culture with their teams. “We are careful not to tell them how to do it; they have to make it their own,” Hoerman said. That may include injecting more fun into meetings, making time for check-ins, or scheduling time in their calendars to get caught up with teammates. “Unless you are intentional about it, it is easy to get caught up in work, and let the rest fall away.” It may sound like a kooky approach to running a company and a leadership development program, but the numbers speak for themselves. Since Thiry implemented his community vision, DaVita has more than quadrupled its network of dialysis centers, from 500 in 2000 to 2,278 today, and its stock rose from $2 to $76 a share in the same time frame, including a stock split two years ago. It also has been on Fortune’s Most Admired Companies list every year since 2006. Internally, the company has a 77 percent employee satisfaction rating, which is 13 percentage points higher than the medical/health industry norm, according to CEB Workforce Surveys & Analytics. DaVita has gotten so much attention for its culture that it built an external learning program for businesses that want to emulate its approach. Hoerman said he is not surprised by its success; if an organization helps people lead better, happier lives, they will be more productive and more invested in themselves, their colleagues and their customers. “When you build a strong community and educate people about why it is important, the business results just follow,” he explained. CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.
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BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Outsourcing: Satisfaction Is Up, Spending Is Down BY CUSHING ANDERSON
Organizations are happy with the outsourced training services their providers offer, and they’re not draining the budget to get them.
E
ffective training programs transfer knowledge and skills to employees, customers and partners, help retain employees, and ultimately improve speed to proficiency for everyone. Organizations choose to deliver training in a wide variety of ways. The decision to outsource rests often on the training quality, subject matter expertise and industry knowledge. Last year, this study revealed slightly fewer organizations were outsourcing training activities. This year there is a small decline in the share of training budget devoted to outsourcing and a decline in the total spending on outsourcing. Organizations spent about 20 percent of their budgets on outsourced activities, down from about 30 percent just a few years ago. Every other month IDC surveys Chief Learning Officer’s Business Intelligence Board on a variety of topics to measure senior learning and development executives’ attitudes, issues and interests. More than 180 BIB members shared their plans, objectives and feeling on training outsourcing. Training outsourcing is typically defined in research as the ongoing transfer of management and execution of one or more complete training processes to an external service FIGURE 1: SPENDING ON OUTSOURCE TRAINING provider. HowHow much of your learning budget went to ever, survey reoutsourcing expenses? sults consistent80 ly show this is not the term the 72% 60 marketplace uses. The types 40 of training activities purchased 20 suggest enter% % 15 % prises use the 2 3 % 9 term “training 0-20 % 21-40 % 41-60 % 61-80 % 81-100 % outsourcing” % of Training Budget Spent on Outsourcing, 2015 synonymously Source: Human Capital Media Advisory Group, 2016 with any exter%
%
%
58 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
% of companies
%
nal training provider use. This article adopts this broader usage of training outsourcing for analysis.
Outsourcing Usage Fluctuates, Budget Spend Declining For the past several years, the number of enterprises that outsource part of their training function has had small variations: up in 2007, down in 2009, up in 2011, etc. While down in 2015, the most recent survey year, the erratic trend continues; about 58 percent of enterprises report outsourcing some portion of their training function for the past two years — a slight increase. Until recently, the challenging economy drove a portion of outsourcing instability. However, increasing satisfaction with internal training may contribute to the up and down nature of these figures. Enterprises leverage external providers to deliver more training than internal resources can provide, and to gain access to better training expertise while controlling costs. Companies that outsource spend about 20 percent of their training budget on outsource services. This is a meaningful decline from 2013 and 2014 when about 30 percent of the training budget went toward outsourcing. (See figure 1.) Currently, only 15 out of 100 enterprises spend more than 40 percent of their training budget on outsourcing. In 2013, that share was about 30 out of 100. Looking forward to 2017, more than half of companies expect training outsource spending to remain the same, which represents a significant increase from the findings from last year. (Figure 2.) This suggests companies that outsource are satisfied with their external training providers or overall training approach. Economic challenges have not fully retreated, but only about 10 percent of companies indicated their training outsourcing budgets will decrease next year — the lowest share since before 2008.
Where Is the Training Budget Going and Why? Some analysts and experts predict enterprises only
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FIGURE 2: OUTSOURCING SPEND CHANGES IN 2017 How will your level of spending on outsourcing change next year?
11%
Spending will decrease Spending will increase
33 % 56 %
Spending will stay the same
Source: Human Capital Media Advisory Group, 2016
FIGURE 3: TRAINING PROVIDER SATISFACTION Organizations are usually satisfied with outsourced training providers service. 100
net promoter score
outsource “non-core” activities. However, CLOs seem willing to outsource core and non-core activities. The activities CLOs identify as most important include training delivery, strategy development and enrollment management — each described as among the most important activities by at least half of enterprises. The importance of various training activities hasn’t changed much the past several years, except for a decline in custom content development. Examining what’s considered important and what’s outsourced shows a closer relationship to areas where partnerships between enterprises and learning outsource vendors can be most successful: training delivery, enrollment and vendor management, program oversight, custom content design and development, and learning technology management, among others. While other aspects of training outsourcing have not changed much, the reasons for outsourcing are shifting. In 2013, a majority of companies chose outsourcing to gain access to better training expertise or to deliver more training than internal resources could provide. While those reasons remain the most important, the ability to “better align learning function with company’s strategy” and “reduce cost” are now considered a priority by more than a quarter of organizations, up from about 15 percent last year. The percentage of CLOs who report being satisfied (either very or somewhat satisfied) with their providers overall is relatively high, and long-term trends suggest satisfaction is increasing. This year, more than 94 percent of enterprises report being satisfied with their providers, about the same as last year, and an increase from 2014. Subtracting those dissatisfied from those enterprises who are satisfied results in a “net promoter score” of about 90. (See figure 3.) Companies that don’t outsource typically cite satisfaction with their internal training operation, don’t do enough training to warrant an outsourcing arrangement, or cite outsourcing as too expensive. These reasons have been consistently important for the past seven years of this survey. This year, complexity of subject matter — presumably custom created content — has become an equally important reason not to outsource training. The importance of relevant training, and the value it can bring to an organization, is summed up in one CLO’s response to “Why don’t you outsource?”: “It is not ideal to outsource the future of organization.” Leveraging external providers remains a well-established practice. Key findings from this survey include: • A small decrease in the number of enterprises who plan to outsource. • A decrease in the amount companies spend on outsourcing. • Companies that outsource are highly satisfied with the results.
83 % 80
74 %
89 %
2015
2016
77%
67
%
60
40
90 %
52% 2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
Human Capital Media Advisory Group, 2016
Many CLOs surveyed offered suggestions to improve training outsourcing. These two seem particularly relevant: • The organization and the outsourcer should hold a shared vision, resulting in a “closer alignment between the results of the training outsourcing with the desired outcomes for the business.” Another concurred that it was important to complete a “proper evaluation prior to selection of training providers.” • Outsourcers who can blend cross-functional skills in learning and development into a single company — such as training administration, training content design and development, delivery — are important. As enterprises continue to recover along with the economy, how they use external providers will change. Some organizations will increase their use of external providers. Others will “do more with less,” and still others are satisfied with their internal teams and will hold the line with their internal organization. Whatever organizations choose, aligning their training offerings with business needs remains job one. CLO Cushing Anderson is program director for learning services at market intelligence firm IDC. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.
䄀挀挀漀甀渀琀愀戀椀氀椀琀礀 戀爀椀搀最攀猀 愀渀礀 最愀瀀⸀ 爀攀瘀攀渀甀攀 瀀爀漀搀甀挀琀椀瘀椀琀礀 攀洀瀀氀漀礀攀攀 攀渀最愀最攀洀攀渀琀 椀渀渀漀瘀愀琀椀漀渀 挀甀氀琀甀爀攀
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㠀 ⴀ㔀 㐀ⴀ㘀 㜀 ∠ 瀀愀爀琀渀攀爀猀椀渀氀攀愀搀攀爀猀栀椀瀀⸀挀漀洀
VIRAL continued from page 42
INFLUENCE continued from page 48
If the learning function is going to create environments where people are comfortable taking the risks inherent to learning — exploring new issues and problems — the learning environment has to be a fundamentally safe and inclusive one. Further, Wlodkowski emphasized the need for the four dimensions to work exhaustively together in a motivational learning environment. “When you create those four conditions as an instructor with learners — this is something that has to be co-constructed — you have the best chance for optimal performance on the part of the learners.” Infusing some of the key characteristics Fractl’s Jones discussed into such an environment will drive engagement and inspire action — that viral shareability. Ginsberg said that in an online space learning leaders could ask people to post a photo of themselves or something that’s significant about their lives. Perhaps ask students to write a paragraph in a discussion or blog format about what brought them to the course to begin with. The instructor would do well to pair learners so that everyone has someone to turn to when they’re confused about something, or need clarity or support. And to build the right attitude, instructors should give learners the opportunity to choose how they’re going to explore particular content. Laying out of what success looks like when creating this intrinsically motivating learning environment is also important. “You don’t have competence unless you have clear criteria for success,” Ginsberg said. Online that might include instructors sharing students’ work who’ve previously taken the course, for instance. Whether crafting content for high-view, high-share success or to enhance worker performance, knowing the intended audience well is key. This pre-work might involve advance surveys where, with the help of some thoughtful questions, students can share some things important to their learning experience that might not come out otherwise, Ginsberg said. When it comes to delivering engaging content that is compelling enough to share, Jones said, “if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million. The medium is ideal for getting to the point in a visually pleasing way.” But learning leaders shouldn’t feel relegated to video. Layne said that when picking a delivery method, learning organizations should think critically about learners’ unique needs and not about what’s trending. Regardless of the delivery mode, throwing a bucket of frigid water into the mix might not hurt. CLO
Learning leaders are able to influence because of the relationships they develop with people across the organization. There’s a lot of communication involved so people know they’re working toward the same goals. Further, this mindset doesn’t change based on who the learning leader is engaging. Influential people get things done through others without leveraging title or position, Whitcomb said. When a relationship has been nurtured between learning leader and team member, or learning leader and department manager or employee, titles and roles are afterthoughts as people gather around a table to solve problems. According to online database company EBSCO Information Services’ Competency Center, building and maintaining influence includes a range of capabilities such as networking, coalition building, persuading and negotiations, activities neither Whitcomb nor Kippen are strangers to. In its web resource “Competency Center: Building and Maintaining Influence,” EBSCO offers six strategies to help leaders become more influential in the workplace: 1. Create a broad network of professional relationships inside and outside the organization. 2. Think of negotiation and persuasion in terms of mutual benefit rather than manipulation. 3. Solicit opinions and perspectives from the people whose support is essential. 4. Build a partnership with the people who will be most affected by an initiative and whose buy-in is crucial to success. 5. Be transparent about any personal motivations and never hesitate to over-communicate. 6. Share credit with others. Talent is increasingly a differentiator that can determine business success in a competitive market. Kippen said that all new business initiatives should have three components: change, communications and learning. As such, the role chief learning officers play in any and all of those initiatives is a significant one. Yet, Duke CE’s Chavez said the days of the learning leader as an aggregator for all learning activity are quickly coming to an end, if not already over. Instead, today’s CLOs have to develop big solutions that help enable capabilities in the business through learning. “They’ve got to be plugged into the business to be able to do a good job with that,” he explained. “And that means they have to be extremely curious about the business and the problems embedded in the business.” When it comes down to it, in order to be successful, learning leaders have to be curious, plugged in and deliberate about making friends. CLO
Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.
Bravetta Hassell is a Chief Learning Officer associate editor. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.
62 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
GROUND FLOOR continued from page 37 It will be free of charge and will also cover the cost of GED testing. Focusing attention on entry-level workers also helps develop the company’s future leadership potential. Workers who learn the business from the ground up bring a unique perspective to their future role in the company because they have personally witnessed a host of problems emerge and become resolved. Kimo Kippen, chief learning officer at Hilton Worldwide is just such an example. Kippen began his career as a busboy and today aligns learning to corporate strategy at one of the world’s best-known hotel brands. When asked about the GED assistance benefit, Kippen said, “At Hilton, we are working with team members across our corporate offices, owned and managed properties globally, who are our greatest asset.”
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Regardless of their position, Kippen said, employees are encouraged to take advantage of numerous development programs at Hilton, including the GED assistance benefit, Hilton Worldwide University and its leadership development curriculum. Ensuring access to a steady stream of qualified talent has always been important to an organization’s success. Those companies that invest in a well-trained and certified workforce at all levels within the company will have steady and continued access to a deep pool of qualified labor which will make certain that they continue to stay ahead of the curve and remain competitive. CLO
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IN CONCLUSION
Reflect on Your Life’s Journey Building authentic leaders means creating space to reflect on life’s context • BILL GEORGE
I
Bill George is senior fellow at Harvard Business School, author of “Discover Your True North,” and former chair and CEO of Medtronic. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.
n the past 10 years, authenticity has become the gold standard for leadership. This is a sea change from 2003 when I wrote “Authentic Leadership.” Back then, many people asked what it meant to be authentic. In the book, I defined authentic leaders as genuine, moral and character-based leaders. “People of the highest integrity, committed to building enduring organizations … who have a deep sense of purpose and are true to their core values.” In 2005, I created the Authentic Leadership Development course at Harvard Business School. We didn’t realize then how many people yearned to become more authentic in their leadership. Since its inauguration in 2005, ALD has become one of the most popular electives for both MBA students and executive education participants. In the past decade, 6,000 people have participated in these groups. What have we learned from the past decade of teaching? How can chief learning officers help develop authenticity in their company?
No slide deck, online course or workshop will change someone overnight. Only habitual reflection can lead to change. Authentic leaders are true to themselves and to their beliefs. They have discovered their true north, align people around a shared purpose, and empower them to lead authentically. Because they engender trust and develop genuine connections with people, authentic leaders can motivate them to achieve higher levels of performance. As servant leaders, they are more concerned about serving people than their own success or recognition. The first step to develop authentic leaders is to help others understand their life story. For my 2007 book, “True North,” we conducted the largest in-depth study of leaders ever conducted, based on first-person interviews. We discovered leaders developed authentically by reflecting on their lives. Their stories cover the full spectrum of experiences, including the impact of parents, coaches and mentors, community support, scouting, student government and early employment. Many lead66 Chief Learning Officer • October 2016 • www.CLOmedia.com
ers were influenced by difficult experiences, such as personal illness or illness of a family member; death of a loved one; or feelings of being excluded, discriminated against or rejected by peers. At this point, you may be asking, doesn’t everyone have a life story? What makes leaders’ stories different? Well, many people with painful stories see themselves as victims, feeling the world has dealt them a bad hand. Some get so caught up in chasing the world’s esteem they never become genuine leaders. Or, they lack the introspection to connect the dots between their life experiences and the goals they are pursuing. Often this causes them to repeat mistakes that led to earlier problems. The difference in authentic leaders lies in the way they frame their stories. Their life stories provide the context for their lives, and through them they find their passion to make an impact in the world. Novelist John Barth once said, “The story of your life is not your life. It is your story.” In other words, it is how you understand yourself through your story that matters, not the facts of your life in particular. Leaders who reflect on their stories understand how important events and interactions with people have shaped their approach to the world. Companies need to give leaders spaces to reflect on their life’s journey. The best way to do this is to create small, vulnerable communities that meet regularly to reflect. In my course, Authentic Leadership Development, we create six- to eight-person leadership development groups as an integral part of the classroom experience. These groups spend time sharing the crucibles of their lives with one another. They’re immensely powerful — some groups continue to meet years after taking the course together. Again, for learning leaders, the goal is to create spaces to reflect or share. Even though we teach the course, we know that authenticity can’t be taught. Instead, people grow more authentic as they become more vulnerable with one another. No slide deck, online course or workshop will change someone overnight. Only habitual reflection can lead to change. To develop authentically, leaders need to do the difficult inner work to develop themselves. They need to develop a strong moral compass that is based on their values. Finally, they need a space to reflect on their life journey. If, as a CLO, you can help leaders do that, you’ve moved them one step forward on the road to authenticity. CLO
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