Chief Learning Officer - October 2018

October 2018 | CLOmedia.com

World Bank’s

Sheila Jagannathan

SPECIAL REPORT

Learning Technology Today

Fill Your Own Tech Talent Pool - The Future of How We Think - #MeToo: Movement or Moment?

Helping Leaders Create Leaders - Leo Burnett Is Selling Wellness

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EDITOR’S LETTER

For a Limited Time Only

S

ears was the undisputed king of retail when I was growing up.

Heading back to school? Sears had you covered with all the clothes and supplies you could possibly need.

Washing machine went kaput? The Sears appliance store offered choices and styles to fit your needs.

Need a power drill? Aisles of Craftsman tools fit whatever your home improvement project might be.

Fitness equipment? Check. New tires for your car?

Check. Mattresses? Rest assured. Sears had it.

Sears stores were everywhere, from cities to suburbs to small towns. And in the rare event there wasn’t a store nearby, you could order just about anything and everything in the Sears catalog and have it delivered to you.

The company was the picture of stability and its massive Chicago headquarters served as a powerful symbol of that corporate heft. The Sears Tower reigned as the world’s highest skyscraper for 25 years from its completion in 1973 to 1998.

The effort remains a worthy one. Staying relevant and competitive in business requires continuous investment in skills and abilities. A corporate-academic hybrid is the logical way to deliver it.

Now, some of those early investors are struggling to adjust. Motorola was split up and sold off piece by piece.

Industrial powerhouse GE continues to grapple with the challenges of the digital age. What changed? Business did. Innovation happened, new models arose and the pace of change sped up.

Household names like Motorola, Kodak and Circuit City as well as Sears have waxed and then waned. According to one study, 88 percent of companies that were on the Fortune 500 in the 1950s are now long gone.

Look at CEOs for further evidence. The length of their tenure at the top continues to drop, registering a median of five years in 2017.

That quickening pace of business transformed enterprise learning as well. Curricula and courses with yearlong revision and development cycles gave way to learning in the moment of need. Seemingly evergreen skills made room for rapidly emerging skill sets and a more flexible approach to management and leadership. Learning and development has kept pace.

But it wasn’t just from afar that I saw that. My dad But the focus on permanence lingers — to create worked there. He started in the appliance department something special and fight like hell to protect it. It’s not and slowly but surely moved up to managing a region of a bad impulse but it’s one CLOs have to increasingly let service centers. Under his watch, a fleet of vans visited go of in order to be successful. hundreds of homes daily to install dishwashers, repair Being a CLO isn’t a lifetime appointment. This isn’t TVs or fix just about any home appliance, whether it the U.S. Supreme Court or a tenured professorship. It’s was Sears’ Kenmore brand or not. a business role like any other. You pick the best talent Sears was as solid and dependable as an employer available, focus on a solid strategy and deploy proven could be. Until it wasn’t. tactics to make it happen. With a little bit of luck the The tide turned in the 1990s. The retail business combination of right people, right approach at the right started to change as consumers turned to specialist time works — and it can feel like magic. brands. The internet killed catalogs. Dad took an early And then it’s over. There’s power in embracing the retirement package he couldn’t refuse. process and making the most of the situation you’re in.

Fast forward a couple of decades. The Sears Tower, Companies are moving to a more agile business model. vacated by the company after its 1995 move to the subSo are people. More often than not, your best people are urbs, took a new name in 2009. The last Sears retail looking for flexible and creative work. Learning for a store in Chicago — the city the company called home limited time only isn’t a bad thing. CLO for more than 100 years — closed in July 2018. Corporate fortunes come and go but the lessons they teach can remain, particularly for learning organizations.

From the time the first corporate universities were established the focus was building something that lasts.

Companies like GE and Motorola created some of the Mike Prokopeak first modern corporate universities and established the Editor in Chief new role of chief learning officer to run them. mikep@CLOmedia.com

Embrace the temporary to see results that last.

4 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

OCTOBER 2018 | VOLUME 17, ISSUE 8 CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER John R. Taggart jrtag@CLOmedia.com

EDITORIAL ASSOCIATES Aysha Ashley Househ ahouseh@CLOmedia.com

BUSINESS MANAGER Vince Czarnowski vince@CLOmedia.com

PRESIDENT Kevin A. Simpson ksimpson@CLOmedia.com

Rocio Villaseñor rvillasenor@CLOmedia.com

MARKETING DIRECTOR Greg Miller gmiller@CLOmedia.com

VICE PRESIDENT, GROUP PUBLISHER Clifford Capone ccapone@CLOmedia.com

VICE PRESIDENT, RESEARCH & ADVISORY SERVICES Sarah Kimmel skimmel@CLOmedia.com

VICE PRESIDENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF Mike Prokopeak mikep@CLOmedia.com

RESEARCH MANAGER Tim Harnett tharnett@CLOmedia.com

EDITORIAL DIRECTOR Rick Bell rbell@CLOmedia.com

DATA SCIENTIST Grey Litaker glitaker@CLOmedia.com

MANAGING EDITOR Ashley St. John astjohn@CLOmedia.com

MEDIA & PRODUCTION MANAGER Ashley Flora aflora@CLOmedia.com

ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Christopher Magnus cmagnus@CLOmedia.com SENIOR EDITOR Lauren Dixon ldixon@CLOmedia.com ASSOCIATE EDITORS Andie Burjek aburjek@CLOmedia.com Ave Rio ario@CLOmedia.com EDITORIAL ART DIRECTOR Theresa Stoodley tstoodley@CLOmedia.com VIDEO AND MULTIMEDIA PRODUCER Andrew Kennedy Lewis alewis@CLOmedia.com

PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Nina Howard nhoward@CLOmedia.com

MARKETING SPECIALIST Kristen Britt kbritt@CLOmedia.com REGIONAL SALES MANAGERS Derek Graham dgraham@CLOmedia.com Robert Stevens rstevens@CLOmedia.com

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Josh Bersin David DeFilippo Michael E. Echols Paul Eder Daniel Fraga Sarah Fister Gale John Hillen Christophe Mallet Mark Nevins Jack J. Phillips Patti P. Phillips

Daniella Weinberg dweinberg@CLOmedia.com DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT Kevin Fields kfields@CLOmedia.com AUDIENCE DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR Cindy Cardinal ccardinal@CLOmedia.com

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CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Cedric Coco, EVP, Chief People Of ficer, Brookdale Senior Living Inc. Lisa Doyle, Head of Retail Training, Ace Hardware Dave DeFilippo, Chief People and Learning Of ficer, Suf folk Tamar Elkeles, Chief Talent Executive, Atlantic Bridge Capital Thomas Evans, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, PricewaterhouseCoopers Gerry Hudson-Martin, Director, Corporate Learning Strategies, Business Architects Kimo Kippen, President, Aloha Learning Advisors Rob Lauber, Vice President, Chief Learning Of ficer, McDonald’s Corp.

Maj. Gen. Erwin F. Lessel, ( Ret.) U.S. Air Force, Director, Deloit te Consulting Justin Lombardo, ( Ret.) Chief Learning Of ficer, Baptist Health Adri Maisonet-Morales, Vice President, Enterprise Learning and Development, Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Alan Malinchak, CEO, Éclat Transitions LLC Lee Maxey, CEO, MindMax Bob Mosher, Senior Par tner and Chief Learning Evangelist, APPLY Synergies Rebecca Ray, Executive Vice President, The Conference Board Allison Rossett, ( Ret.) Professor of Educational Technology, San Diego State Universit y Diana Thomas, CEO and Founder, Winning Results David Vance, Executive Director, Center for Talent Repor ting Kevin D. Wilde, Executive Leadership Fellow, Carlson School of Management, Universit y of Minnesota James P. Woolsey, President, Defense Aquisition Universit y Chief Learning Officer (ISSN 1935-8148) is published monthly, except bi-monthly in January/February and July/August by MediaTec Publishing Inc., 150 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 550, Chicago IL 60601. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Chief Learning Officer, P.O. Box 8712 Lowell, MA 01853. Subscriptions are free to qualified professionals within the US and Canada. Digital free subscriptions are available worldwide. Nonqualified paid subscriptions are available at the subscription price of $199 for 10 issues. All countries outside the US and Canada must be prepaid in US funds with an additional $33 postage surcharge. Single price copy is $29.99.

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Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

7

CONTENTS O

ctober

2018 10 Your Career

NEW SECT ION!

This month, Chief Learning Officer debuts a new section focused on helping you navigate and succeed in your career.

30 Profile Teaching the World Sarah Fister Gale Sheila Jagannathan is helping transform the way World Bank creates and disseminates content to staff and clients across the globe.

60 Case Study Selling Wellness Sarah Fister Gale Advertising firm Leo Burnett is using mindfulness training for leaders to make everyone more productive.

62 Business Intelligence Delivery Dilemmas Mike Prokopeak Data indicate a more complicated picture about learning delivery beyond the simple assumptions.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY JOHN HARRINGTON

8 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

October 2018

CONTENTS

48 54

24 42

Features

Experts

24

#MeToo: Movement or Moment?

16 BUSINESS IMPACT

Ave Rio One year later: How #MeToo has affected the workplace.

42

Helping Leaders Create Leaders

18 BEST PRACTICES

Mark Nevins and John Hillen Help leading executives cultivate a culture of leadership.

Michael E. Echols Is a College Degree Obsolete?

Josh Bersin LXP: Poised for Center Stage

20 ACCOUNTABILITY

SPECIAL REPORT

Learning Technology Today

48 54

Jack J. Phillips & Patti P. Phillips Stepping Up to the ROI Challenge

22 ON THE FRONT LINE

Fill Your Own Tech Talent Pool

David DeFilippo Working Forward and Backward

66 IN CONCLUSION

Sarah Fister Gale Could apprenticeship programs and corporate universities be the solution to the deep end of the talent gap?

The Future of How We Think

Paul Eder Supporting Your Firestarters

Resources

Daniel Fraga and Christophe Mallet Immersive technologies are at the forefront of fundamental learning and development transformation.

4 Editor’s Letter

For a Limited Time Only

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9

NEW SECT ION!

YOUR CAREER

CAREER ADVICE FROM

JULIE BETTS Enterprise Learning Leader, NCR Corp.

Chief Learning Officer recently spoke with Julie Betts, enterprise learning leader at NCR Corp. about her career progression and how she came into L&D. You didn’t begin your career as a learning leader. You were in customer-facing roles at Pitney Bowes. Can you tell us about the trigger moment that brought you into L&D? I graduated from Michigan State University with a science degree.

I was interested in pursuing a role as an account manager sales executive in the pharmaceutical industry. Looking to get some experience, I started with Pitney Bowes.

I worked in the sales capacity for several years and one of the things I noticed very early on in my career, specifically in a sales role, [was] those sellers that are successful are educating their customers. They are working to become that trusted adviser to the clients that they support.

Michigan State University Bachelor’s in science and technology studies

1997 1993

10 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

You really have to know your stuff to do that and really understand the industry trends and those drivers to bring those forward to your customer.

I realized that I had a passion for that. I enjoyed bringing my knowledge forward to the customer and it helped me make money — which is a beautiful thing. I was able to transfer into a learning role, which brought me from Detroit to Peachtree City, Georgia, where our national training center was at the time. At that point I became what they call a classroom educator.

How did you make the jump to NCR? At the time the market was really contracting. It was when the housing market was starting to drop and fall out and Pitney Bowes was going through some organizational changes. I saw the opportunity to look further to see what I wanted to do with my career. It still is amazing that I was able to become an employee at NCR. My position was originally aligned to Duluth in Gwinnett County where NCR’s headquarters was. I was hired by someone who worked out of the London office at the time.

Thankfully, the person who hired me, even though he was British, knew how bad the traffic was in Atlanta! I thank him, almost on a daily basis, be-

Pitney Bowes Inc. 2001: Field sales representative and certified postal consultant 2004: Classroom education 2007: Aea development manager

2001

NCR Corp.

2010: Regional learning consultant 2012: Global learning business partner 2016: Director of strategic global learning business partners Currently: Enterprise learning leader 2010

2016 2018

Practical Applications

cause he reassigned my role to Peachtree City and I was able to go up to Duluth as I needed to. The customers I was supporting, being a sales organization, were primarily virtual.

I had this saying when I was going through this transition that I had on a whiteboard — something that really stuck with me: “When God closes a door, he opens a window. You just have to have the courage to fly through.” I did not take it off that board until I was done going through that transition to my new role at NCR. That was a really cool thing to see happen at that point.

From a career perspective, it also gave me an opportunity to expand my responsibilities. I was also traveling a lot with Pitney Bowes — upward of 80 percent of the time and I had just had a baby. I was looking for something that was more virtual where I could just stay put.

Coming from outside L&D, what did you bring that someone who had grown up in an L&D organization may not have brought to the role?

It’s that real-life, real-world experience, that — in my case — swinging a bag, knocking on doors, being face-to-face with ultimately our end-customer.

[It’s] recognizing the fact that I may know a lot but I also need to understand and listen to the customer. One of the key things is developing those listening skills as you’re working with customers. Now when I think about what we do in learning and development, a lot of what we do is consulting. I have a team of learning business partners and their whole job is to sit and listen and consult with the internal customer. That’s such a critical skill. We know a lot and we want to share a lot. Especially when you’re in sales — you want to tell them everything you have in your portfolio, how amazing it is, how innovative — but we have to listen. We’re really excited about it but it doesn’t mean customers are excited about it. That’s a critical skill I learned early on — to use my knowledge in a way that is helpful to the customer, but I’m also listening and receiving what they are saying at the same time and really taking that in and using that as a diagnosis. CLO

Trello I like using Trello to organize my projects, keep documents and information all in one place and assign myself due dates. It helps me prioritize based on due date and all of the necessary pieces for each project are there together.

— Kim Stabenow, marketing coordinator Self I am using the app “me.” I am working to express myself as my unique self fully, with thinking, feeling and willing. Apps tend to diminish the self by controlling it to a narrow bound. I am using myself as my app.

— Robert M. Burnside, former Ketchum CLO Tableau We use it to easily join quant and qual learning data to business metrics for every individual on every learning intervention. It allows us to analyze sentiment and ROI with ease, which leads to optimization.

— Derek Mitchell, insight and analytics leader Moodies Emotions Analytics / Feelix Moodies helps me to test my perception of another person’s emotional state and often leads me to more insightful empathy. It is an AI tool that has taught me a lot about other human beings. I am a very visual person so Feelix allows me to express my emotion through images, which seems to be richer for me than using language alone.

— Beth Macdonald, director, Future Considerations Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What app or tool are you currently using? Send your submissions to Ave Rio, associate editor, at ario@humancapitalmedia.com.

Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

11

YOUR CAREER

What Are You Reading?

Invisible Power: Insight Principles at Work

by Ken Manning, Robin Charbit and Sandra Krot I am reading this book because last year I attended a program that transformed how I show up at work and reconnected me to my innate wisdom. I left the program truly accepting my natural potential to learn and others’ potential to learn and be the best they can be. The book has examples from the corporate world on how our mind, our thoughts and our connection to our consciousness can unlock the potential in all of us as individuals and as a team. I now truly see each person I work with, directly or indirectly. I have also learned not to have expectations without clearly articulating them to others. I lead from a place of compassion. I lead from a place of acceptance.

— Jacqueline Akinyi McMenamin, global organizational effectiveness consultant, Roche

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

by Stephen R. Covey This book is essential in self-development. As a remote worker, I’m always interested in ways that I can improve my personal effectiveness. As a leader of a remote worker, I desperately need to know the best ways to lead my team of two (including me).

— Patrick Wraight, director, Academy of Insurance

The 7th Sense: How Flashes of Insight Change Your Life

by William Duggan I am reading this book to learn more about strategic intuition and how it enables us to be more creatively analytical, especially when learning from examples of others. It differs from the sixth sense — expert intuition. I am also curious about how artificial intelligence is changing the workplace and the learning skills needed with this disruption.

— M.J. Hall, learning performance designer, coach and content manager & learning SME, Association for Talent Development

Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What’s at the top of your reading list?

Send your submissions to Ave Rio at ario@humancapitalmedia.com.

12 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Make Your Mark: A Guidebook for the Brave Hearted

by Margie Warrell I choose to read books to invite reflection and personal growth in my own life and work. Margie’s book is a wonderful reflection tool for getting clear on what you want, getting in touch with the ways of thinking, being able to add or detract from that goal and giving a sense of priority and phasing so that you progress against that goal. From my work in leader development as an executive coach in a management consulting firm, I have observed and asserted that the more aware we are, the more effective we can be.

Awareness puts us in a place of choice. A moment in time where we can change or choose a mindset, behavior or next action that results in a better outcome.

— Carolyn Butcher, executive coach

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YOUR CAREER

Top of Mind Learning in the Age of Acceleration By Jesse Jackson Jesse Jackson is chief learning officer of consumer and community banking training functions at JPMorgan Chase. Responsible for the management, direction and strategy of consumer and community banking training functions, Jackson’s globally distributed learning team supports more than 150,000 employees.

R

esponsible L&D professionals are rapidly responding to the fact that we are living in an increasingly transformative period.

This new period, classified as the age of acceleration, is described by kinetic changes occurring across our collective professional and personal experiences. This acceleration is also illustrated by massive disruption happening at high velocity to our traditional business practices. It is an age in which entire industries are being reshaped with routine business models being rendered useless in favor of more agile people, plans and processes. It’s a period where the premium for more innovative and effective corporate learning designs and solutions has never been more important.

However, the great news Jesse Jackson is that the clues to reimagine JPMorgan Chase a more agile L&D organization abound. Additionally, the work to effectively meet these challenges — incorporating new skills, behaviors and knowledge into the enterprise — is what we have been delivering to our current client groups for ages. The major reset is that we need to turn our lens inward with the urgency of now.

Only then can we extend our legacy of building the capabilities needed to increase organizational performance at scale in the face of this new economic acceleration.

The foundational building blocks for making this reset can be found in the following three steps.

First, we need to think and do everything with a digital mindset. More specifically, we must reengineer learning, not as a series of events that are deAccording to

Jesse 14 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

livered at a certain time and in certain places, but instead incorporated directly and continuously into the fabric and flow of work. Developing an approach of always-on, always-available digital learning allows an enterprise to meet employees in a more responsive and personalized fashion. With the speed of business, this is no longer a luxury; it’s now vital to organizational health, readiness and operating effectiveness. Additionally, with the broad distribution of smart phones, mobile computing and cataloging systems, the ability to build, organize and distribute digital learning content has never been easier.

Second, we need to incorporate organizational agility everywhere. As L&D professionals, we need to ensure everyone understands there are no processes, people or programs immune to the age of acceleration. To remain static is to admit defeat. With the profusion of opensource quality content from authoritative sources, our ability to leverage these online channels to secure deep domain expertise in organizational agility skill sets is literally a website away.

Finally, we need learning metrics that track to clear business outcomes. Without question, our NPS data that is exemplified by level-1 and level-2 survey results remains important. However, as we place digital learning in the flow of work, demonstrating the commercial impact of this employee-centric design is invaluable.

Measuring how skills, behavior and knowledge uplift are allowing the individual employee and organizational group to deliver faster, smarter or better is essential to all talent development objectives. Clearly linking learning to key performance measures ensures ongoing alignment of L&D with the enterprise’s strategic objectives.

Navigating these three foundational elements effectively to enhance L&D capabilities is the challenge of our time. Executed well, it also serves as a catalyst to unlock greater organizational capacity for any enterprise while providing greater career mobility for employees. Perhaps most important, it means the difference between thriving in this age of acceleration and being trampled by it. CLO Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What are you thinking about? Send your thoughts to Ave Rio at ario@humancapitalmedia.com.

The most overrated trend in L&D is

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The most underrated trend in L&D is

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BUSINESS IMPACT

Is a College Degree Obsolete?

A human capital strategy requires training and education • BY MICHAEL E. ECHOLS

I Michael E. Echols is principal and founder of Human Capital LLC and author of “Your Future Is Calling.”

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

t’s a broad question heard often these days: “Is a college degree worth it?” This question is most often asked with regard to individuals, but let’s examine it from the company perspective.

We can start with a brief look at the value proposition of training. Training is most often driven by investment in a company balance sheet asset of strategic importance to near-term financial performance. As an example, a commitment to Salesforce.com software is not only a software investment, it is a substantial commitment to a strategic framework for capturing data and servicing customers. Employees not only are required to know what screens to access and what keys to hit and when, but they need to be proficient in the “how to” of the software. This all requires training dictated by the software’s architecture.

But embedded in the Salesforce.com training are unforeseen education-related issues. Without the training, the full utility of the software investment will not be realized. The training is a necessary condition to get value out of the software investment, but it is not sufficient to realize the full potential of the investment and the related strategy. Problem solving and critical thinking are needed to reap the full strategic value.

Training fits into the decision space where context and critical structures are defined.

One thing we can all agree on is that the world around us is changing at an amazing pace, and while it is reasonably safe to forecast some things a year out, it is virtually impossible to accurately forecast even the most rudimentary factors a decade from now. The point is that while today’s training may be adequate for the immediate future, it is virtually certain to be inadequate 10 or even five years from now.

Several implications can immediately be drawn.

First, almost continuous reinvestment in training will be required. The only unknowns are how much will be required and how frequently retraining will be needed. The other, less obvious, implication is today’s training will not be able to fully respond to 16 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

the unpredictable reality of tomorrow. What is certain to be required in the future is communication, problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.

Without tumbling into the sinkhole of the education versus training debate, let it be said that both have their place. The education component can be better understood by focusing on the desirable skills of critical thinking and problem solving. While the context of trained skills is always known, the context of problem solving, by definition, is never known beforehand. Problem solving always requires the decision-maker to figure it out based on information and decision parameters previously unforeseen.

Training fits into the decision space where the context and critical structures are precisely defined — in the case of Salesforce.com, by the code of the software.

In the case of education, the thought patterns and skills required to think critically about new problems are homed in classes where compare-and-contrast tasks are debated in high-quality education settings.

If critical thinking and problem solving are the responsibility of colleges and universities, which I believe they are, the opportunity for improvement is certainly there. One need look no further than the groundbreaking research reported in the book “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa.

The research conclusions are, to say the least, disheartening. Nonetheless, when it comes to critical thinking and problem solving, it is education, not training, that we will be required to call upon as we go forward.

The one remaining contrast between training and education involves the question: “Who pays?” It is almost always the case that the employer pays for the training but less frequently pays for degree-related education. Why? Simply put, the training is necessary to fully capture the value of the balance sheet asset invested in by the company. Such is almost never the case with a degree seeking expenditures. Education never appears on the balance sheet.

Training is most often necessary but not sufficient to gain the full value of the human capital investment. For problem solving and critical thinking, a college education is the most desirable, even with all its imperfections. A complete human capital strategy requires both training and education. CLO

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BEST PRACTICES

LXP: Poised for Center Stage

The learning experience market has reached a turning point • BY JOSH BERSIN

T Josh Bersin is an industry analyst and founder of Bersin by Deloitte. He can be reached at editor@ CLOmedia.com.

he recent acquisition of Pathgather, a pioneer in learning experience solutions, by Degreed, a leading content provider founded around the principle of “jailbreaking the degree,” marked an important turning point in the learning experience market.

The coming together of these two visionary companies emphasizes the importance now placed on learner experience, which was once viewed as a “nice to have” bonus of corporate training that came after enrollment numbers, completion rates, time spent and other administrative-focused measurements.

Learning experience platforms, or LXPs, currently comprise a small piece of corporate training spending, about $200 million to $250 million compared with about $5 billion spent on LMSs. However, whereas the LMS market is mature and growing only at a rate of 3 to 4 percent annually, primarily due to product turnovers and corporate growth, the LXP market is projected to grow at a rate of about 150 to 200 percent annually.

LXP market growth is fueled by several factors, the first being learner demand. Employees now have a wealth of resources literally at their fingertips for learning — most of which likely reside outside formal corporate training offerings. Think about how often you turn to Google or YouTube to quickly research a topic. Learners no longer have the patience to wade through online courses to get to the information most relevant to their jobs.

They want consumer-like learning experiences with recommendations based on their interests, job roles and career goals. Excellent mobile experiences are a must.

A second driver is the sheer size of the workforce population. There are more than 500 million working professionals in the world and nearly a billion employees overall (factoring in part-time, temporary and side-gig workers). All of them need learning at some point in their job, whether it be for onboarding, compliance or training to use the tools of their trade. So if one considers the potential recurring revenue fees to deliver training to all these people, it is easily a multibillion dollar market.

The third factor is overall disenchantment with traditional LMSs, once viewed as the core of corporate learning. While they vary in their user interfaces, LMSs primarily perform administrative

18 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

functions such as tracking registrations and course completions, documenting compliance, and managing workflow and training cost allocation. Employees don’t use LMSs that much other than to occasionally launch courses. Additionally, many LMSs are expensive to own and cumbersome to administer. These systems are increasingly viewed as part of the enterprise resource planning ecosystem with IT and HR as their primary users.

The LXP market is projected to grow 150 to 200 percent annually.

Because the LXP market is still in its infancy, it will continue to evolve and likely change shape.

As more learning moves to short-form video (microlearning) and more courses are authored by experts and employees, we can expect LXPs to deliver learning straight to work platforms, such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google G-Suite.

Today, IBM Watson can deliver learning through conversations, and several vendors, such as Filtered and Buttlerfly.ai, specialize in connecting employees with experts to help them learn what they need to know. Skillsoft’s Percipio has a feature called ELSA, the Embedded Learning Synchronized Assistant, that recommends content based on an employee’s web activity, and Degreed offers integrations with Slack.

Additionally, the fast-growing marketplace of on-demand digital adoption tools (WalkMe, EnableNow, EdCast’s GuideMe) is impinging on this space with software that recommends instructional content based on job and learning history and functionality that monitors minute-by-minute activity to guide and help learners along the way.

And certainly, learning offers some of the most exciting uses for AI and conversational systems. I fully expect that the LXP will become the platform for some of the most advanced AI-based innovations. CLO

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Stepping Up to the ROI Challenge

Connecting leadership development to ROI • BY JACK J. PHILLIPS AND PATTI P. PHILLIPS

I

Jack J. Phillips is the chairman, and Patti P. Phillips is president and CEO of the ROI Institute.

They can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

n his 2017 Chief Learning Officer article, “The Business Case for Leadership Development,” William C. Byham, founder and CEO of Development Dimensions International, notes the following: “An article in McKinsey Quarterly accused U.S. companies of lavishing $14 billion per year on programs to nurture their leaders while seeing little in return.” The Wall Street Journal ran an article a few years ago titled “So Much Training, So Little to Show for It.” And the authors of an October 2016 article in Harvard Business Review referred to leadership development programs as the “great training robbery.”

Some estimates put the annual investment in leadership development in the U.S. at $50 billion. When the cost of travel and the time of leaders involved increases, that amount increases to more than $100 billion. Globally, the amount is more than $500 billion.

The considerable need for leadership development but low expectation of a documented return on it presents a quandary for CLOs who understand how critical it is to develop their organizations’ leaders.

In the past, the providers of leadership development have been reluctant to step up to the challenge of connecting leadership development directly to the business.

But that seems to be changing.

Several authors of best-selling leadership books, for example, are beginning with the end in mind. Liz Wiseman’s “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” is being used worldwide to drive business results. Wiseman Group’s global partners are trained and certified to offer courses in the Multipliers method-

business. This organization’s approach is based on the Marine Corps’ leadership model, and their book is endorsed by Frederick W. Smith, chairman and CEO of FedEx Corp.

In another example, Eric Kaufmann, author of “The Four Virtues of a Leader,” takes a holistic approach to business connection. In his book, Kaufmann brings leadership development into the company by meeting with top executives and identifying the key business measures that may need to improve with leadership development and coaching. Having business discussions with top executives represents a major shift; some executives are not interested in connecting leadership development to the business directly while others are requiring the connection for the program to be implemented.

Even in large organizations, leadership providers are stepping up to this challenge. Last year, for example, The Ken Blanchard Cos. produced a webcast, “Making the Business Case for Leadership Training,” detailing how leadership training should drive business value. In the webcast, David Witt suggested it’s time to connect leadership development to impact and ROI measures.

This was followed by Byham’s CLO article, “The Business Case for Leadership Development,” which showed how leadership development connects to major organizational measures. According to the “Global Leadership Forecast 2014-15,” conducted by The Conference Board and DDI, 81 percent of people who report to a trained leader said they were more engaged in their jobs. Even more important is how the change in leader behavior in 43 companies affected important business metrics. A further 22 companies calculated ROI for their training programs and found ROI figures ranged from 147 percent to 633 percent.

In some organizations, programs have been redesigned so the leaders involved can clearly see how those programs connect to ROI. For example, the Employers Council, a Denver-based nonprofit specializing in supporting organizations with HR law, HR services and training, offers an Intentional Leader program. They ology, which connects programs to the business and have dedicated a module where participants connect helps calculate the financial ROI of those programs. their leadership development to key performance meaAngie Morgan, Courtney Lynch and Sean Lynch, sures. The program is built around a project that particauthors of “Spark: How to Lead Yourself and Others to ipants complete to show impact and ROI. Greater Success,” have made a similar commitment.

This underscores that something as soft as leadership Through their leadership development company, Lead development has a business connection — good news Star, they are connecting leadership development to the for top executives. CLO

The need for development but low expectation of a documented return presents a quandary.

20 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

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Working Forward and Backward Start with quick wins to establish a master plan • BY DAVID DeFILIPPO

L David DeFilippo is chief learning officer for Suffolk.

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

ike any field, the learning and talent profession requires a certain amount of expertise that comes from a combination of education and experience.

Along with those capabilities there are different opinions and approaches to carrying out this work, all of which are valid in their own right. As practitioners, we need to leverage our skills and experience to achieve results for the sake of our organizations.

Therein lies one of the perennial challenges between developing perfect versus practical solutions.

Knowing that the world and the enterprises in which we serve continue to move and innovate faster than ever, the question becomes how to work within them in a way that sets them up for long-term success and delivers tangible results. I have found three ways to approach this challenge that have both provided me with learning and served me well over the years: a combination of defining the master plan, breaking it down into quick wins and using that progress to take on next challenges.

One of the biggest challenges I see practitioners struggle with is developing their game plan (or strategic plan) in the face of stakeholders’ desire for immediate progress. Whether tasked with starting up a new function or turning around an existing one, beginning with a “plan for the plan” is a key step to demonstrate that one has a process that leads to a strategic plan. By being transparent about this process, stakeholder expectations can be managed effectively. For example, this plan might take shape as a 30- or 100-day road map based on the size and scope of the challenge. Additionally, you may feel more comfortable at this stage responding to questions with less concrete answers, such as, “I really don’t know until I conduct the due diligence to identify the issues and proposed solutions.” At this stage, knowing one’s process to gather data to then develop a plan is more important than sharing the eventual solutions.

The next step is where the meat gets put on the bones: developing a long-term approach based on internal and external benchmarking in order to define the way forward for the next two to three years. Developing these schemes as one-page documents so they are visually digestible and succinct is an effective way to communicate recommendations to stakeholders.

22 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

At this point, the prioritization of work and rationale for that prioritization is critical. Developing solutions in the ideal sequence or picking the critical few that will have the greatest impact can be difficult. Based on my experience, I recommend developing the holistic plan and then sequencing the development and implementation of the highest-impact solutions first while ensuring they are forward-and-backward compatible with the entire system.

Beginning with a “plan for the plan” is a key step.

For example, when confronted with the choice between working on revenue-generating talent solutions versus functional areas — and knowing that the highest business impact will result from income-producing areas — practitioners are best served to first address the higher-impact areas and then scale that same model to address the functional areas.

Finally, with the plan complete and the highest​-impact initiatives prioritized, the tactical work can begin. The key to this phase is the oft-cited need for “quick wins” to build credibility and support. Executive coach and leadership expert Steve Arneson said, “It is all about putting trophies on the shelf in the early days of a change agenda.”

The bottom line is the most important part of this stage in demonstrating the capability to get the highest-impact work done. In doing this, there is subtle yet real value in communicating and celebrating these early wins to build team and stakeholder confidence. With demonstrable progress on significant business issues, the opportunity to advance one’s plan and move to those next priorities is created.

The key to this planning and execution process is to design part of the system so it fits together regardless of sequence. While counterintuitive on the surface, moving forward and backward from quick wins to accomplish a multiyear plan is a way that human capital practitioners can serve their organizations in a practical and meaningful way. CLO

MOVEMENT OR MOMENT? One Year Later: How #MeToo Has Affected the Workplace and What Learning Leaders Can Do About It

BY AVE RIO

24 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

T

he #MeToo movement went viral in October 2017. Today, it continues to spread awareness about sexual harassment and misconduct, but it appears little has been done by organization leaders to produce much substantial change in their workplaces.

A new study by leadership training company VitalSmarts shows just that. The study of more than 1,100 people found that only 31 percent of employees observed anything more than small changes to their workplace since the movement began.

Emily Gregory, vice president of development and delivery at VitalSmarts, has concerns about whether the #MeToo movement is simply a moment or truly a movement in the way that it creates long-term sustainable change. “There’s been so much awareness that has been built, but I think the behavior change is going to take longer to come,” Gregory said. She said part of why it’s hard for organizations to change is that the bad behavior has been entrenched for so long in workplace cultures. “Your world is perfectly organized to get the results you’re currently experiencing.”

Learning leaders are discovering that raising employees’ awareness about sexual harassment and misconduct through symbolic compliance or “check-the-box” training is not enough. Rather, a focus on behavior-based training, open communication and accountably from leadership is needed to drive change.

Lack of Behavior Change According to Gregory, part of the reason there has been a lack of behavior change resulting from the #MeToo movement is that people have faulty assumptions about what drives that change. “We tend to think if people are aware and want to change their behavior, then behavior will change,” she said. “But behavior change is a lot harder. Just look at your New Year’s resolutions and whether you were able to quit smoking or lose weight.”

Gregory said the #MeToo movement has created enormous awareness and motivation for people to change, but society hasn’t provided a holistic approach to driving sustainable change. “We need to change not only individuals’ desire and ability to change, but the social and structural environment as well,” she said.

The VitalSmarts study identified four factors that have the greatest impact on conduct. One is confidence in the

Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

25

system. Of the survey respondents, 22 percent agreed that witnessing tangible changes at work encouraged them to speak up about harassment. Additional workplace training was another factor; 20 percent agreed that learning skills for how to speak up about past or current abuses in the workplace — beyond “traditional” sexual harassment training — encouraged speaking up.

Gregory noted traditional awareness-focused harassment training needs to change to behavioral-focused training to have the desired effect.

Little progress has been made across the country to implement a strategy for mitigating wrongdoing.

The third factor is having a plan or precedent for speaking up. Forty-five percent agreed that having an idea of what to do if they see or experience sexual harassment would motivate them to speak up. Gregory said that is something that can be accomplished with behavioral-based training as well.

She said the last factor — inspiration or motivation to speak up — shows the power of the #MeToo movement. Almost half of respondents (48 percent) said hearing people speak about sexual harassment inspires them to speak up if they witness or experience similar concerns. “The power in the movement has been in creating this incredible social motivation and community of people whose stories are inspiring others to speak up,” she said.

Research by the Ethics & Compliance Initiative found that rates of observed misconduct are declining, coming close to historic lows, and reporting of suspected wrongdoing has reached an historic high. Pat Harned, CEO of the ethics research organization, said this may be because organizations are doing a better job of helping employees be able to identify wrongdoing.

However, the same ECI research found rates of retaliation for reporting wrongdoing have doubled in the past two years. “When people report and experience retaliation, or even if they believe that they will experience retaliation, that is a very big indicator that things within an organization are not good,” Harned said. While reporting and retaliation rise and fall together, the latest research found that retaliation rose significantly higher than reporting, which Harned said is troubling.

She said the significant increase may be due to two things. First, research has found misconduct 26 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

is often done by leaders, who are more likely to retaliate. “When you report somebody at a senior level, you’re much more likely to experience retaliation because they’ve got more power to be able to retaliate,” she said. Second, Harned said retaliation is part of the culture right now. “We’re dealing with government leadership that doesn’t think twice about lashing out against people who disagree or making life difficult for people who are trying to raise concerns or report wrongdoing that’s happening.”

The ECI study also shows that little progress has been made across the country to implement a strategy for mitigating wrongdoing. Only 1 in 5 employees stated that their company has a strong ethical culture. “It becomes the natural pattern for leaders to focus on performance and the bottom line, but maintaining that culture from their perspective and owning it is a challenge,” Harned said.

Behavioral-Based Training VitalSmarts’ Gregory said any training that simply focuses on what not to do is going to fall short unless it proactively offers replacement behaviors.

She said the training should also focus on procedures for bystander intervention. “The #MeToo movement has focused so much on speaking up and saying, ‘Me too, I too have been a victim of this, I too have experienced this,’ ” she said. “But what we’re not realizing is there’s a whole village around me that said nothing in the face of my harassment. We have so many bystanders to this behavior who have put their heads down.”

Gregory said learning leaders need to offer training that will activate those bystanders. “Simply telling people they need to speak up is not enough; not even explaining the skills of how to speak up is enough,” she said. Rather, those skills need to be practiced.

“We would never give someone a book on buoyancy and then say, ‘Go swim because you learned the principles of buoyancy’; we would practice it with them,” she said. “Communication skills and sexual harassment training need to have that same element of behavioral-based practice around scenarios that people can relate to.”

Stephen Paskoff, president and CEO of Employment Learning Innovations, has been using this behavior-based approach for more than 30 years. Paskoff said there are five C’s that determine whether learning will be effective: commitment, communication, content, consequences and continuity.

To change the culture of the organization and subsequently change behavioral patterns, Paskoff

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asks his clients the following questions: Do the top leaders model values that reflect proper behaviors and are they willing to act on it as a business issue?

Do you have ongoing communication regarding the issue (outside of a poster or annual message from the CEO)? When people do the right thing is it recognized all the way to the right side of the spectrum — and if you’ve done something seriously wrong, is that treated as a disciplinary matter? Is it an ongoing initiative?

“There is a difference between learning to document that you delivered it and learning that is designed to change behavior,” Paskoff said. “It’s not understanding the content — that’s the easy part.

Most of the training fails because it’s focused on giving you examples and rules but not attacking or challenging the conceptual resistance that causes people to disregard the rules.”

Through Socratic learning — which is interactive and experiential — Paskoff said the training should convince people that the standard is important and convince them that if there are rule violations or inappropriate behavior, the employer really does want to hear about it and will fix it.

“Do you really think that Harvey Weinstein — or anyone else — didn’t know that there were behavioral standards that would make their conduct inappropriate?” he said. “It’s not that they didn’t know that — it’s that, for one reason or another, they chose to disregard it.”

He said the training first must get people to understand how bad behaviors affect productivity, performance and an individual’s own employment.

Second, the training should be simple to understand and designed for the appropriate audience — not for lawyers. Third, the training must stick.

“There should be organizational communications that are memorable, engaging and occur from the organizational level but by individual managers, too,” he said. “If you want people to speak up, you can’t just give them training once a year and it can’t just be through written messages from the CEO.” Paskoff said CLOs should be able to work closely with others in the C-suite so they recognize this is a hard-line business issue, not just something to be sent over to be fixed by learning. “Learning can’t do it alone,” he said. “Learning needs the leadership of the C-suite.”

ECI’s Harned said her organization’s research has shown training does not change conduct. Rather, the purpose of training should be to communicate that leaders of the organization care about the issue. “It’s a communications effort as much as it’s an educational effort,” she said. “If leaders are expecting that their training is going to keep sexual harassment from hap28 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Personal stories and a dialogue between managers and employees helps make the message stick. pening, they’re deluding themselves,” she said.

She said the most effective way of training people and getting the message to stick is through personal stories and creating a dialogue between managers and employees.

Continue the Conversation Gregory said part of why change is so hard for organizations is that they have been too intent on confidentiality to the detriment of open conversation. “Even when an organization has taken appropriate action in the past against an abuser, they often don’t say why that person has left the organization,” she said. “So while you might root out a bad apple, you don’t fundamentally change the barrel, or the social norm that was within the barrel, if you will.”

She said organizations must figure out a way to create more transparency. “That’s what #MeToo does; these women are standing up and saying, ‘We’re going to be bold about this.’ We need to have organizations be bold and equally transparent about what they’re doing — because I believe they are doing things — but we don’t talk about it so it doesn’t impact us.”

Transparency is important to training company Fierce Inc., which recently conducted a survey finding that while people are discussing equality issues with friends and family, they are not having those conversations with colleagues, especially upper management.

Of more than 1,000 U.S. employees surveyed, 57 percent said they have discussed gender equality, including the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements.

In the workplace, 25 percent discussed gender inequality with their colleagues, but just 3 percent discussed this topic with company leaders and 7 percent with their broader team.

“Leadership often does not feel comfortable talking about the issues and therefore their employees do not feel comfortable,” said Stacey Engle, executive vice president at Fierce. “Company leaders do not know how to approach it and companies do METOO continued on page 64

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helped non-tech experts find new careers in data analytics, cloud development, blockchain and other high-demand positions. “It’s a chance to master new competencies through training and on-the-job experience,” Jordan said.

IBM also offers a more traditional 12-month apprenticeship program where candidates from a variety of backgrounds work full-time on an IBM project team while receiving hands-on training.

Throughout the year they can achieve credentials to demonstrate their mastery of new skills while on the job as a way to bolster their résumé. “We’ve had nurses, writers, teachers and a lot of vets go through the program,” Jordan said. “It is helping us build our pipeline and helping them develop new skills.”

not have a strategic framework around how they’re engaging with employees on these kinds of topics.”

The study found that women are leading the conversation around issues of inequality. More than 60 percent of women discussed gender issues, while 53 percent of men did. Women are also less likely to see their organization as diverse; 70 percent of men believe their workplace is diverse compared with 60 percent of women.

Younger workers are also leading the conversation. Some 72 percent of those 18 to 29 reported having a conversation about gender inequality, while just over 50 percent of those over 60 say the same. “The fact that older generations and men talk about these issues less often than their counterparts is concerning given the majority of CEOs and company leaders today are older men,” Engle said.

One positive finding from the Fierce survey was that people feel more empowered than they did a year ago. Almost half (48 percent) said they are more likely to stick up for themselves, 40 percent said they are more likely to stand up for a colleague, and 30 percent are more likely to address a colleague directly for inappropriate behavior.

“Some of that is awareness of the movement and that you’re not alone,” Engle said. She said leadership should encourage this empowerment in employees and build trust. “When a leader is open to discussing topics that honor the issue and can move the conversation in a productive way, that’s a very critical skill in today’s environment.”

Engle said learning leaders shouldn’t sweep issues like gender inequality and sexual harassment under the rug. “I’d encourage chief learning officers to talk with the executive team around the approach on how to have strategic conversations around issues that impact their employees,” she said. “In this day and age, with social media and outlets like Glassdoor, employees are going to talk about it, and the more that you can model the types of conversation that exist in your workplace to move your business results forward and be inclusive, the better.”

The New Apprentice Traditional apprenticeship programs for white collar jobs have been slow to catch on in the U.S., “but they are gaining traction,” Hanks said. Along with IBM, other companies such as Apple, Pinterest, Airbnb, Salesforce.com and Microsoft have all rolled out tech-based apprenticeships programs to fill their talent pipeline with aspiring tech experts. “It is a different approach to solving the talent gap problem,” she said.

It can also be a very effective model for finding and developing great talent, Bay added. “Apprentices will put more skin in the game because they see the opportunity.”

It’s important to note that apprenticeships are not the same as internships. Internships provide students with a glimpse of a specific career path over a short term, whereas apprentices are there to work and learn the skills needed for a specific job, which they hope to fill at the end of the program.

Apprenticeship programs are more intensive than internships and require a greater investment in training and mentoring, but they often lead to a better-trained employee. “We benefit just as much as they do,” Jordan said.

Companies that have never trained talent into technical roles may feel overwhelmed by the prospect of creating an apprenticeship program or launching an in-house bootcamp, but it is okay to start small, Jordan said. She encourages business leaders to start by thinking about what skills they really require and how they could transfer their existing knowledge to a new generation of workers.

“We have an opportunity to change the trajectory of the industry by looking beyond computer science degrees,” she said. “Programs like these are how the future of work will evolve.” CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

64 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Unintended Consequences While the majority of respondents in the VitalSmarts survey believe #MeToo is a healthy movement, 1 in 5 said the movement has been less safe for the “potentially accused,” as they believe it is now less safe to mentor or coach the opposite sex, to admit past or present harm, or to express genuine romantic interest in the workplace.

“There is such an overreaction and fear in a subset of the population,” Gregory said. In fact, 65 percent of men reported feeling less psychologically safe to mentor or coach a member of the opposite sex.

“Because of the traditional power hierarchy and the power structure — because ultimately harassment is about an imbalance of power — there has been a lot of focus on creating more safety for women to speak up, to be free of harassment, for all of that — and that’s very necessary,” Gregory said. “What’s happening, though, is that some men have relied on that power imbalance to feel safe themselves. So, I feel safe because I’m in power and this shifting of those power balances — this leveling of these power balances — is then frightening to me because I am losing what I have long considered to be my source of power.”

In reality, though, you don’t need power to feel safe in the workplace, Gregory said.

“They’re reacting very defensively and pulling back,” she said. “They just want to feel safe. That’s what all people want.”

She said there are lots of easy ways to create that sense of psychological safety, to help

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men understand that safety is not about pulling away; in fact, it’s about getting closer. “It’s about looking at other people as human beings. It’s about having respect for one another,” she said. “If women are being denied the opportunity to be mentored, if women are being denied opportunities because they can’t be in the same room with someone, that’s denying women, and therefore denying organizations, to grow and contribute.”

Gregory said the #MeToo movement should be viewed as a catalyst, not as the change. “It’s amazing and empowering,” she said. “But it’s incumbent upon leaders of organizations and quite honestly employees in all organizations to say, ‘This was simply the catalyst for change’ — we now need to make the change, and we need to make it in ways that will be sustainable.” CLO

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Profile

Teaching the World Sheila Jagannathan is helping transform the way the World Bank creates and disseminates content to staff and clients across the globe.

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

A

s a child, Sheila Jagannathan spent long hours with her grandfather, a Sanskrit scholar who taught her about the ancient texts and the importance of continuing to improve your intellect. “He inspired me to follow a path of lifelong learning,” Jagannathan said.

Later while at Boston University, she was further inspired by the work being done on computer-based learning and artificial intelligence for education. That led her to change her coursework to education technology with a focus on intelligence systems that provide an adaptive learning environment. It was still the 1990s, when such technologies were nascent in the field of education. But over her career they have blossomed, and Jagannathan, now lead learning specialist and program manager of World Bank’s Open Learning Campus, or OLC, has been active in this evolution.

“There has been more disruption in education in the last eight years than the previous 100,” she said.

“As the fourth industrial revolution rapidly unfolds, the agility to continuously learn, unlearn and relearn will be the capstone to a successful career. It’s a great time to be in this field.”

A Global Approach In 2001, after spending time in the private sector and with government agencies, Jagannathan joined the World Bank Institute in Washington, D.C., as an e-learning specialist. At the time, 95 percent of the institute’s training was delivered in face-to-face settings. The content was excellent, but not scalable. The World Bank has clients and staff across the globe, many in developing countries with few resources to travel for training.

Jagannathan and her team knew there was a better way.

“We wanted to create a single destination for distance learning that would provide an ecosystem for staff and clients to access education and share knowledge,” she said.

30 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Taking inspiration from education technology leaders, including Salman Khan, creator of the Khan Academy, and Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, she envisioned a future in which World Bank knowledge and content could be converted to distance learning formats that could give clients and staff around the world access to content, while supporting opportunities for interaction and engagement. Jagannathan achieved this vision with the launch of the World Bank’s OLC, which is now part of the Global Operations Knowledge Management practice of the World Bank.

“It’s like an e-University for global practitioners.”

“This is the golden age for learning, and we have so many more opportunities to scale up globally with impact.”

—Sheila Jagannathan, lead learning specialist and program manager, World Bank Open Learning Campus The OLC, which launched in 2016, is a technology-driven platform for development learning to build the leadership and technical capabilities of all development stakeholders, including partners, practitioners, policy makers, staff, academics and the public. The courses help scale development learning by providing a comprehensive learning curricula with wider access and enhanced learner experiences.

“The goal of OLC is to provide dynamic learning opportunities where diverse audiences can learn at their own pace and access the knowledge they need to tackle the toughest development challenges, including climate change, universal education for all, health systems for the poor, gender issues, etc.,” Jagannathan said.

PHOTOS BY JOHN HARRINGTON

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Profile Tens of Thousands Attend First MOOC

“Our participants aren’t just coming to hear from The OLC team began by creating a MOOC on experts,” Jagannathan said. “They want an opportuhow to secure financing to achieve the United Nations’ nity to connect with peers to share knowledge, ex17 sustainable development goals, or SDGs, which in- change ideas and co-create solutions.” clude eliminating hunger, achieving gender equality, One of the great features of this and other OLC and providing quality education and clean water.

MOOCs is that even though it is distance learning, “Since achieving the SDGs will require far more there are opportunities to engage and interact with the funding than aid can provide, the World Bank Group, content and other participants, Jagannathan said. “It is together with other multilateral development banks an open, interactive and networked environment, where and the [International development lessons continuously captured throughout Monetary Fund], commit- the world are available at your fingertips just in time and ted to use billions in invest- in versatile formats — from bite-sized lessons to fullment funding, aid and length courses to peer-to-peer conversations.” grants to catalyze trillions Along with message boards, which averaged hunin financing of all kinds,” dreds of posts per week, participants were asked to said Julius Gwyer, program identify a development problem in their communities officer in the development as a final project and propose a financing solution by finance vice presidency of applying lessons from the course. They produced althe World Bank Group in most 1,800 creative digital artifacts, many of which Washington. “World Bank could be used to launch real-world financing projects. clients need guidance on “We have generated a lot of awareness in a lot of comhow to find and mobilize munities with this course, and a call to action was put sources of financing. The out encouraging participants to be innovative within — Sheila Jagannathan MOOC was a tremendous their professional contexts,” Gwyer said. opportunity to raise awareness of the agenda.”

Gwyer’s team reached out to Jagannathan for help Something for Everyone creating a program to assist clients to better underSince that first program, OLC has rolled out a stand how public and private sources of financing number of additional MOOCs expanding on the ficould be accessed worldwide. She first helped them nancing course and tackling other big topics, which define the goals of the program, the audience and the they host throughout the year. The OLC team has timeline, then she recommended a MOOC as the also built a library of bite-sized training for staff on best solution to meet their goals. the go, self-paced courses and other knowledge conOnce the idea was approved, they created the con- tent, including lectures, papers and documents. tent and format for a four-week MOOC taught by “Sheila has developed a suite of learning products five World Bank instructors along with presentations and tools that are increasing the World Bank Group’s from government officials and private sector experts. outreach and capacity building, enabling deeper enThe free course was open to anyone anywhere in the gagement with development partners around the world with internet access.

The OLC team wasn’t certain who in the community would respond, but they were pleasantly surprised. Approximately 50,000 participants from nearly 200 countries and territories signed up for the two offerings of the course. “We were delighted by the strong support and levels of participation we received for the MOOC, which included a number of policy-makers, government ministers and private sector investors, and colleagues in other international organizations,” Gwyer said. Based on its success, plans are underway to offer the course a third time, drilling down into case studies and more specifics on innovative fi- Sheila Jagannathan, lead learning specialist and program manager of World Bank’s Open nancing approaches and instruments.

Learning Campus, continues on her path of lifelong learning inspired by her grandfather.

“Our participants aren’t just coming to hear from experts.

They want an opportunity to connect with peers to share knowledge, exchange ideas and co-create solutions.”

32 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Profile developing a state-of-the-art e-learning course, and she was a partner to us throughout the process.”

The Future Is Virtual

Jagannathan believes VR, along with AI, geospatial data and learning analytics will continue to spur the evolution of educational technology.

world,” Gwyer said. “I congratulate her and her team on this incredible accomplishment.”

She’s also become a valuable resource to department heads across the World Bank Group, including Samuel Lantei Mills, senior health specialist for the World Bank in Washington. In 2015, Mills reached out to Jagannathan for help developing a course on how to enhance local capacity for improving civil registration and vital statistics (CRVS) systems in low and middle-income countries. The goal was to encourage communities to create official documents for births, deaths and other life events so citizens have a documented history and communities have a better sense of their population trends.

Many of the sustainable development goal indicators require functioning CRVS systems for effective monitoring. However, more than 100 low- and middle-income countries have deficient systems, according to a World Bank report co-authored by Mills. “Civil registration is key to identifying the poor to provide them with essential social and financial services,” Mills said.

“Vital statistics are crucial for planning and monitoring each country’s targeted policies, programs and services.”

Mills knew a distance learning-based training program could be a cost-effective and far-reaching way to promote adoption of CRVS systems. “But I had no experience creating training,” he said. So he asked Jagannathan for help.

She guided his team through every step along the way, from setting learning goals and developing content to helping them secure resources to fund the project. OLC launched a self-paced version of the course in May 2017 — ahead of schedule — and rolled out a fully facilitated distance learning course with 13 modules guided by global experts later that year. “This course is having a real impact on people in many countries,” Mills said.

Additionally, Jagannathan assisted with the launch of a French version of the course in June 2018, and a Spanish version will be released shortly.

“We are very grateful to Sheila and all of the people she helped,” Mills said. “This was our first foray into

Jagannathan continues to work with her OLC staff and World Bank partners across the globe to generate new MOOCs, self-paced courses and other e-learning elements to foster a culture of global knowledge sharing and to ensure the data and ideas generated by the World Bank have a platform from which to be disseminated.

This includes transforming the World Bank’s annual “World Development” reports into e-learning modules to make them more accessible to a broader audience.

She noted that these reports provide vital data on global trends and risks, but they can run up to 1,000 pages, making them difficult to digest. Instead, her team is converting them into four-week MOOCs that are highly interactive, including lectures and opportunities to discuss results. Thousands of people have attended the MOOCs. It’s just another example of how her team is rethinking the way World Bank provides content to its constituents. “We have flipped the model to 95 percent distance learning and 5 percent face-to-face,” she said. “On the rare occasion when we do face-to-face programs, we can focus on networking and dialogues about problems and potential solutions instead of lectures.”

She’s also delving into the world of virtual reality, testing the potential for immersive learning programs to help stakeholders better understand the experiences and challenges faced by teams in these communities. In one of the first pilot courses, called Journey to Fiji, participants experience lives of four Fijians to see how climate change is affecting their lives now and what it could mean for their future. In another, participants experience life at a rural school that has one drinking fountain for 600 students and teachers.

By immersing participants in the experiences of these citizens, VR learning has the potential to engage them in stories they can’t experience firsthand, sharing development projects in fragile environments and crisis scenarios, Jagannathan said. “It is a way to show various stakeholders, including donors, policymakers and other partners, the impact they are having in a way we couldn’t before due to remoteness, security and other issues.”

She believes that VR, along with AI, geospatial data and learning analytics, will continue to spur the evolution of educational technology, giving participants a more personalized and experiential learning ecosystem — and she’s excited to be a part of it. “This is the golden age for learning, and we have so many more opportunities to scale up globally with impact.” CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Microlearning: are you doing it right?

What microlearning is (and what it isn’t)

By Tim Harnett

Microlearning. Everyone’s talking about it, and it’s been hailed as a “great way to reinforce knowledge,”¹ “an antidote to the abundance and complexity of information”² and “so important”³ to navigating the changing world of work.

four minutes to complete and enables employees to quickly upskill in the moment of need. Microlearning also appeals to millennial employees, who will make up 50 percent of the workforce by 2020.

But is microlearning just the newest learning trend? Or is it an idea with long-term value?

How microlearning benefits organizations and employees

What it is: At its heart, microlearning is a strategy that facilitates single concept learning. It’s a modern approach to workplace learning, designed to deliver targeted lessons within an employee’s workflow. Microlearning doesn’t replace traditional learning strategies, but rather complements them by providing learning opportunities to upskill employees in the moment of need.

What it isn’t: Microlearning isn’t simply big content broken down into little content, e.g., a 20-minute video edited into four five-minute sections. Instead, each microlearning lesson is a distillation of a single idea or concept, resulting in a learning opportunity that is selfcontained and complete.

“It’s not the size of the lesson, it’s the size of the idea.”

—Summer Salomonsen, chief learning officer, Grovo Why microlearning — and why now?

Rapidly evolving technology is changing the way people work — and increasing the need for knowledge and skills that will enable people to do that work well. Yet today’s employee has even less time to learn on the job: a mere 4.8 minutes each day, less than 1 percent of the work week.⁴ Because microlearning is concise, practical and empowering, it’s a powerful tool for delivering relevant training to busy — and often distracted — employees.

Each short lesson is focused on one concept, takes under

According to research by Aberdeen, 60 percent of bestin-class companies are more likely than all others to see microlearning as “effective for employee development.”⁵ These companies already know that microlearning offers benefits beyond enabling fast, relevant delivery of training.⁶

What can microlearning do for your organization?

• Make learning more engaging. Studies show microlearning is 58 percent more engaging than traditional training.

• Increase completion rates. In contrast to traditional training, 97 percent of microlearning assignments are completed.⁷ • Increase concept retention. In 1885, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus estimated 80 percent of learned content is lost after a mere 30 days. Yet repetition and relevance can radically increase concept stickiness. Microlearning is both relevant, as it’s delivered within the flow of work, and repetitive, as learners can repeat the lessons at will.

• Meet the modern employee’s need for flexibility.

Microlearning is accessible in the flow of work, at precisely the moment of need. When microlearning opportunities are made mobile, employees can access training on a break between meetings, while waiting for a client or after a call.

• Save learner time. Microlearning lessons are concise and highly targeted, so employees don’t have to

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waste time deciphering important takeaways — and can instead focus solely on learning.

• Save resources. Because it is the distillation of a single idea or one skill, microlearning content takes less time (and money) to create and can be developed and launched up to 300 percent faster than traditional learning.⁸

Getting Started with Microlearning For organizations looking to use microlearning as part of their L&D strategy, Summer Salomonsen, chief learning officer at Grovo, suggests the following three steps:

1

Start small. Rigorously identify the problem, skill gap or behavioral issue that is holding your organization back. Create lessons built around only one concept per

lesson. Next, begin analyzing what skill (or skills) need to be learned by employees to solve that problem.

2

Stay focused. You have a limited amount of time in which to convey an important topic; consider how to weight parts of the lesson most effectively. Make sure each point is focused on driving your ideal outcome, i.e., enabling the employee to learn the new skill or concept. Beware of scope creep and stay focused on one concept at a time.

3

Make it stick. Make sure content can be continually practiced and reinforced to drive real change through repetition.

Like what you read and want to learn more? Watch the webinar “Microlearning – Are You Doing it Right?” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcnp6VB_7Hs.

¹ Omer, A. (2017). Use microlearning when learning reinforcement Is critical. Training Industry. ² Shank, P. (2018). Microlearning, macrolearning. What does research tell us? eLearning Industry. ³ Bersin, J. (2018). The disruption of digital learning: ten things we have learned. Joshbersin.com. ⁴ Bersin by Deloitte. Leading in learning: building capabilities to deliver on your business strategy. ⁵ Lahey, Z. (2016). From learning to knowledge: best-in-class methods for enabling employees to propel the business forward. Aberdeen Group. p.1. ⁶ Cornerstone OnDemand. (2018). Microlearning – are you doing it “right”? Webinar. ⁷ https://www.grovo.com/can-help/build-a-culture-of-learning ⁸ Cornerstone OnDemand. (2018). Microlearning – are you doing it “right”? Webinar.

First Things First: A Holistic View of Human Capital Development Your company has announced an ambitious new mission for 2020: to lead the world in XYZ production and services. As the L&D leader, what hard skills, soft skills, knowledge and talent do you need to accomplish that mission?

What do you focus on first? What skills will have the greatest near-term impact? What will be important to sustain the company through the competitive assaults that undoubtedly will come if you’re successful?

“Without a framework, we might miss the interdependence among all aspects of L&D and the business.”

More than 90 percent of C-level officers agree that learning and development is essential to viability today and competing tomorrow. Yet, according to LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report, only 8 percent of CEOs say they see business impact of L&D programs. Even fewer (4 percent) saw a clear ROI. These are stressful times to be in learning and development.

With such rapid change in job skills, it’s hard to make sure development is keeping pace. Anxiety intensifies with increased scrutiny of L&D links to business outcomes.

“These are themes I hear echoed from the L&D leaders I work with every day,” commented Dr. Michelle Eppler, executive director of Bellevue University’s Human Capital Lab. “When I am confronted with multiple needs and multiple solutions, I find it’s helpful to create a map or diagram to support decision-making. In consulting with my colleagues in L&D, we created the Human Capital Ecosystem.”

The Human Capital Ecosystem is essentially a map that: Represents the holistic impact of human capital development, so it keeps us mindful of how one input

1

impacts other outcomes. It also helps remind us that there are many aspects of development that can support or restrict the outcomes we seek.

2

Centers value around what our C-level colleagues care about. It’s an issue that only 4 percent of CEOs see ROI from their company’s development programs. “At the Human Capital Lab, we don’t believe that’s because of lack of performance on the part of L&D, but it may reflect a requirement for stronger focus,” commented Eppler, “or a stronger way to articulate program goals and business outcomes.”

3

Helps identify weaknesses or gaps and find solutions within the organizational portfolio. It highlights critical skills gap areas and examines how gaps impact other areas of business.

The Human Capital Ecosystem is designed to help learning leaders focus, solve problems, discover pain points and examine how processes connect and interact within the organization.

Ask more questions Without a framework, organizations might miss the interdependence among aspects of the business.

Knowing the skills of the team will guide learning leaders into asking better questions before starting a new program or process. “Instead of jumping to training a number of people on a software, for example, there are other questions you might ask first,” Dr. Eppler says.

“What’s the business impact? What kind of performance is required to achieve that impact? What other aspects, like culture and leadership, will impact success? How can L&D have a greater impact on financial outcomes, social capital, corporate mission?”

There’s no question that human capital is responsible for value creation in business today. As human capital becomes increasingly critical, the focus is on L&D to make it impactful. The Human Capital Ecosystem helps L&D meet expectations from the C suite.

The Human Capital Lab™ is a think tank hosted by Bellevue University. It is dedicated to discovering statistically stable links between learning interventions and business outcomes. The Lab makes their studies available free to all members. Membership is free. Members also receive the monthly e-Newsletter, Innovation@Work, featuring latest studies and news about the human capital industry. Join the Lab: HumanCapitalLab.org You can download a poster of the Human Capital Ecosystem infographic here: HumanCapitalLab.org

The advantages of eLearning

When building an eLearning program, take a strategic approach to boost employee engagement, collaboration and retention

By Tim Harnett

These days, there is an increased focus on employee engagement and retention, and as the labor market tightens, organizations should prioritize keeping highvalue employees in-house. At the same time, changing market conditions mean all employees will need new skills and competencies. Creating ongoing competency groups for increased knowledge retention should be a priority. However, these learning objectives can’t always be addressed with in-person training, which can be timeconsuming and costly to deliver. In this context, eLearning takes on greater importance, as organizations look for more efficient ways to train their high-value employees and align eLearning objectives to corporate goals.

high-value employees, to develop those skills in this subset of the employee base. These employees might be very mobile within an organization, so being able to reach them anywhere and anytime is crucial to providing them with the skills they need.”

How can organizations leverage their eLearning programs for maximum value? Dash suggests building up virtual teams, using the metrics most aligned with your business goals and ensuring learning continues after courses are complete.

Solidify your virtual teams Reaching high-value employees with learning and development programs should be central to any organization’s learning strategy. Allowing employees to work together and collaborate is just as important in a virtual environment as an offline one and will contribute to a culture of learning at any organization. “When you give employees time and a place to gather and learn from each other, they become a force multiplier within the company,” Dash says. The research agrees: placing employees into online communities of practice through knowledge management systems leaves workers feeling more productive and engaged.2

Going forward, organizational spending on virtual learning will increase. Recent Chief Learning Officer research suggests that half of all organizations will target eLearning delivery as a top priority for L&D technology spending over the next 18 months.1 While eLearning has long been a tool for compliance training and education, Bryna Dash, vice president of corporate and government sales for Blackboard, believes eLearning can and should be used to train high-value employees. “You want workers to collaborate and work more effectively, no matter where they are,” Dash says. “Blackboard training experts can help design leadership training courses for

“With engaging eLearning experiences, you help create that tipping point where learning transfers to on-the-job knowledge.”

One of the greatest challenges organizations face is employee engagement, which remains stubbornly low.3 Giving employees the opportunity to work in teams on eLearning courses can help increase those engagement

2018 Chief Learning Officer State of the Industry survey.

Oesch, T. ((2017). “Online communities of practice support social learning among knowledge workers.” Training Industry 3 Harter, J. (2017). Dismal employee engagement is a sign of global mismanagement. Gallup.

1 2

Blackboard is a global leader in lifelong learning. With over 100 million learners and 20 years of experience, we’ve perfected the art of effective learning. We’ve helped over 1,600 corporate and government organizations around the world deliver outcomes-based learning that drives employee growth in a measurable way. Our ed tech platform of products and services provides a trusted one stop solution that powers learning programs that make employees and organizations thrive. Blackboard.com/Business

levels. “At Blackboard, we have a robust methodology designed to give our customers the templates they need to create meaningful programs,” Dash says. “By engaging your learners, you help create that tipping point where learning transfers to on-the-job knowledge.”

Measure the metrics that matter One of the greatest challenges to understanding the impact eLearning has on the organization comes in using the right metrics for eLearning programs. More than 58 percent of organizations agree that their overall measurement strategy is fully aligned to the learning strategy,4 but there’s still much to do, particularly in measuring the impact of eLearning. Metrics can be broad or specific, but in all instances, they should be tied to organizational goals. “The metrics you take away from your eLearning course should be tied to the goals of your business,” Dash says, “whether that’s a broad objective like bettering employee engagement or a specific goal like providing employees with the exact tools they need to do their work. Virtual courses give you access to a wealth of data, but you need a plan to know both what data you

4

2018 Chief Learning Officer State of the Industry survey.

have and how it impacts your business. Be thoughtful about what you’re trying to achieve and make sure you have the right resources to go there.”

Learning continues even after the course is over Learning doesn’t end once the webinar finishes or the training is complete. Dash advises organizations to continue to assess employees to ensure they have internalized the material. “There’s always a bit of a dropoff once learners have finished a course,” Dash says, “so it’s important to allow for repeat learning to ensure employees have really internalized the material. This in turn helps retention because employees have the knowledge necessary for use in their job.”

As high-value employees become more essential to solving business challenges, being able to train employees virtually on high-impact skills will be critical to organizational success.

Learn more about how Blackboard can develop an eLearning program for your organization at blackboard.com.

Enabling employees who will drive your business into the future and beyond How digital dexterity is a powerful tool against disruption and change

By Tim Harnett Organizations today all struggle for relevance and longevity. With digital disruption affecting every industry, the average company tenure is predicted to shrink from 24 to 12 years by 2027. The lifespan of an organization depends on its ability to adapt to new technologies and processes, and failure to adapt to digital change shortens that lifespan. Both traditional and newer industries face internal disruption and external innovation-driven changes, forcing everybody to reassess how best to prepare employees for the new reality of work.

To stay relevant, organizations must make digital processes a core part of their strategies. Thankfully, digital process expectations are evolving. “Employees of all generations are adopting many of the same perceptions and traits around technology,” says Skip Marshall, vice president and chief technology officer of human capital management at Tribridge, a DXC Technology company.

“We’re starting to see a flattening of the technology curve from an expectation perspective. Technology adoption and assimilation is happening at all generational levels.”

Organizations will need employees with digital dexterity to adapt to change and combat disruption. But what, exactly, is digital dexterity? Marshall explains: “Digital dexterity means having the adaptability and flexibility to quickly and iteratively leverage technology advancements that will improve your organization. Technology evolves at an exponential pace, requiring a nonlinear approach to keep up with exponential change.”

Why should organizations nurture digital dexterity in their employees? “Without these skills, you’ll end up with a gap between what technology provides and offers and your employees’ ability to adapt to change,” Marshall says. “Ideally you want your employees to progress and advance, so your organization can advance as well.”

How can organizations develop digital dexterity in their employees? Marshall suggests several ways.

Have senior management lead the way Employees need senior leaders to set the tone and

example of how to succeed in this new environment.

Senior leaders should set clear objectives and realize that addressing disruption is more about developing people than implementing new processes. “Technology itself is irrelevant if employees aren’t adaptable,” Marshall says.

“Your employees need to be critical thinkers and problem solvers, leveraging their cognitive capability around technology and adjust to what’s coming. There’s no other way to keep pace.” Specific technologies come and go, but the need to react to new processes is pervasive.

Employees can’t be experts on technology without also being experts on knowledge. Strong leadership allows learning to happen by example, instilling a learning mindset throughout the organization.

Senior leaders should find ways to enable learning and development among all individuals — not just their high performers. Collaborative environments can help with this goal.

Provide a collaborative environment Organizations should do all they can to create a teamcentric environment where their employees can learn and grow. Workplace culture will play a big part in organizational survival. “Your culture will drive what the workplace has to do to understand how to move forward,” Marshall says. Culture includes how organizations are structured and networked. When addressing digital disruption, collaborative environments will benefit both employee and employer and best be able to meet challenges. “Hierarchal structures don’t necessarily allow for the adaptability and flexibility of the future workforce,” Marshall says. “Team models and Agile approaches to managing employees will become critical in the future.”

Digital dexterity requires more than just IT skills; soft skills will also be crucial to solving tomorrow’s problems.

Organizations should think beyond what technology they need employees to learn and focus on how best to create true collaboration within their teams. At the same time, employees should view technology as an opportunity, not something to be feared. Viewing

DXC Technology (DXC: NYSE) is the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, serving nearly 6,000 private and public-sector clients from a diverse array of industries across 70 countries. The company’s technology independence, global talent and extensive partner network deliver transformative digital offerings and solutions that help clients harness the power of innovation to thrive on change. DXC Technology is recognized among the best corporate citizens globally. For more information, visit dxc.technology.

technology as a way to learn new skills and chart their own paths allows employees to contribute more to the organization than if they believe technology will just eliminate their jobs. Automation may make some jobs redundant, but it will also create new jobs and opportunities. In the past 25 years, 33 percent of new jobs were ones that hadn’t existed before, in areas associated with technology. In the coming years, digital processes may continue to create new jobs and worker opportunities.

An organization’s intangible assets (processes, people and ideas) can now make up as much as 80 percent of its value. With so much value driven by intangible things, proactive organizations need to put their employees first. Marshall reiterates that digital dexterity is less about technology than about people. “At the heart, digital dexterity is driven based on the development and growth of individuals — their ability to take these advances and apply them within the context of your organization and drive your business forward.”

EAnthony, S. et al. (2018). 2018 Corporate Longevity Forecast: Creative Destruction is Accelerating. Innosight. ² Manyika, J. (2017). Technology, jobs, and the future of work. McKinsey & Company. ³ Skroupa, C. (2017). “How Intangible Assets Are Affecting Company Value In The Stock Market.” Forbes.

1

HELPING LEADERS CREATE LEADERS A culture of leadership is key to organizational success.

To develop their teams, learning executives focus on three dimensions: goals, others and self.

BY JOHN HILLEN AND MARK NEVINS

Y

ou’re an anomaly if you have never encountered a “stall” — an inflection point where you suddenly seem unable to get the stellar results you strive for. When executives hit a stall, they tend to redouble their efforts to engineer a revival through reorganizing, bringing in outside experts, hiring new executives who have “been there before,” building organizational infrastructure, running more analytics or transforming business processes. In other words, they do the things that have worked for them in the past, addressing complex problems with proven solutions.

However, the more senior one gets in an organization, the more likely it is that those tried and true tools won’t be sufficient to pull through the

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stall. In these situations, executives must realize that what is required is a more sophisticated approach to the challenges they face. Fundamentally, this means leaders should focus less on trying to fix the organization and more on reinventing themselves.

A leader’s failure to develop the people below and around them is one of the most dangerous and damaging of all the stalls, a fact that you, as a learning and development leader, are keenly aware of. Feedback for senior executives, be it via 360s, executive assessments or anecdotal, has shown time and again that most executives significantly underinvest in developing their people. The consequence is poor talent pipelines, weak benches and leaders who are unable to fulfill what is perhaps the single most important job of every leader: to create other leaders.

It Starts With Self-Awareness Many leaders get failing grades in developing the people below them, but they often have little self-awareness of it. This malady afflicts leaders of all levels, but it’s especially pernicious at the more senior levels of any organization, since it’s the behaviors of senior leaders, for better or worse, that determines the organization’s culture. If the senior team is not committed to developing people, the organization won’t value it, no matter the quality of your L&D programs.

As consultants, we often hear from executives who say, “We need to create a leadership development program.” But leaders don’t create other leaders just by financing a program. They also have to fix themselves.

They must recognize that their own leadership effectiveness depends on their willingness to personally and passionately own the leadership development of others. Traditional management and leadership programs are necessary but not sufficient. They can tempt executives into ignoring the harder role of reinventing themselves to become a sophisticated leader of leaders.

Leadership development programs can create a basic understanding of required leadership skills and competencies, but alone, they rarely spur the mindset and behavioral change people need. If leadership development efforts are grounded only in programs run by the leadership development function, you risk building a training edifice but never entering into it to take charge of the transformation of the people within.

A strong development team can indeed help to frame a philosophy of leadership for the organization, but the company’s leaders must help breathe essential life into it.

Are the leaders in your organization driving the company’s values and culture? Are they equipping their teams for the strategic and operational ambitions of your enterprise? Do those teams understand 44 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

how to lead change and to link vision and strategy to real execution?

Only you can coach your most important leaders in these capabilities and help them make it part of their personal syllabus on leadership growth as soon as they assume a supervisory role. Few executives are natural leaders of leaders. Fewer still feel inclined or equipped to coach or teach leaders. But you can help them develop in this role.

The Leadership Triangle: Goals, Others and Self Over the course of our work with executives and organizations, we have come to see three elements that are most essential in developing leaders: helping leaders clarify and prioritize goals; deepening their understanding of the others whom they must engage and influence to achieve results; and developing a keener knowledge and awareness of themselves. We call this model the leadership triangle. Leading executives must help their top leaders focus on all three of these dimensions.

The leadership triangle can be used as one way to convey the mindset that self-knowledge and self-awareness are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. Bringing one’s best self to the fore as a leader is how they will engage others to achieve the organization’s goals.

But how specifically can you help your organization’s senior executives start developing their leaders?

Championing the Effort The most pragmatic way to begin to change a senior executive’s mindset and behavior is to engage them in spearheading the creation of a structured program for leadership development in the organization.

Involve the leader with your talent development team to develop the strategy and approach, and help position them as the champion of the effort rather than a passive sponsor.

The creation of this program should integrate the company’s strategic and business challenges, what the organization needs from its leaders to excel, how each individual can get better and how people will be held accountable for changing.

Improving Feedback Another powerful way to help move senior executives through a leadership development stall is to encourage them to make a commitment to delivering quality feedback to their leaders. Time and again, we find that leaders may intend to give feedback to their followers but don’t. For one reason or another they never get around to it — or they give a lot less feedback than they think they do. “Provide me with more

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feedback and coaching” is usually the most common request from followers to bosses on performance or 360-degree appraisals.

Help senior executives distinguish between feedback and criticism. At its best, feedback is specific, descriptive, tough on issues and future-oriented. It should be directed toward pragmatic solutions and productive behavioral change. Criticism, on the other hand, generally comes across as telling people how they should be. It is critical, generalized, judgmental, tough on the person, mostly about the past and appears to place blame.

Help leaders understand that feedback is about creating a dialogue. In other words, it’s not about filling out elaborate multipage appraisal forms; it’s about employing a personal touch. Aspiring leaders need to hear from their superiors, and vice versa. And that interchange should happen frequently and be disassociated from any formal performance management process that affects compensation or career path.

Create a process or system for senior leaders to give more feedback — and keep it simple so they can do it easily. They must then exercise the discipline to actually do it. When conducting one-on-ones like these, the direct report should go first, and the senior leader should listen and take notes. They should inquire to see whether the report’s self-assessment aligns with theirs, and respond with perspectives and suggestions.

The leader should ask the report what kind of feedback they are getting from others and whether they are soliciting it. They should ask what they are worried about and share pragmatic ideas on behavioral changes that could improve the report’s leadership right away.

Discussing blind spots is particularly important.

Agreeing on specific changes and asking the report to create an action plan — as simple as books to read, specific changes to make, a top-three list of improvements — is a great final step. The senior leader is likely to spark a marked turnaround in the aspiring leader’s performance and potential. Meanwhile, they will have demonstrated that they are truly committed to their team members’ development.

Discovering Their Inner Coach To become a genuine leader of leaders, one must make a distinction. Sometimes they are the manager, the boss; other times they’re the coach or mentor.

As a manager, they set goals, monitor and measure, hold people accountable and reward them. They tend to focus on transactional questions: How are we allocating resources? What’s getting in the way? What do you need me to know or to help you figure out? What should you be escalating? How can I tell you if you’re not doing a good enough job? The manager role is a critical one for execution, but it cannot be one’s sole role if they aim to develop their leaders.

46 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Few executives are natural leaders of leaders. Fewer still feel inclined or equipped to coach or teach leaders.

The other role they need to play is coach, and that’s when they can focus on how people lead rather than on what they themselves seek to accomplish. When they focus on the “how,” they engage in nontransactional questions. Their purpose is to help people learn and grow via dialogue to bring out their best and to show that they care about their team members as people and about their careers.

Help senior executives to think of these roles as conducted side by side, not head to head. They are “porch swing” roles and conversations. They don’t happen over spreadsheets. The executive will be less successful if they flip-flop between these two modes in the same meeting: the carrot-and-stick of the boss alternating with the ear and empathy of the coach.

The fact is the honest boss role, which is more urgent and tactical, will usually dominate most meetings. So executives must be deliberate about when to engage in “manager meetings” versus “coach meetings” — and don’t let “urgent matters” drive coach meetings off the calendar.

Beyond the Stall The essential factor to help senior executives recover from a stall in leadership development is to get them to commit to being personally involved. Encourage them to spread their philosophy and influence across all formal and informal efforts and programs to develop their people. A leader’s investment sends a powerful message that will align and engage their followers. Doing so will also help each of those followers develop into leaders themselves. Help them strive to reinvent themselves so they are known and recognized as leaders who are intent on and committed to creating other leaders. CLO John Hillen is a leadership and strategy professor in the School of Business at George Mason University and Mark Nevins is president of Nevins Consulting. They are co-authors of “What Happens Now?: Reinvent Yourself as a Leader Before Your Business Outruns You.” They can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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48 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Could apprenticeship programs and corporate universities be the solution to the deep end of the talent gap?

BY SAR AH FISTER GALE

T

hese days, every company is a technology company, which means demand for IT talent is never going to go away. And despite aggressive efforts to push teens toward STEM degree paths, colleges are just not graduating enough software engineers, coders and other tech talent to meet current hiring demands.

Sixty-five percent of tech leaders say the skills shortage is the highest they’ve seen in a decade, according to the 2018 “Harvey Nash/KPMG CIO Survey,” and it’s only going to get worse as demand for candidates with computer science degrees continues to outstrip supply. One study

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Learning Technology Today

So You Want to Start an Apprenticeship Program?

For companies that don’t have the resources to launch their own homegrown apprenticeship programs or corporate universities, there are many community and government organizations that can help. “You don’t need to build your program from scratch,” said Angela Hanks, director of the workforce development policy center for the Center for American Progress. “There are resources out there to help you get started.”

In 2015 former President Barack Obama awarded $175 million in apprenticeship grants, and President Donald Trump has continued the program, including specific funds for tech apprenticeship programs, said Hanks.

Companies can access these funds through partnerships with community colleges and organizations targeting people facing barriers to employment.

There are also a new crop of nonprofit organizations, like LaunchCode, a nonprofit technology training and apprenticeship company, that provide free software development training, then match candidates with local businesses who hire graduates as apprentices and provide continued on-the-job training.

“Apprentices can be a great fit for a business, especially if someone is going through a career shift,” said Chris Bay, vice president of education for LaunchCode. “They know how to work and often have intimate knowledge of a specific field, they just need support to develop new skills.”

Such partnerships can be a good fit for small and midsized firms that aren’t sure how to select or train nontraditional candidates but want to expand their hiring and are willing to mentor them into a role. “You can’t expect full productivity from day one,” Bay said. “But you can expect an apprentice to work hard and to demonstrate a willingness to learn every day.”

— Sarah Fister Gale 50 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

from Computer Science Zone, “The Technology Job Gap,” predicted that within the next 10 years, there will be 1 million more computing jobs than graduates to fill them.

It sounds daunting. However, the lack of computer science graduates isn’t really the problem; it’s how companies think about the people they hire to fill these roles — and the development they provide once they arrive.

“Companies say they have trouble finding talent, but they have been slow to provide training to help candidates get the skills they need to do these jobs,” said Angela Hanks, director of the workforce development policy center for the Center for American Progress.

There is an assumption, especially among companies hiring tech talent, that these employees should come to the company fully formed, degree in hand and ready to tackle any technical challenge put in their way. But in a bustling economy where tech unemployment rates are less than 2 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is a naive approach to recruiting — and it is getting in the way of progress. Fifty-four percent of business leaders surveyed by consulting firm Capgemini report that the digital talent gap is hampering their digital transformation programs — yet just 11 percent say they plan to add training or upskilling to address these gaps, according to Randstad Sourceright’s 2018 “Talent Trends” report.

This disconnect has exacerbated the tech talent gap as companies ignore great candidates because they don’t have the exact credentials or experience to meet their job descriptions.

However, it is also creating opportunities for companies who are willing to invest in training to mold enthusiastic, ambitious candidates into high-performing loyal workers who have the exact skills needed for the job.

“It is all about shifting your perspective from the credentials to the skills,” said Chris Bay, vice president of education for LaunchCode, a nonprofit technology training and apprenticeship company based in St. Louis. “If a candidate has basic skills, they can learn and grow on the job.”

Passion: The Only Real Credential When companies make this shift, they open themselves up to a much broader, more diverse talent pool to fill their technology needs, said Joanna Parke, chief talent officer of ThoughtWorks, a global technology company headquartered in Chicago.

ThoughtWorks has always sought out nontraditional talent for tech roles, and it invests in programs to support career changers and women returning to the workforce, Parke said. “Our founder believed that if you can find smart people who can collaborate, they will come up with much better solutions than a homogenous group of people with identical learning experiences.”

Their only criteria: find people who are passionate about their field or area of study, whether its technology, art, business, music or even forestry, with the idea that the company can train them for any role. While most of ThoughtWorks new hires have dabbled in technology, few have formal computer science degrees, and that’s OK, she said. “It is a lot easier to teach technical skills than passion.”

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Learning Technology Today ThoughtWorks’ recruiting strategy means most new hires require more training than a traditional two-day onboarding program. “It’s a steep learning curve,” Parke said. But the company has honed its training offering to get candidates up and running in a matter of months.

Tania Abdollahi, for example, was a business major at UC Berkeley and was working in recruiting in 2015 when she was hired by ThoughtWorks after attending a Write/Speak/Code meetup event at the company’s office in New York. “The bootcamp gave me a good foundation to start, but I needed additional support,” she said.

Before her first day, the ThoughtWorks team sent her online coding assignments to help her prepare. Once hired, she was sent to a six-week new hire training program at ThoughtWorks University in India with a cohort of 90 other new hires from around the world. The program immersed them in programming and developer training, along with soft skills courses on communication and consulting. Back on the job, she continued to learn through paired programming assignments and mentoring over the next two years. “ThoughtWorks University helped me bridge the gap,” she said. Now she’s working with major clients on project sites around the world.

This level of training is a big investment, but it has allowed the company to expand to 42 offices in 15 countries and to be named one of AnitaB.org’s Top Companies for Women Technologists in 2017. “This approach has given us an advantage in our industry space,” Parke said.

New Collar Jobs at IBM ThoughtWorks is no longer an anomaly as more companies start to question their recruiting biases. “A lot of tech jobs don’t require a CS degree,” said Kelli Jordan, head of IBM’s New Collar Initiative, a portfolio of programs supported by IBM designed to find and train nontraditional candidates for technical jobs.

“The New Collar Initiative is all about changing the way people learn,” she said.

New Collar supports multiple learning programs, including P-TECH (Pathways in Technology Early College High School), an accelerated high school and community college program that features coursework designed to get students ready for the workplace faster so they can take on hard-to-fill midlevel tech jobs.

IBM founded the P-TECH program in 2010 and it has since expanded to 90 schools nationwide, Jordan said.

Additionally, IBM offers the STEM Re-Entry Taskforce for employees who left the workforce and want to return. “This program attracts many women who dropped out in their 30s and find returning to the workforce a little daunting,” Jordan said. IBM launched the program in partnership with The Society of Women Engineers, iRelaunch and other global firms to make coming back to the tech industry easier. It offers candidates a full-time paid 12week “returnship” where they work on high-level projects with a senior-level mentor while receiving skills training. Many of these returners are former technologists, though the program has also TALENT POOL continued on page 64

Apprenticeship Resources The following resources provide more information about starting an apprenticeship program: “The Federal Resources Playbook for Registered Apprenticeship” This guide from the Employment and Training Administration provides information for employers, labor unions, apprenticeship sponsors and other organizations on how to access federal apprenticeship funds and resources. doleta.gov/oa/federalresources/playbook.pdf “A Quick-Start Toolkit: Building Registered Apprenticeship Programs” This toolkit provides steps and resources to start and register an apprenticeship program, from exploring the apprenticeship model as a workforce strategy to launching a new program. doleta.gov/oa/employers/apprenticeship_toolkit.pdf Techtonica This nonprofit offers six-month tech apprenticeships with stipends and laptops to Bay Area women and nonbinary adults with low incomes, then places graduates with sponsor companies for at least three months of full-time work. techtonica.org LaunchCode This nonprofit tech apprenticeship organization provides training for nontraditional tech candidates and matches trainees with paid apprenticeships at local companies. launchcode.org Mined Minds This nonprofit coding bootcamp in Pennsylvania provides former coal miners with coding and computer software training. minedminds.org “Supporting Community College Delivery of Apprenticeships” This is a report from JFF, the national workforce and education nonprofit, on community college involvement in apprenticeship programs. jfforg-prod-prime.s3.amazonaws.com/media/ documents/CCSurveyReport091917.pdf

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ach week over breakfast, editor Mike Prokopeak and veteran CLO Justin Lombardo invite listeners in to a one-of-a-kind conversation about what’s happening in corporate education featuring in-depth interviews with learning executives, authors and industry leaders.

for a creative, safe, diverse and empowering organization is essential for an organization’s health.

This behind-the-scenes look at the evolution of the CLO role spotlights how it fits in today’s ever-evolving business environment and what learning executives who aim to lead tomorrow need to be doing today.

Back then, the role was perceived as more narrow, focusing on traditional learning and development but with a charter to advance methods and processes. In the early years, the focus was on development for better product quality and customer service.

Q&A With Justin Lombardo Why is the CLO role important right now?

A chief learning officer attends to the organizational elements that are essential for success. All too often, operations or other central functions simply don’t.

Obviously, the first of these is learning and development. But we need to take a broad definition of this. If we believe talent is the critical competitive advantage then keeping people’s skills, knowledge and competence is hugely important. Enabling their growth is what a learning and development function is about and the CLO is a key figure for overall talent management.

Also of singular importance is the role the CLO plays in creating, transforming or sustaining an organization’s culture. A truly strategic CLO can become the change agent and culture keeper for an organization. And in this day and age, the ability to transmit and embed key cultural attributes

You were there at the beginning of the role of chief learning officer. What has changed between then and now?

Under the early visionary CLOs and their like-minded CEOs, the role quickly proved value in advancing more strategic agendas. L&D was no longer viewed as a support function and the CLO came to be seen as a seasoned business executive. This upped the ante for CLOs in terms of their attributes and competencies. It was no longer an HR rotation but a critical business role.

What needs to change for CLOs to continue to be successful in the future?

It is continually evolving. The CLO needs to no longer limit scope or thinking to development alone but more broadly around talent holistically. Getting, keeping, enriching, empowering and challenging talent — from multiple perspectives — is where they should focus.

What’s the most underrated skill for chief learning officers?

Two things come to mind: agility and creativity.

Without these, the role would have collapsed decades ago.

ABOUT YOUR HOSTS One of the first CLOs in health care, Justin Lombardo has worked at Northwestern Memorial in Chicago, Children’s Medical System of Texas and Baptist Health in Florida where his efforts have been recognized by the mayor of Chicago, Chicago Business Council and Working Mother magazine. Prior to his work in health care, Justin spent 15 years at Motorola University where he worked with visionary learning executive Bill Wiggenhorn to build one of the first strategic global corporate universities. He has also held faculty appointments at Northwestern University, University of Alabama at Birmingham and Johns Hopkins University.

Mike Prokopeak is editor in chief of Chief Learning Officer magazine. He directs the editorial strategy for the magazine as well as events including the CLO Symposium. Under his direction, Chief Learning Officer has won more than a dozen awards for editorial excellence. Prior to joining Chief Learning Officer, Mike worked for Houghton Mifflin Co., the Great Books Foundation and Flagstaff Publishing, a division of Pulitzer Newspapers Inc. A former high school teacher and U.S. Peace Corps volunteer, Mike has in-depth experience in education and adult learning.

Listen Now at CL Obreakfastclub.com

Coming to a City Near You Attend a live taping to hear directly from executives at Microsoft, Citi and Nissan among others and network with local learning leaders.

TALENT POOL continued from page 51 helped non-tech experts find new careers in data analytics, cloud development, blockchain and other high-demand positions. “It’s a chance to master new competencies through training and on-the-job experience,” Jordan said.

IBM also offers a more traditional 12-month apprenticeship program where candidates from a variety of backgrounds work full-time on an IBM project team while receiving hands-on training.

Throughout the year they can achieve credentials to demonstrate their mastery of new skills while on the job as a way to bolster their résumé. “We’ve had nurses, writers, teachers and a lot of vets go through the program,” Jordan said. “It is helping us build our pipeline and helping them develop new skills.”

The New Apprentice Traditional apprenticeship programs for white collar jobs have been slow to catch on in the U.S., “but they are gaining traction,” Hanks said. Along with IBM, other companies such as Apple, Pinterest, Airbnb, Salesforce.com and Microsoft have all rolled out tech-based apprenticeships programs to fill their talent pipeline with aspiring tech experts. “It is a different approach to solving the talent gap problem,” she said.

It can also be a very effective model for finding and developing great talent, Bay added. “Apprentices will put more skin in the game because they see the opportunity.”

It’s important to note that apprenticeships are not the same as internships. Internships provide students with a glimpse of a specific career path over a short term, whereas apprentices are there to work and learn the skills needed for a specific job, which they hope to fill at the end of the program.

Apprenticeship programs are more intensive than internships and require a greater investment in training and mentoring, but they often lead to a better-trained employee. “We benefit just as much as they do,” Jordan said.

Companies that have never trained talent into technical roles may feel overwhelmed by the prospect of creating an apprenticeship program or launching an in-house bootcamp, but it is okay to start small, Jordan said. She encourages business leaders to start by thinking about what skills they really require and how they could transfer their existing knowledge to a new generation of workers.

“We have an opportunity to change the trajectory of the industry by looking beyond computer science degrees,” she said. “Programs like these are how the future of work will evolve.” CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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THE OF HOW WE THINK

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Learning Technology Today

Immersive technologies are at the forefront of fundamental learning and development transformation.

BY DANIEL FR AGA AND CHRISTOPHE MALLET

P

eople and organizations need to continuously learn. Rather than a sequence of jobs, 21st century careers will be more like a series of developmental experiences focused on lifelong learning. And this is not some Utopian and distant future; this change is already happening, and leaders need to foster a culture of development and adaptability to keep up.

Immersive technologies, namely virtual, augmented and mixed reality, are at the forefront of this transformation. By rewriting the way people connect — with information, experiences and each other — these technologies can lead enterprise toward higher standards of performance.

VR is currently disrupting learning and development in a number of ways. It’s allowing organizations to standardize and deliver training at scale so everyone can get the same quality of training regardless of where they are or what their role. It allows companies to reduce money spent on travel or facility downtime when training large teams. It can also reduce

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Learning Technology Today health and safety risks for people who deal with high-risk situations, allowing them to learn through simulations and gain practical experience without danger.

VR also can eliminate the distance between student and teacher as well as concept and practice. Companies can even change their culture by influencing behavior.

Welcome to the future of how we think.

VR Training and Development Today VR training currently fits into one of three models: skills-based, knowledge-based and behavioral.

Here’s a throwback to 1966: The Beatles release “Revolver,” the Vietnam War rages on and Time magazine reports on the effects of a strange new substance called LSD. In another mind-expanding event, Thomas A. Furness III creates the first visual flight simulator — and takes the first steps into VR training.

Furness created this simulator to train U.S. Air Force pilots. He built head-mounted displays so trainees could experience real-world scenarios that were too costly or dangerous to recreate in reality. Pilots repeated key tasks and learned incident management tactics in simulated conditions.

This is a decades-old example of the skills-based model of VR training: teaching practical skills by using the body as a natural interface and developing physical memory through repetition.

Consider the more current example of José, who has been hired as a maintenance operator on an offshore rig for a big oil company. It’s a high-risk job, so he’ll need to learn and follow strict health and safety codes to operate machinery and maintain equipment. Before he can set foot on the oil rig, José visits the oil company’s training center so he can be trained in a simulation on a virtual rig. He puts on the VR headset and starts the tutorial.

Essentially, José receives an explanation, then a prompt and completes an action. If he makes a mistake, he hears the explanation again and repeats the

To affect behavior with VR is fast becoming less of a sci-fi question and more one of scalability.

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action until he does it correctly. José uses his body as a natural interface to interact with objects in the simulation, which stimulates muscle memory.

José’s story is inspired by a solution developed

by EON Reality for the Institute of Technical Education’s Marine and Offshore Technology program.

With the knowledge-based model of VR training, content is replaced in its spatial context, enhancing cognition.

Consider Alberta, for example, the head of innovation for a multinational manufacturing company. Alberta needs to catch up on the latest lean manufacturing practices. Rather than traveling abroad on an intensive course for three days, she plugs her company VR headset into her laptop and logs into the training platform. There she can access an entire catalog of case studies, animated scenarios and interactive exercises that bring her up to speed.

Every week, Alberta spends one to two hours on the course, explores an entire learning ecosystem with other executives and tests her knowledge of the content she studied — in VR, online and offline. For 12 weeks, Alberta learns and reflects on what she’s learned and is able to directly apply these learnings in her own department.

Alberta’s story is inspired by GEMBA by The Leadership Network, a VR training platform developed by immersive technology agency Somewhere Else to provide senior executives with a tool to solve the challenge of implementing high-level training on a mass scale.

Today, most VR training platforms are built on the skills- or knowledge-based models. Behavioral training is the latest wave of VR adoption, in which VR is used to train for more human interactions.

With automation threatening to replace millions of what McKinsey & Co. has called “predictable physical jobs,” vast portions of the workforce will need to be retrained toward less automatable jobs. Those jobs include management, customer service and other roles involving sophisticated human-to-human interaction. At this point in 2018, to affect behavior with VR is fast becoming less of a sci-fi question and more one of scalability. VR already uses the body as a natural interface, which allows simulation of social, emotional and even near-spiritual experiences. So from powerful experiences, we can engender perspectives.

For an example of behavioral VR training, consider Ellie, who was recently promoted to customer service representative for an international retailer.

Her new role involves a lot of face time with customers and the ability to deal with unexpected situations. Ellie is worried that she lacks the confidence to think on her feet. However, her company

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Learning Technology Today has a VR training program that teaches new representatives the best ways to deal with unexpected situations or unpredictable customers.

Ellie goes through a series of scenarios that play out as interactive 360-degree videos, and as she completes each one, she gains more confidence. As the difficulty increases, so does her anxiety. However, with each successful attempt, she reacts more calmly and professionally. From conflict resolution to better standards of service, Ellie’s learning experiences are only limited by the content that she can access.

Ellie’s story is inspired by Walmart’s VR Training Academies, which consist of scenario-based programs developed by immersive technology company STRIVR for Walmart to use at scale across the United States.

only gets the relevant and dynamic content that will help him complete his task. In the end, José is one with the oil rig; his body integrates into the architecture, which responds to his actions in real time.

Alberta now uses a mixed reality headset for everything: to process numerical and visual information, visualize complex problems across her organization and familiarize herself with emerging concepts in her field.

She is able to bridge the gap between the real manufacturing environment and the data she has about it. She can run simulations, bring colleagues in virtually to inspect her environment and make AI-assisted real-time decisions on how to optimize the manufacturing process. The learning and the application have become simultaneous.

Ellie needs to constantly adapt to new products and ways of improving customer service. Instead of learning with pre-scripted experiences, she wears her virtual reality headset and launches a simulation populated by conversing AI characters. With the real-time data collected by the company, simulated customers based on real current situations come to Ellie with randomized problems to solve and give her realistic feedback on her performance. Ellie’s performance data is saved so the AI can adjust the learning curve with each training session.

This future is already upon us. A 2016 report by learning and talent management provider Kallidus, “Virtual Reality: The Next Big Transformational Learning Technology,” estimated that 91 percent of L&D professionals planned to use VR in their organizations, with up to 32 percent of people saying they would be using it within three years.

Companies are changing fast. So is learning.

Don’t get left behind. CLO

Rather than a sequence of jobs, 21st century careers will be a series of developmental experiences focused on lifelong learning.

Digital Transformation Tomorrow With the rise of big data, AI and the “internet of things,” immersive technologies have yet to reveal their true potential. The more emerging technologies integrate, the more engaging and effective learning becomes. In this vision of the future, training isn’t restricted to a few hours a week.

Mixed reality gives us a head-mounted display that layers virtual objects onto the physical world.

With relevant, timely and informative data, consider how José, Alberta and Ellie can learn continuously while they carry out their everyday tasks.

Imagine: José has worked on the offshore oil rig for a few years and now uses a mixed reality headset that’s built into his hard hat. It overlays information on relevant objects that are in his field of view to guide him through the steps of a new maintenance routine he has to perform.

Technical teams on the mainland produce and update the information José sees and can get a live feed of what he sees if he struggles with any issues.

All the equipment on the rig is connected to the central mainframe, which receives regular status updates and regulates the flow of information. José

Daniel Fraga is a virtual reality designer and Christophe Mallet is co-founder at Somewhere Else, an immersive technology agency based in London.

They can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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he world is changing much faster than our ability to adapt. The disruptive forces of speed, uncertainty, complexity, technology, competition and globalization have fundamentally altered the way we live and work. Join physiologist Bob Rosen, an expert on leadership and transformation and executive coach Emma-Kate Swann as they reveal the four powerful practices of being conscious.

WHY IS AN ABILITY TO DEAL WITH ACCELERATED CHANGE SO CRITICAL RIGHT NOW? In truth, we’ve been dealing with extreme change and complexity for years now — the world is simply changing faster than our ability to adapt, and the pace of change will only increase. That dynamic impacts us as individuals, organizations and communities. We experience more stress and burnout, and more disengagement and cynicism. We also become more resistant to change and often become overwhelmed by all types of disruption and transformation that we don’t fully understand.

This is all happening at a time when pressures on companies to transform themselves and stay competitive through continued disruption is a requirement to survival. Unfortunately, relatively few of us have been able to keep up, whether at work or in our personal lives. That’s a problem. Rather than having just a few people capable of managing the acceleration of change, we need many people. It’s great to have singular entrepreneurs cracking the codes of their industries — or collapsing the barriers around multiple industries — but we also need people who can do this at all levels. Those magnificent macrotransformations can’t happen without microtransformations happening first, or at least in tandem.

YOU SPELL OUT FOUR KEY PRACTICES FOR BEING “CONSCIOUS AND GROUNDED” AS AN ANTIDOTE TO THESE CHALLENGES. HOW ARE THESE PRACTICES DIFFERENT OR CHANGED NOW VERSUS IN THE PAST? We see “grounded” as the foundation. To withstand the forces of change (and to successfully bend with them), we must become rooted in our physical, emotional, social, intellectual, vocational and spiritual health. It’s only then that we can add “conscious,” which we see as an accelerant, to our leadership repertoire. Being conscious enables us to transform ourselves as our teams and organizations are transforming. The more aware we are, the faster we can adapt, and the higher performing we’ll be.

In many ways, these practices are the same as in the past.

Grounded leaders are particularly adept at caring for themselves in ways that keep them operating at the top of their game. They understand the need to manage their energy, stimulate their intellect and cultivate their connections. We see applying the practices in “conscious” (go deep, think big, get real and step up) as the means to accelerate their effectiveness as grounded leaders. The focus becomes about performing in bigger and better ways, with an ultimately more positive impact on the products you create, the people you lead and the customers you serve.

HOW DO YOU APPLY THESE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES ACROSS AN ORGANIZATION? WHAT SPECIFIC BENEFITS CAN YOU EXPECT TO SEE? We believe grounded and conscious people are the real drivers of transformation and change. In sharing the principles of being grounded and conscious, our aim is to prepare everyone to thrive in a constantly disruptive marketplace. Our research has shown that grounded and conscious leaders at all levels outperform their peers. These leaders know how to tap into their own potential, as well as the potential of those they lead.

When these skills are scaled throughout an organization, the result is a workforce full of confident, agile and resilient people, engaged in healthy relationships and serving on collaborative high-performance teams.

To deploy these principles across an organization, we ideally start at the top and engage senior leadership in adapting and tailoring “grounded” and “conscious” to fit their unique situations. We then partner with internal resources to design an implementation plan that will touch every employee in

some way or another. To ensure that critical information is cascaded throughout the workforce, we offer a wide range of capabilities, from webinars to live sessions to virtual coaching.

The obvious benefit is alignment among the various levels within the organization. People who understand each other, who share a common vision and way of working together, simply accomplish more. Together, they create change savvy cultures and sustainable growth.

WHY IS THIS A CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER’S ROLE? IT’S NOT SKILL DEVELOPMENT OR COMPETENCY DEVELOPMENT OR DIRECTLY TIED TO THE BOTTOM LINE. In our view, we need a fresh approach to personal and organizational transformation. Many existing leadership programs were designed for relatively static organizations.

Today’s organizations are much more dynamic, and our leadership programs need to reflect this dynamism. We need leaders who can perform and transform at the same time, and we need them to be able to collaborate in new ways. It’s the role of the chief learning officer to enable the building of these new capabilities, to cultivate new mindsets, behaviors and environments.

Because the concepts of “grounded” and “conscious” strike at the heart of who we are and how we interact with the world, they are fundamental to adult learning. They give us the base (namely a better understanding of who we are and what our needs are) on which to build any skill or competency. And, by the way, we do see a direct link to the bottom line. When teams, for example, are made up of grounded and conscious people, they perform better. It’s the same for organizations as a whole. Grounded and conscious people know how to go the distance and stay focused while they do it. They’re better at developing strategies and at executing them. They’re better at attracting talent and retaining it. The list goes on — and those are all things that directly impact the bottom line.

3 reasons to hear these keynotes speak : 1. Learn the new approach to living & learning and why “conscious” is the new “smart.”

2. An in depth look into the four key practices for being “conscience and grounded.”

3. How to succeed in times of disruption and uncertainty without falling behind.

Register today at www.clomedia.com/symposium

Case Study

Selling Wellness

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

L

eo Burnett is an iconic advertising agency known for producing such memorable characters as the Jolly Green Giant, Tony the Tiger and the Keebler Elves. But in the world of advertising you can’t rest on what you’ve done. Even after 83 years and ranking as the No. 2 ad agency in the country, according to D&B Hoovers, Leo Burnett’s leaders know the only way to stay on top is to constantly generate a stream of innovative new campaigns.

That takes strong leadership and a culture that embraces collaboration over conflict — particularly in the face of change, said Brenda Strong, executive vice president and director of agency resource optimization for Leo Burnett in Chicago.

In 2016 Leo Burnett’s parent company, Publicis Groupe, went through a major restructuring that included acquiring Ardent, an analytics software company, and hiring its founder, Andrew Swinand, as Leo Burnett’s new North America CEO. Swinand brought more than technical savvy to the global agency; he also introduced “conscious leadership” to the organization.

“If you can cut out the drama, you increase the time and energy people spend on the job.”

— Brenda Strong, EVP, director of agency resource optimization, Leo Burnett Swinand had spent several years learning this approach through the Conscious Leadership Group, or CLG, a consultancy founded by Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman that teaches leaders how to reduce strife in the workplace, attract and retain top talent, and increase engagement through a more mindful approach to management. Swinand found the program helped his previous company’s leaders tap into a more creative and collaborative environment. When he joined Leo Burnett he brought it with him as part of a broader culture change effort.

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SNAPSHOT Advertising firm Leo Burnett is using mindfulness training for leaders to make everyone more productive.

ducing drama,” said Strong, who came with Swinand in the move. “It can be transformational in big and small ways.”

The program, which is taught through workshops and forums, is based on 15 leadership commitments that include things like “choose to live in the moment,” and “stop blaming others for your situation.” The ideas are particularly applicable in the fast-paced, high-stress environment of advertising, said Eric Doctors, former senior vice president of learning and organizational development at Leo Burnett, who retired in July. “You can’t burn hot all the time,” he said. “Conscious leadership creates a space to pause, breathe and be authentic in helping your people move forward.”

From the Top The challenge was how to scale the concept and intimacy of the learning for a much larger organization. The workshops typically involve small groups of leaders practicing the commitments in a “circle of trust,” Strong said. “It wasn’t feasible to roll out to 1,100 employees all at once.”

The learning and development team began by inviting the founders of CLG to run monthly training workshops with about 40 senior leaders in the organization, introducing them to the concepts of conscious leadership. Then they began hosting mindfulness morning sessions for leaders to encourage creativity in the agency.

The sessions focus on discussing the leadership commitments and how leaders can begin to reframe the way they engage with their teams and adapt the team culture to a more mindful style of communication. “The concepts are easy to relate to,” Strong said.

But it takes time for leaders to practice using these strategies in small group settings. “It helps leaders

think about how they behave in work situations and how they can surface ideas more effectively.”

In 2018, the company launched workshops for the next level of leaders. They are invited to sign up for the monthly events so they can get familiar with the basics.

Then they have opportunities to participate in facilitated discussions where they meet with groups of peers to discuss challenges they face on their own teams and how to use the commitments to address them.

During the 18 months since rolling out the program, about a dozen senior leaders have stayed active with the training and workshops, and about 75 to 80 vice presidents and senior managers have shown interest, according to Doctors. That’s an impressive rate of response. “In advertising you can’t mandate people do anything,” he noted. “If they want it, great, but we don’t make them.”

Conscious Book Club Steve Grosklaus, chief analytics officer for Leo Burnett, was one of the first leaders to participate in the workshops, and it changed the way he thinks of himself as a leader. “Every day we walk in at 8 and immediately get to work,” he said. Attending these workshops helped him realize that taking time to stop and reflect on the work they are doing adds real value. “It makes us a better organization and better individuals.”

He was so affected by what he learned that he shared a copy of the book “The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership” with all 50 members of his team and now hosts a conscious leadership book club. For the first meeting, he asked everyone to read the book, then to email him the three principles that they felt would have the most impact in the team along with one that they didn’t like. “About half of the team actually read the book — the other half reviewed a CliffsNotes version,” he said. But they all came to the meeting with opinions.

Based on their feedback, the group compiled a list of three goals: Eliminate gossip, identify others’ needs and partner to solve them, and be open and honest — even if it forces you outside of your comfort zone.

“It was the starting point,” Grosklaus said. The team talked about ways they could address these goals in their day-to-day interactions with each other and other departments, and they meet every couple of months to share stories and talk about what’s working and what isn’t.

“It’s gotten to the point in meetings now where people will self-correct,” Grosklaus said. If someone is gossiping or playing the victim, they often catch themselves and shift gears, or others will jokingly point it out. “Awareness makes it work,” he said. “We are getting better all the time.”

Grosklaus noted that his team members, who are predominantly math and analytics majors, have bene-

fited a lot from the thoughtful nature of this process — particularly when it comes to collaborating with other groups at Leo Burnett. “Our brains are wired differently,” he said with a laugh. “But this process has helped us become more self-aware.”

Happiness Is on the Rise While the company doesn’t plan to offer the full program to all Leo Burnett employees, Doctors’ team has organized larger seminars for anyone interested in learning about the commitments and what they involve. They are providing the books and online learning materials for further study.

Even without direct training, he is confident that introducing the conscious leadership concepts at the top of the organization will have a cascading effect on the entire corporate culture. That shift is already starting to have an effect.

While it’s hard to measure the impact of the training, Doctors noted that bi-weekly pulse surveys show happiness trends are on the rise, along with other positive metrics. “People feel more optimistic about the future of the organization, and they feel leaders are more responsive,” he said. He has also heard frequent references to the leadership commitments in meetings and day-to-day conversations. “Leaders are talking about it, and it is building momentum.”

He’s also witnessed changes in the way leaders and employees deal with chaos and frustration in the workplace. For example, the company recently went through a major Leo Burnett’s Steve Grosklaus office remodel, shifting from private offices to shared common space. “People were grumpy and the leaders faced a lot of noise and push back,” he said.

Before the training, many managers might have a kneejerk instinct to tell their people to suck it up and get back to work. But Doctors saw many leaders taking a more pragmatic approach. “They were pulling together and resolving the negative feedback with more positive dialogue about the change,” he said. “It helped people move forward instead of getting stuck in the past.”

While it can all sound a little touchy feely, Strong noted that the leadership commitments and the related training have practical implications for the business. “Happy people are more productive,” she said. And in a creative industry, freeing people from the conflict that can bog down a corporate culture just makes good business sense. “If you can cut out the drama, you increase the time and energy people spend on the job itself.” CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. To comment, email editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Business Intelligence

Delivery Dilemmas Data indicate a more complicated picture about learning delivery beyond the simple assumptions.

A

mong the nuggets of accepted wisdom about corporate learning, these three are near the top: Compliance training is a low value but necessary task. Classroom training is going the way of the dodo. Learners hold the power in the new learning environment.

The reality is far more complicated, according to a survey of the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board. The Business Intelligence Board is a group of 1,500 professionals in the learning and development industry who have agreed to be surveyed by the Human Capital Media Research and Advisory Group, the research and advisory arm of Chief Learning Officer magazine. This survey was conducted in June 2018.

Let’s start with that third assumption: Learners hold the cards in the new business environment. The vast array of free, high quality learning resources and sophisticated tools to access and consume them mean control has shifted from traditional arbiters of expertise like instructors and centralized learning departments. Learning on demand at the point of need has given learners control of their education.

Not so fast, at least when it comes to how decisions get made in corporate learning. The reality is less than a quarter of companies actually involve employees in deciding how learning gets delivered. Not even CLOs hold the keys (Figure 1). Just 4 in 10 Business Intelligence Board members report that CLOs are involved.

Given the nature of CLO jobs, that finding is not surprising. Many learning executives, particularly in midsized or large enterprises, spend their energy developing strategy, measuring effectiveness and managing stakeholder relationships rather than focusing on delivery methods. Frontline learning professionals such as instructional designers are more influential (43 percent).

So who holds the ultimate power to determine how learning gets delivered? Senior leadership and business line leaders (71 percent and 52 percent, respectively) are most influential. Money talks when it comes to decision time and these leaders hold the organizational purse strings.

62 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

Onto the second assumption, that traditional classroom-based instructor-led training is on the wane.

Again, the data paint a different picture (Figure 2).

Classroom-based ILT remains the most used learning delivery method for many skill areas. More than half of learning departments use classroom-based ILT for leadership development (67 percent), business skills training (65 percent), onboarding and new hire training (62 percent), developing core competencies (51 percent) and technical skill development (53 percent).

These figures are actually slightly up in all those areas year over year. That is despite nearly one-quarter of CLOs indicating in the same survey last year that they plan to decrease their usage of classroom-based ILT. The lone area where classroom-based ILT isn’t used by a majority of organizations is compliance training.

That brings us to the third assumption about learning: Compliance training is a low-value activity organizations engage in as a check-the-box activity.

Here the data appear to back up the assumption. According to survey respondents, 84 percent deliver compliance training via self-paced or instructor-led e-learning. That finding bears further study as companies respond to the #MeToo movement and other corporate scandals. Compulsory training has the potential to be more impactful and meaningful on compliance topics such as safety, sexual harassment and business ethics.

Despite what the data indicates, as CLOs look ahead they see a future where classroom-based ILT continues to decline in importance (Figure 3). Among the areas where CLOs expect to decrease usage, classroom-based ILT is expected to see the largest decrease (28 percent).

The only other significant decrease expected is in textbased training (19 percent). Coaching and mentoring is expected to increase.

Bear this in mind as you look at those expectations: Last year one quarter of CLOs expected to decrease their use of classroom training when in fact this year’s data showed an increase. Reality doesn’t always match expectations when it comes to learning delivery. CLO

Figures’ Source: Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, N=500. All percentages rounded.

BY MIKE PROKOPEAK

FIGURE 1: STAKEHOLDERS INVOLVED IN DECIDING LEARNING DELIVERY MIX 71%

52% 43%

39% 24% 14%

Senior leadership

Business line leaders

Instructional designers

CLOs

Employees

Learning governance council

FIGURE 2: EXPECTED DELIVERY METHOD BY CONTENT AREA Classroom-based ILT

Self-paced e-learning 67%

65%

Coaching or mentoring

48% 47%

Mobile learning 60%

53%

51%

46% 39% 34%

42%

39%

44%

20%

20% 9%

Leadership development

32%

31%

16%

12% 12%

50%

40%

28%

26%

Business skills training

Simulations

62% 55%

35%

Formal on-the-job training

8% 10%

Onboarding and new hire training

20% 13%

11%

10%

Core competencies

Technical skills

7% 9%

Compliance training

FIGURE 3: CHANGE IN USE OF DELIVERY METHOD IN NEXT 12-18 MONTHS Increase

About the same

Decrease 67%

65% 55%

55%

56% 42%

40%

57%

54% 51% 44%

40%

61% 49%

40%

33%

34%

33%

23%

5%

Mobile learning

2%

Coaching or mentoring

3%

Collaborative

5%

Self-paced e-learning

5%

Video

15%

11%

7%

Simulations

28% 19%

5%

Instructor-led e-learning

FIGURE 4: HOW PREPARED IS DELIVERY INFRASTRUCTURE TO MEET BUSINESS NEEDS?

Formal on-the-job training

Classroom-based ILT

Text-based training

56%

25% 15% 5%

Not prepared

Somewhat prepared

Prepared

Fully prepared

Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

63

IN CONCLUSION

Supporting Your Firestarters

Create a culture of support for those who make a difference • BY PAUL EDER

I Paul Eder is a strategic management consultant and co-author of “Firestarters: How Innovators, Instigators and Initiators Can Inspire You to Ignite Your Own Life.”

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

n any given organization, there are doers who shine regardless of the situation. These employees, who I call firestarters, overcome obstacles that appear insurmountable and consistently achieve results.

They have a seemingly endless amount of passion, talent and desire for mastery that you can only hope other employees will try to emulate.

Who are firestarters? They are the innovators who create, the instigators who disrupt and the initiators who start. They don’t fit a set pattern based on role, education or skill. However, they do share a common orientation toward aligning their actions with a personal mission and making an impact.

An organization would love for all employees to have this orientation. However, these individuals are rare, and they are also quirky. Some people may never understand their “go-go-go” mentality. Others will ask why they can’t be satisfied with the status quo or may even be offended by their desire to reimagine an environment that feels comfortable (even if it’s not fully effective). Therefore, anyone can be a discourager, punisher or limiter.

To capitalize on the energy of your organization’s firestarters, you must institute a culture of support for them. Here are four roles supporters can play to ensure firestarters achieve the greatest impact.

Nurturers: Some people are excellent listeners.

They add their energy to new ideas, poking holes and asking questions in just the right way to ensure one’s thoughts flourish in new and exciting ways.

To these nurturers, listening is not a passive action. It involves engagement, ideation and acceptance. We all need someone who takes the time to care about our ideas. For firestarters, this is especially true considering the sheer number of things they hope to accomplish.

Nurturers let firestarters know they are not alone.

They are available to lend an ear, thoughts and words of support to help firestarters make their impact.

Motivators: Some people provide enough energy to power the lives of 10 other people. They don’t necessarily thrive on their own ideas, but they see potential in others and love pushing people to achieve their greatest potential. These motivators can help firestarters maintain their spark of passion and won’t let them accept failure when a situation seems tough.

The best motivators often appear to be firestarters at first. But when you talk to them, you discover they

66 Chief Learning Officer • October 2018 • www.CLOmedia.com

are passionate about helping others achieve their goals.

Their orientation is not toward a personal mission.

Illuminators: All learners need great teachers.

Teachers can inspire others to dream and achieve.

They realize the powers that others have when passion is infused with the right combination of skills and knowledge.

These illuminators have a growth orientation; however, the growth they concern themselves with is not their own. They show firestarters new mental pathways and often plant the seeds that inspire them for years to come.

Not everyone can be a firestarter, but all can be supporters.

Illuminators may also be firestarters who have decided to give back. They refocus their attention away from their personal mission to ignite others to make an impact. Illuminators recognize potential in those around them and work to ensure that potential blossoms into a prosperous reality.

Protectors: The motives and actions of quirky people are often met with doubt. The energy needed to thwart unwarranted criticism may then be pulled away from their true passions. The notoriously quirky firestarter needs others in their life who are willing to step up to their defense.

These bold defenders — or protectors — see firestarters’ potential. However, they also see the roadblocks that others present in the firestarters’ path.

Protectors take personal responsibility for removing roadblocks so firestarters can maintain their focus.

Protectors know the difference between defending and enabling. Their role is not to prop someone up in spite of their faults. Rather, they see qualities that others view as faults, and they work to ensure those perceptions are erased and the true value is highlighted.

A culture of support emphasizes these four roles. Not everyone can be a firestarter, but all can be supporters.

By adopting these roles, we agree to become partners in a powerful journey. Success often requires removing ego and accepting that our largest impact may be serving as best supporting actor rather than the star. CLO

Fill your classrooms with engaged learners, every day.

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