Chief Learning Officer - July/August 2019

July/August 2019 | ChiefLearningOfficer.com

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EDITOR’S LETTER

Time to Sing Loud

B

ig shifts are an opportunity to do big things.

That’s the optimist point of view on change.

But it’s not just a matter of opinion or difference in perspective.

Change happens regardless of our intentions and despite our best efforts otherwise. Change is ignorant of our lifelong hopes and dreams. The world keeps turning, the economy goes up and down and what’s new becomes old. When you look at it with clear eyes, optimism is really the only option. You can’t control many things but you can control how you respond.

That’s not to say it’s easy to be an optimist. In technology and science, it’s fashionable to take the pessimistic view. The evidence is all around. Rather than bring us together, social media has deepened divisions. Artificial intelligence threatens to automate us out of a living.

In corporate learning, new technology is marketed as a way to personalize career development and respond quickly to changing business conditions. Powerful software algorithms crunch data and create sophisticated career plans and learning pathways. But the reality for many is technology is a way to extract cost from the expensive and time-consuming process of developing people. Budgets are always limited and cost pressure never goes away.

Embrace the moment to do something epic.

“Lux Aurumque” and invited the world to sing along.

The resulting videos submitted by a group of 185 singers were stitched together to form his first virtual choir. It took off from there. Whitacre’s seven virtual choirs have featured 8,000 singers from 120 countries, earning more than 40 million views on YouTube and performance spots at the 2012 London Olympics, the Kennedy Center and a live virtual choir performance streamed via Skype at the 2013 TED conference.

Some argue live performances have suffered as people opt to stay home and feast on a buffet of high-quality on-demand video and movies. Rather than see that as a threat, Whitacre spotted an opportunity to bring art and technology together.

“Technology tells us who we want to be but art tells us who we are,” he told the audience during his recent keynote at the Association for Talent Development conference in Washington, D.C. Like singing, learning is a participatory art that is amplified when more people join the chorus. Technology offers the tools to do that in exciting new ways.

To paraphrase Reece Roberson, global head of talent management and learning at Interface, chief learning officers have an opportunity to do big things. After a decade-plus in learning at Home Depot, Roberson gave up the comfort and resources of an $80-billion company to join Interface, the maker of Flor tiles, as a team of one tasked with building a learning culture from the ground up. Why? Because he spotted an opportunity to move from getting stuff done to doing epic stuff, he told the audience at our recent Atlanta CLO Breakfast Club.

It is an exhilarating time for chief learning officers.

In many ways, it’s the fulfillment of the original promise of the role as the bridge between the future goals of the organization and the current state of its talent. That vision is often hamstrung by limited budgets, bloated mandates and unclear mission. And sometimes by a failure to dream big enough.

The moment we are in is an opportunity to make that right — if you’re willing to raise your voice. CLO

The rise of evidence-based practices in corporate learning is undoubtedly positive. A rigorous, controlled and scientific approach rooted in data and fueled by continuous improvement has done more to advance the profession of corporate learning than anything. But pairing that clinical approach with powerful, easy-to-use technology makes it easy to reduce learning to a continuous cycle of skilling, reskilling and skilling again.

That’s shortsighted. Technology can amplify the art of learning, just as much as it does the science. The trick is to seize the opportunity to do things differently.

Take the example of Grammy-winning conductor and composer Eric Whitacre. When a young singer uploaded a video of herself singing one of his compositions to YouTube, he wasn’t simply flattered a fan found his music. He saw an opportunity to combine art and technology to bring people together in a new way.

Mike Prokopeak Inspired by her example, Whitacre uploaded a Editor in Chief video of himself silently conducting his composition mikep@CLOmedia.com 4 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

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JULY/AUGUST 2019 | VOLUME 18, ISSUE 6 PRESIDENT Kevin A. Simpson ksimpson@CLOmedia.com

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CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Lisa Doyle, Vice President, Global Learning, Booz Allen Hamilton David DeFilippo, Principal, DeFilippo Leadership Inc. Tamar Elkeles, Chief Talent Executive, Atlantic Bridge Capital 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 Brenda Sugrue, Global Chief Learning Of ficer, EY Diana Thomas, CEO and Founder, Winning Results David Vance, Executive Director, Center for Talent Repor ting Judy Whitcomb, Senior Vice President of Human Resources, Learning and Organizational Development, Vi 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 Human Capital Media, 150 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 550, Chicago IL 60601. Periodicals postage paid at Chicago, IL and additional mailing offices.

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CONTENTS J

uly/August

2019 10 Your Career Pamay Bassey of Kraft Heinz shares her journey to CLO; the Center for Talent Reporting’s David Vance says we need to change the conversation around funding measurement; and people share what they’re reading these days.

34 Profile The Weather Man Sarah Fister Gale The new CLO of the National Weather Service is taking learning to the masses.

52 Case Study A Bright Future for State Farm

Agatha Bordonaro State Farm partners with Bright Horizons EdAssist to reap real rewards from its tuition reimbursement program.

54 Business Intelligence Top-Down Tinkering From the Ground Up

Ashley St. John Digital disruption leads the charge for change in executive education.

ON THE COVER: PHOTO BY PAUL ANDREWS

8 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

July/August 2019

CONTENTS

40

22

44

48

Feature

22

Experts

Power Up Your L&D Partnerships

16 BUSINESS IMPACT

Stephen L. Cohen and Kevin D. Wilde Client organizations and suppliers must make a concerted effort that involves commitment, communication, credibility, clarity, cadence and collaboration.

17 SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

Special Report:

Michael E. Echols The Strategic Elements of Learning

Bob Mosher Standing Still Is No Longer an Option

EXECUTIVE EDUCATION IN 2019

18 LEADERSHIP

40

Digital Degrees and Flexibility

20 MAKING THE GRADE

44

The Experiential Leader

Sarah Fister Gale The workplace is evolving and executive education must adapt.

Ken Blanchard Leading the 4 Stages of Team Development

Lee Maxey Tackling Employee Student Debt

58 IN CONCLUSION

Sarah Fister Gale How immersive learning is changing the way leaders develop.

48 Designing for Results

John Ambrose The Language Learning Blind Spot

Resources

Jack J. Phillips and Patti P. Phillips It is rare for executive education programs to start with the business need. But they could, and, with some programs, they should.

4 Editor’s Letter

Time to Sing Loud

57 Advertisers’ Index

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Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

9

YOUR CAREER

Career Advice From

Pamay Bassey CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER, THE KRAFT HEINZ CO.

Ekpedeme “Pamay” Bassey, chief learning officer for The Kraft Heinz Co., shares her career journey and what she has learned along the way.

How did you begin your career in learning?

I studied artificial intelligence in college. After graduating, I found a graduate program that focused on taking AI research and what we know about how the mind works and how we process information and applying it to create innovative and engaging learning experiences. It was sponsored by then Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), and my career in learning was born there as a consultant.

What attracted you to learning and development?

Recently, I read a Forbes article by computer scientist Jim Spohrer, in which he recounted a conversation he had with Elliot Soloway, a professor at University of Michigan. Profes-

The Pamay Group LLC 2003 – 2016: President/chief learning architect

2003

10 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

sor Soloway asked Jim why he was studying AI, and Jim replied he wanted to make machines smarter. To which Soloway replied, “Seems like it might be a better goal to make people smarter with the help of AI.” This changed Jim’s focus going forward.

Like Jim, my initial interest was in AI — I wanted to be part of an effort to create intelligent computers.

I was attracted to the application of AI in the field of learning — to make people smarter with the help of AI — by my professors and peers at the Institute for Learning Sciences at Northwestern University. Being able to be part of the process of providing information and experiences to people to allow them to learn and grow is my professional passion.

As a trained comedian, how do you incorporate comedy into your role as CLO and in your other writing and speaking efforts?

Laughter is an amazing tool. No matter what you are learning or doing, laughter makes it better. To me, incorporating comedy into everything I do is just me sharing my authentic self with those around me. Have you ever watched an audience enjoying comedy? They are nodding and laughing at the same time, because they are thinking, “How does that comedian know about the crazy things that happen in my life? And how

BlackRock June – November 2018: Director of learning, BlackRock Investment Academy 2015 – 2018: Director, global head of learning platform and professional development

2015

The Kraft Heinz Co. 2018 – present: Chief learning officer

2016

2018

2019

SM

S E T I B ALL

estions.

-fire qu id p a r r u swers o ssey an a B y a Pam

The most important part of learning is: are they courageous enough to just say that in front of so many people?”

What lessons helped you along the way?

The most important lesson is that change can be challenging, but discomfort can be the catalyst for future success. I learned that lesson during some of the most transformational times in my life. Those times required me to boldly charge into and actively learn from challenging situations and difficult life chapters.

After my position was eliminated at the startup where I worked, I decided to study acting and improv at Second City and start my own business. When I had a personally challenging year, I wrote a book and launched my passion project, which focuses on cultural and interfaith diversity, communication and understanding.

When I wanted to shake things up, I moved from life as an entrepreneur to a life back in corporate, first moving from Chicago to New York and then back to Chicago. I certainly would not be in the position that I am in today if I had not learned the importance of walking through fear and saying yes in the midst of uncertainty.

What’s your biggest piece of career advice?

When I talk to people who are hesitant about making career choices that don’t seem to contribute to a linear career progression, I ask them — what is your why? Why are you considering this choice? How will this career choice help you to write the next chapter of your professional story? If you know that — and you execute with excellence in whatever you are doing — you are on the right path for having a successful career, however you define success. And most important, you should be defining success for yourself, not letting others define it for you. CLO Know someone with an incredible career journey?

Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you. Send your nomination to Elizabeth Loutfi at eloutfi@CLOmedia.com.

Take responsibility for it. Own your own learning and development. Learn like an owner. Seek out high-impact learning experiences, and once you read an article or take a course, find ways to apply it in your day-to-day so the information becomes a part of you. If you approach life and your career as a lifelong learner, it will serve you well.

The most overrated trend in L&D is: I am not a big fan of gamification, but I know that it works for others, so I try to keep an open mind because it is all about the learners, not about me!

Learning is essential to an organization because: In today’s business environment, a commitment to lifelong learning is a competitive advantage. When you have an organization full of lifelong learners, it will be easier for that organization to face any challenge, disruption or change that happens along the way.

The biggest industry misconception is: That people prefer face-to-face learning to online learning. The issue is not the delivery method, per se; it’s how well-designed the learning experience. And can I take what I learned and apply it to my day-to-day when I get back to my desk?

I got into the L&D space because: I am a lifelong learner, and I think that learning can be your superpower.

Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

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YOUR CAREER

What Are You Reading?

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

By Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner Not a new book but a good one: Tetlock, a professor at Penn, details why so-called experts’ predictions stink and how and why a group of amateur forecasters are a more reliable guide to the future. Lots of useful stuff for data analysis that CLOs can use to be better business partners.

— Mike Prokopeak, editor in chief, Chief Learning Officer

The Coddling of the American Mind

By Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt Great read as we look to the future and consider learning and development opportunities for the next generation and what will have the biggest impact.

— Ashley Morris, consultant, Navalent

The Mismeasure of Man

By Stephen Jay Gould There is a common practice to try and reify intelligence. We often need heuristics to simplify our learning and often use labels we use to categorize people, label roles or measure learning. It’s a historically fresh reminder that ours is a complex process. But don’t we live the journey!

— Andrew Webb, co-founder, Inspired Learning Group

TakingPoint: A Navy SEAL’s 10 Fail-Safe Principles for Leading Through Change

By Brent Gleeson Gleeson’s approach captures attention using the Navy SEAL ethos [and] generates connections between SEAL and corporate leadership experiences.

— Ashley C. Gillis, chief learning officer, Anchor Pointe Learning

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

Send your submissions to Elizabeth Loutfi at eloutfi@CLOmedia.com.

12 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

By Chip and Dan Heath I’ve always been someone who isn’t afraid to stand in front of a crowd, but recently I decided to take some time to really develop how I deliver messages, make a pitch and “sell” my ideas. I’m learning that in order for me to be able to sell my ideas, I’ve got to tighten my elevator pitch, and if I want my message to be memorable, I’ve got to make it simple. This book does a great job of breaking out six characteristics that make an idea “sticky.” I’m really looking forward to putting these learnings in place in my professional and personal life.

— Dania Shaheen Gutterson, vice president of strategy and people operations, Kazoo HR

YOUR CAREER

Top of Mind Talk Management, Not Measurement By David Vance David Vance, executive director of the Center for Talent Reporting, says we need to change the conversation around funding measurement.

T David Vance Center for Talent Reporting

he profession continues to struggle to get budget and attention for more robust measurement strategies. Learning professionals, particularly those with measurement or analytics responsibilities, appreciate the value of measurement and know that further budget would be well spent but often cannot convince senior leaders in learning to make the investment, let alone senior leaders outside learning.

So, how do we make the case for more resources?

My advice is that we don’t. Instead, we take a stealth approach. While some senior leaders will readily see the reason for more robust measurement, in my experience, most will not. Senior leaders always have many more requests for budget and staff than they can grant, and typically measurement, by itself, does not rise to the top of the priority list. And since you are already providing learning, measurement seems like an “add-on” or a “nice-to-have,” not something that is essential.

I suggest we change the conversation. Instead of talking about measurement, talk about what will be required to deliver the planned results from the learning initiative. In a nutshell, talk about management rather than measurement. Of course, you cannot manage without measures, so management will be the Trojan horse that gets measurement in. This approach makes measurement the means to the end rather than the end. It also focuses on the most important purpose or use of measurement, which is to manage.

Start with programs aligned to your organization’s key goals or needs. For these important initiatives you need to partner closely with the goal owner, such as the head of sales or manufacturing. Both parties

According to

David

What is the biggest lesson you’ve learned in the past year?

14 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

need to agree on program specifics like learning objectives, target audience and completion date. Most important, they need to agree on their mutual expectations for the impact of the learning and the measures and targets that must be achieved to deliver that impact.

These would include efficiency measures like number of participants, completion rate, completion date and cost, as well as effectiveness measures like participant reaction, learning and the all-important application rate. These measures will have to be managed to plan throughout the development, delivery and reinforcement stages to deliver the ultimate measure: impact.

Notice that you now have a robust measurement strategy that is an integral part of the management for this initiative. It is not an “add-on.” In fact, you will not be able to meet expectations without it, and consequently you should refuse to do the learning if a senior leader suggests stripping out the measurement. However, since measurement was not presented separately (no budget or staff identified for it, simply part of the plan), the whole issue of stripping it out is not likely to come up. You can follow the same approach for other learning initiatives, including those not directly aligned to the goals of the organization. In every case, you should identify some measure of success, and in every case, you should identify the relevant measures and their targets required to deliver the success.

This, then, is the stealth approach: Treat measurement as a means to an end. Embed measurement in all your key initiatives by getting agreement with goal owners and senior leaders up front on the planned outcome and on targets for all the relevant efficiency and effectiveness measures. You may also need to employ measurement and analytics up front to better understand the issue, learner, or optimum learning solution or modality.

In conclusion, stop asking senior leaders to help you with your measurement strategy. They really don’t care.

Instead, engage them to manage their program to deliver planned results that they do care about and which, by necessity, will include measures. CLO Chief Learning Officer wants to hear from you: What are you thinking about? Send your thoughts to Elizabeth Loutfi at eloutfi@CLOmedia.com.

Focus more on the big picture and less on the details, at least to start. I want to share as much as possible about a new approach or idea. In my excitement to share, I probably overload listeners with more detail than they can absorb.

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BUSINESS IMPACT

The Strategic Elements of Learning Strategic learning is about the why • BY MICHAEL E. ECHOLS

W

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.

e are in the midst of titanic shifts in how we buy and sell, how we manage our health, how we move from here to there, and how, what, where and why we learn. The strategic learning is about the why.

It is human nature to look backward to try to understand both the present and the future. The current digital revolution is such a case. What is especially challenging about digital is how fast it is happening, and how broad its reach.

Corporate digital deployment can be viewed as an “add-on” to assets and strategies that already exist — i.e., assets brought forward from the past. Here, I’ll point to Walmart to show you what I mean.

Walmart has been a hugely successful place-based retailer. Few American communities of any size are without a Walmart or a Sam’s Club. The investment in physical assets is obvious the moment you step past the greeter at the door. Their massive buildings are filled with row upon row of wheeled shelving units displaying tens of thousands of items. Once inside, we buy and then carry the purchases to our automobile parked in the equally huge parking lot outside. It is all very visible. It is all very familiar.

Less obvious, however, is the gigantic strategic shift taking place in how Walmart is repositioning itself to serve customers in the digital age. Retail competitors are also following suit.

Successful learning leaders will have to let go of the comfort of the past and set their visions further into the future.

It is easy to think of Walmart’s digital investments as an add-on to the company’s historic retail strategy.

Competitive reaction to what Amazon.com is doing is a common narrative repeated on Wall Street. While the competitive response message may be reassuring, it is not sufficient. Indeed, Walmart’s digital investments are much more about what they are becoming than an add-on to what they have been. So it is with learning.

The changes we are in the midst of are strategic, 16 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

though much energy has been devoted to the how, what and where of learning.

But before we make the closing arguments for strategic learning it is worth taking a short side journey away from the Walmart display racks, on the newest passenger airplane, the Boeing 737 MAX 8. By the time this column is printed, the two recent crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia will likely have been diagnosed and solutions implemented. As an aside, it is extremely likely that those solutions will contain a huge dose of learning, driven largely by the emerging role of artificial intelligence in transportation.

AI will be a key driver of the strategic dimension of learning. The challenge will be for the masses, from the drivers of autonomous vehicles to the residents of smart homes, to learn how to use, manage and ultimately control “smart” devices. The pilots of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 are already in this strategic learning phase. The rest of us will soon be there, in one form or another.

For some, it will be most comfortable to slip back into the familiar. For others the challenge will be much more about the why as entire industries are threatened and even obliterated by the digital changes going on all around us.

So what does it all mean for learning leaders? It means much more than merely training more software coders. It means that successful learning leaders will have to let go of the comfort of the past. It requires setting our visions further into the future. The speed of change, the scope of the impact and the uncertainty of it all blur the line of sight to the best answers for each company. The answers needed are not to be found among the merchandise displays in the aisles of today, but in the learning challenges created by the electronic payment systems that currently handle our money, the rich and interactive electronic displays of merchandise, the robots that will eventually stock our shelves, the autonomous vehicles that will deliver our merchandise to our buyers and the new processes that assure privacy and security. We all have a lot to learn from this future, and it’s currently knocking on our front door.

Just as with the ultimate safety of the Boeing 737 MAX 8, learning by all those touched will be an important dimension of the solutions. Indeed, learning will be strategic in that future. CLO

SELLING UP, SELLING DOWN

Standing Still Is No Longer an Option Workflow learning is the brave new frontier • BY BOB MOSHER

A

s many of you know, I’ve been at this for a long time — 36 years to be exact. I have seen some amazing changes in L&D during that time. I remember standing in front of a group of trainers showing them how we could “transform” their classrooms by putting all of their transparencies into a new tool called PowerPoint. Those days are long gone, and we have been through huge transformations since. And if we thought PowerPoint, the internet or e-learning were transformational and challenging, we haven’t seen anything yet.

Why? Because the next big change strikes at the heart of how we’ve defined ourselves since our inception. You see, even with the transformational modalities and tools I’ve described, the locus of control was still squarely in our domain. We were still creating a learning solution that was a training-first deliverable.

It focused more on knowledge and skills gain than on workflow application. Clearly, we hoped that some type of transfer occurred, but the journey started with our deliverables, which were created and maintained in our design shops, and were delivered via our platforms and trainers, be them live or digital. Those times are changing dramatically, if they haven’t already. The question is — are we ready?

With new emerging design methodologies, technologies and learners, workflow learning is the brave new frontier. What is workflow learning? It’s when learning and support solutions are designed to begin on the job and while the learner is doing their job.

Many of you may say, “So? Isn’t this what e-learning enabled?” Not exactly. Tools like e-learning made learning available in the workflow, but the learner needs to leave their work to consume it, even if they are still sitting in front of their computer. Leaving work isn’t always a physical thing. I can be sitting at my desk but have to mentally leave my work to find and consume a learning or support asset. In true workflow learning, that doesn’t happen. When the “lesson” is over, work is also completed.

There are a number of things driving this change.

The first, and most important, is the learner; learning and support are at their fingertips and consumed in the flow of life. This has created an expectation that learning programs found at work will be equally as intrinsic.

It has created a much more independent and inspired learner — one who has little patience to wait.

The second is the technology. There have been a number of remarkable breakthroughs in learning technologies that make workflow learning a reality, and there’s no sign of this slowing down any time soon.

Here are a few to watch: From an LMS to a learning experience platform (LXP): The LMS is a well-established platform, but it sits alongside a crowded field of other content repositories that have long since overwhelmed our learners.

Since platforms like SharePoint hit the scene, organizations have been stockpiling learning and support assets like never before. The problem is not their availability, but finding the most current and efficient option. LXPs have emerged as a powerful technology that sits on top of the LMS and the other repositories and allows learners to have access to and even create content like never before.

From e-learning to electronic performance support systems (EPSSs): EPSSs have been around since the early ’90s, but today’s technologies look nothing like the original platforms. Their ability to embed in the workflow and broker into technologies like the LXP, LMS, SharePoint and many others finally enables true workflow learning while a learner does their job.

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

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

Waterfall approaches can’t keep up with the rapid change of work and the demands of the learner.

Finally, the third thing driving workflow learning is methodology. Agile instructional design is here to stay. Waterfall approaches just can’t keep up with the rapid change of work and the demands of the learner.

It’s time we take a good, hard look at our dated design approaches and let many of them go.

One of my favorite quotes is by Denis Pombriant: “Change is difficult. It’s hard, and people avoid it when we can, but change eventually happens when the consequences of standing still look worse than the consequences of taking a chance on change. It’s time for all of us to change — standing still is not an option, and we can only imagine the disruptions ahead.” CLO Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com 17

LEADERSHIP

Leading the 4 Stages of Team Development Teams are the engine to productivity • BY KEN BLANCHARD

W

Ken Blanchard is chief spiritual officer of The Ken Blanchard Cos. and co-author of “Servant Leadership in Action.”

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

ant to make something happen in your organization? Give the job to a team.

The top-down, traditional management hierarchy — too slow to meet the demands of today’s market — continues to disappear. In its place, teams have become the preferred strategy for getting work done. With greater flexibility and access to resources, teams can achieve rapid results in ways that bureaucracies cannot.

In our latest Blanchard research, done in partnership with Training magazine, we learned that people spend more than half their work time in teams. Yet only 27 percent of the respondents felt that their teams were high performing.

A high-performance team relies on the contributions of many individuals rather than the talents of one high achiever. To give a recent example, last year the Los Angeles Lakers recruited LeBron James, arguably one of the best basketball players of all time. But as the Lakers are finding out, just because you have a superstar on your team doesn’t mean you’re going to win championships — or even get to the playoffs. Citing bad chemistry and lack of cohesion, The Guardian declared in a March 2019 headline that “the Lakers are a dumpster fire not even LeBron James can extinguish.”

Contrast that with last year’s U.S. women’s hockey team, which won the first U.S. gold medal in women’s hockey since the sport was introduced. The unexpected triumph happened 38 years to the day after the original “Miracle on Ice,” when the U.S. men’s hockey team shocked the world by beating Russia in the 1980 Olympics. In each case, these young teams did not rely

provide the appropriate leadership style at each stage of the team’s development.

Teams at stage 1, Orientation, are just coming together. People are usually enthusiastic and have high, even unrealistic, expectations. They’re unsure about the task ahead and depend on authority for guidance.

The team leader’s job at stage 1 is to provide clarity by defining the team’s purpose, goals, roles and behavioral norms. The leader should set the context for the team’s work, orient team members to one another, establish boundaries and help develop a team charter.

After the team has been working together for a while, team members are likely to encounter obstacles and conflicts. That’s when stage 2, Dissatisfaction, sets in. People might be frustrated and confrontational and the team may become fragmented. This is entirely normal and predictable.

The team leader’s job at stage 2 is to foster communication. An effective team leader will harness the team’s diversity by addressing and leveraging conflict. Rather than shutting people down, the leader will make sure everyone’s voice is heard. By affirming different points of view, the leader can move the team forward.

Teams at stage 3, Integration, have improved their competence and problem solving. Trust and decision-making are also improving. Confrontation is likely to have mellowed into cooperation; in fact, team members at this stage tend to avoid conflict.

Leaders at stage 3 can bring cohesion to the team by encouraging everyone to participate. Holding each team member accountable, the leader provides the support the team needs at this stage to reach its goals.

Teams at stage 4, Production, are collaborative and confident. By this time the team has produced good results and morale is high. Leaders at stage 4 can ensure continuous improvement by relinquishing control and encouraging people to tackle new challenges.

During the heyday of Larry Bird, Robert Parish on the heroics of a single superstar but instead succeed- and Kevin McHale, I asked Boston Celtics coach K.C. ed through drive, commitment, cohesiveness, trust and Jones how he led such a group of superstars. K.C. a passionate belief in a common purpose. smiled and said, “I throw the ball out and every once However, you can’t simply throw talented people in a while, I shout ‘Shoot!’ ” In other words, he pertogether and hope for miracles. Building a winning mitted everyone to lead — which is what leading a team requires a trained team leader to keep people stage 4 team is all about. aligned, monitor progress, provide feedback, create a Remember that while superstars are nice to have, safe environment and hold people accountable. teams are the engine to productivity — and leaders are The key to creating a high-performance team is to needed to guide them. CLO

Teams can achieve rapid results in ways that bureaucracies cannot.

18 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

MAKING THE GRADE

Tackling Employee Student Debt What should be the employer’s role? • BY LEE MAXEY

S Lee Maxey is CEO of MindMax, a marketing and enrollment management services company.

He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

tudents will be heading back to school in another month or so, and along with the excitement of a new school year comes the stress of figuring out how to pay for it. Federal student loan interest rates have been on the rise, up from 3.76 percent in 2016-17 to 5.05 percent for the 2018-19 school year. Interest rate hikes may be leveling off. But the number of people behind on paying back their student loans has grown to 20 percent, up slightly from 19 percent in 2016 and 18 percent in 2015, according to the Federal Reserve.

Imagine the stress it causes parents and graduates alike to know they will have debt hanging over them for decades. Last fall, the U.S. Department of Education released data showing only 50 percent of students attending college during the 1995-96 academic year had paid off their loans within two decades. In spite of what a student might’ve studied in college and which employer could be an ideal fit, graduates are increasingly forced to think about choosing the best-paying job available to manage student loan debt. I’m not arguing for or against the value of college for all, but at the forefront of decision-making these days, high schoolers and their parents are very much making choices about postsecondary education vis-a-vis debt.

What if the majority of companies (in partnership with universities, four-year and two-year colleges, and trade schools) took a different role helping students pay off those student loan debts? For example, students at the University of Utah have access to an income-sharing system piloted by the administration. Students get a break on tuition, and in return the university gets a cut of their income after graduation for a certain time period.

The College Post recently quoted the university’s president saying the school’s program, called Invest in U, would help students, for example, avoid interrupting their studies because they had to work to pay for classes or living expenses. The Invest in U payback would cost students just under 3 percent of their income and last three to 10 years, depending on the student’s major.

Some private-sector employers are now adopting student loan contribution programs to attract and retain talent. Two companies that focus on administering these programs are Gradifi and Tuition.io, which offer software platforms for employers to manage student loan repayment benefits for employees. According to both software companies’ websites, a variety of employers currently participate, and the contributions range

20 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

from about $1,000 a year per employee up to an agreed-upon maximum. Companies set the dollar amount and decide whether to make the payment to the employee or the loan-servicing company. Some companies even allow employees to convert unused, paid vacation time into money toward paying down their student debt. If you’re cash-strapped, how tantalizing is the thought of a “staycation” anyway? Better to put the money toward getting out of debt.

employers should consider working with colleges to begin the recruiting process earlier.

As these benefit programs evolve, employers should consider working with colleges and universities to begin the recruiting process earlier. If a student and an employer see a link between the student’s interests and major field of study and the company’s culture and mission, recruiters and school counselors can create a strong offer together with contingencies that protect all parties.

Identifying talent early in someone’s academic career and subsidizing their learning isn’t unlike the work the military has undertaken for a century or more in this country. For example, the Reserve Officer Training Corps, which the federal government established in the early 20th century to add to the ranks of the military’s leadership, offers high-school seniors a four-year, full-tuition scholarship and a commission in a branch of the U.S. military upon receiving a bachelor’s degree.

The commitment after graduation requires several years of serving on active duty with the military to repay the cost of the scholarship.

What if a college student early in their education demonstrates amazing potential through an on-campus visit with company officials? The employer might (for a future high-potential hire) see the benefit of paying for the student’s tuition senior year in return for a commensurate commitment to work for the company.

That sounds like an investment in both a company’s and a graduate’s future. CLO

DON’T JUST SURVIVE.

THRIVE. New research from the International Coach Federation and the Human Capital Institute shows that a strong coaching culture can help employees navigate change with confidence. Learn more at coachfederation.org/coachingculture.

I N PA R T N E R S H I P W I T H

22 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

Client organizations and suppliers must make a concerted effort that involves commitment, communication, credibility, clarity, cadence and collaboration.

BY STEPHEN L . COHEN AND KEVIN D. WILDE

“H

ow in the world did you pull that off?”

Peggy and Jim were used to this question as they would recount the successful partnership that produced a series of award-winning talent development programs. As head of talent management for her company, Peggy would often start by saying the bottom-line results speak for themselves but would add that forging a great external partnership mattered as well. And Jim — the external senior consultant assigned to Peggy’s company — would quickly add that he wished more client engagements looked like this. Both would agree the partnership had the kind of power lacking in most internal/external relationships in the talent development field today.

Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

23

Powerful partnerships are becoming increas- Providers. The results of this survey showed that cliingly critical as client organizations face contin- ents rated their overall relationship with their suppliers ual disruption in the marketplace and search for at about 54 percent, while the supplier view of these new solutions. Organizations are spending more relationships was 59 percent. Not only are these scores than 25 percent of their L&D budgets on outside lower than the CLO BIB data, but suppliers view their resources, to the tune of more than $7.5 billion relationships as somewhat better than their clients each year, according do. The areas achieving to Training magazine’s the greatest relationship “2017 Training Industry strength and alignment Report.” In fact, as of between client and supMarch 2016, more than plier organizations were 50 percent of enterpristhose in which the supes outsource at least plier felt the client was some of their learning willing to work through and development needs difficulties, serving as a according to the Interreference, going to bat for national Data Corporathem and following their tion. Whether to reduce recommendations on imfixed costs or tap into portant issues with an avthe growing external talent ecosystem, organiza- erage of about 70 percent frequency. tions are relying more than ever on capabilities The areas showing the least powerful relationships outside the four walls of the company. As a result, were in the personal areas of clients sharing the pressuppliers are being constantly pushed to provide sures they face and revealing their personal aspirations, updated and innovative solutions that offer real or the strategic partner areas wherein clients encourage business results. suppliers to challenge their thinking, asking for the inWith a strong, compatible relationship, an orga- put of suppliers on next year’s plans and involving the nization can enhance its learning function beyond supplier directly in conducting a formal needs analyits own in-house capabilities. sis or problem-solving process. And, for every one of Win-win relationships between these two par- these items, the suppliers viewed the relationship far ties can be powered up to achieve mutual success. better than the client did.

Here’s what such a relationship might look like, the partnership principles at work in the case, and specific prescriptive behaviors you can apply to power FIGURE 1: TOP CHARACTERISTICS OF SUCCESSFUL up your partnerships.

VENDOR PARTNER

With a strong, compatible relationship, an organization can enhance its learning function beyond its own in-house capabilities.

The Client-Supplier Relationship

Product quality

You may be thinking Peggy and Jim’s story is fictional. It isn’t. While the names have been changed, this powerful partnership example is based on our experiences. The better question is: How does this happen? What exactly does it take to create a powerful Easy to work with strategic partnership between an organization and its talent development suppliers?

Two relatively recent research studies may shed some light on the answer. The first is from a 2015 survey of 308 members of the Chief Learning Officer BusiValue provided ness Intelligence Board’s learning executives. When asked what characteristics are essential, or high priority, to make successful vendor partnerships more likely, the most mentioned were product quality (95 percent), easy to work with (93 percent), value provided (92 perResults obtained cent) and results obtained (90 percent) (see Figure 1).

Interestingly, a similar level of satisfaction with vendors and among their clients was provided in a survey conducted by ISA — The Association of Learning 24 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

97%

93%

92%

90%

FIGURE 2: ASSOCIATED INSIDE/OUTSIDE BEHAVIOR FOR A POWERED-UP VENDOR PARTNERSHIP Power-Up Partnership Principles

Commitment

Internal/Client Organization

External/Supplier Organization

Sees the supplier as more than simply a task executor.

Views client as equal participant in project success.

Goes to bat for the supplier when something goes wrong; doesn’t point fingers.

Doesn’t mislead or overpromise its capabilities or results.

Shares its strategic plan with client.

Doesn’t mislead or overpromise internal capabilities such as technology support.

Communication

Credibility

Takes ownership for ongoing effective conversations.

Provides written documentation during all project phases.

Confirms and reiterates realistic expectations during project.

Frequently checks in with client without a sales agenda.

Provides unexpected changes in budgets, costs, timeline, resources and program features/quality.

Provides updates on possible out-of-scope changes in costs, timeline, resources and program features/quality.

Asks supplier for their thoughts and ideas as a sounding board for what’s new in the field.

Asks client for information on its business, organization and industry.

Requests supplier’s thoughts on needs assessment and planning.

Accepts client’s strategic insight.

Offers client latest trends and insights into the training industry.

Asks supplier for updates on trends in the training industry.

Clarity

Cadence

Brings in supplier early for planning and needs assessment.

Seeks to fully understand the nuances of contract agreements.

Doesn’t ignore contract agreements abiding by in-scope requirements.

Doesn’t make unreasonable demands for actual out-ofscope requests.

Encourages supplier to push back on plans or thinking.

Asks for more detailed understanding of client expectations.

Doesn’t get involved in the internal workings/conflicts of the supplier organization.

Proactively schedules and monitors project progress.

Agrees to meet periodically to review project funding.

Does what it says it will do when it says it will.

Interacts frequently with client on project budget and timing.

Reviews draft and final materials on time and within agreed-upon guidelines.

Collaboration

Asks for input on how to best market and sell the program internally.

Initiates advice and actively provides sales and marketing support.

Is sensitive to continually requesting free advice and services.

Works closely with client on costs of scope changes without nickel-and-diming it.

Agrees to work with supplier to measure results and impact of project by providing needed resources.

Suggests options for project results/impact research study, offering to work with client to conduct it.

The Principles of Powered-Up Partnerships

Clarity: encouraging all personal, professional and organizational expectations to be surfaced, managed and addressed satisfactorily.

Cadence: supporting a meaningful project rhythm regarding schedules, timing, milestones, deliverables and interactions.

Collaboration: demonstrating consistent winwin behaviors that result in meeting and exceeding all project expectations.

Figure 2 (above) shows specific behaviors associated with each of these six principles.

What can our case and this research reveal about how to create powered-up partnerships? In our more than 75 combined years as both suppliers and clients, we have identified six principles that can almost be guaranteed to power up your partnerships: Commitment: ensuring equal treatment of all parties, resulting in mutual success.

Communication: engaging in frequent open, honest and timely conversations that address any concerns.

Credibility: trusting and honoring the capabilities, expertise and experience of all parties.

POWER continued on page 56 26 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

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Cost-Effective Corporate Reading A guide to engagement, critical thinking and cross-team collaboration

By Adina Sapp It’s widely known that reading contributes to the overall intelligence, communication skills and knowledge of individuals, giving people advantages both personally and professionally. Many business leaders attribute their success to regular reading. For example, Bill Gates publishes an annual suggested reading list1 and Warren Buffett spends up to 80% of his day reading.2 Reading can also contribute to group success on the corporate level by driving engagement, critical thinking and cross-team collaboration. And fortunately for budget-pressed L&D leaders, corporate reading programs are budget friendly, versatile and customizable to business needs. Books can be incorporated into meetings, conferences and events, to support new-hire onboarding or career development workshops.

Most importantly, corporate reading programs foster a culture of continuous learning, which can have a positive impact on a company’s overall success. “The fast pace of innovation requires us to be continuous learners,” says Rebecca Janairo, senior business development manager for Amazon Kindle. “Many companies are turning to quick, short-attention-span, bite-sized content for talent development. But that doesn’t really address the complex business challenges of today. We recognize the advantages of bite-sized information, but to address complex issues, professionals need time to dive deep and think critically.”

Companies can tackle macro learning challenges (those that involve a larger time commitment) by creating a reading program that includes a collective, comprehensive look at a topic, questions that generate smart conversation, and an online forum for live participation.

Many companies work with experts like Janairo to find the right books to fit their business goals. “We curate book collections aligned to our customers’ company mission and vision, as well as employees’ job roles and objectives,” Janairo says.

For example, Janairo suggested Blindspot to a company whose diversity program focused on shifting the cultural mindset. The book helped drive thoughtful conversations, which is where the impact of an initiative-based reading program occurs.

Regardless of what tools and resources are used, the emphasis should be on facilitating critical thinking and collaboration across teams and within peer groups. By bringing peers together to discuss complex challenges, reading programs can support business initiatives and drive cultural change. “The importance is in the execution, which takes the form of a continual conversation,” says Janairo. “This helps deliver business results and improve organizational performance, which is the goal of any L&D program.”

The development programs implemented by ABS illustrate this commitment to continuous learning. ABS needed to reach employees around the world in a way that worked for both the employee and the enterprise. To that end, ABS developed internal leadership and development programs that incorporated a blended approach to learning, with eBooks as a pivotal component. To facilitate efficiency of time and costs, it sources eBooks through Amazon. “eBooks are a great tool because they can be used on multiple devices and they allow us to centralize the budget for our leadership and development programs,” says Lacey Hedrick, director of talent management, ABS.

1 Kozlowska, H. (2018). “These are Bill Gates’ favorite books of 2018.” Quartz 2 Popomaronis, T. (2019). “Warren Buffett and Bill Gates prove that quitting this 1 bad habit will help make you more successful in life.” Make It.

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One of the biggest challenges for L&D teams is how to make budgets go further. To that end, Janairo encourages L&D professionals to conduct an audit of current book/eBook subscription services at their organizations and consider overall usage, format, access and age of content. Ensure that you have access to the books your employees want, and that you can add an element of customization that meets a variety of needs.

To make a good return on investment, Janairo advises that quality is more important than quantity, and a blanket purchase may not be the best use of funds. “We’ve talked with customers who have been subscribing to eBook services as a means to make a one-time purchase for a large number of people. But many of those titles go unread. Instead, we’re focused on allowing you to buy what you need when you need it, return unclaimed copies (within 60 days), eliminate waste and ensure your budget really focuses on supporting a lifelong love of learning.”

Learn more about Amazon’s enterprise eBook service at: www.amazon.com/ebooksforbusiness.

Incorporate books and eBooks into your company’s initiatives: Career Development

ENERGIZE AND EQUIP NEW HIRES DURING • TO ONBOARDING. IMPROVE EMPLOYEE AND TEAM SKILLS AND • TO COMPETENCIES (FROM COMMUNICATIONS TO SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT).

REINVIGORATE YOUR SALESFORCE WITH • TO PROGRESSIVE STRATEGIES. DEVELOP LEADERS’ KNOWLEDGE AND • TO CAPABILITIES.

Employee Engagement

RECOGNIZE EMPLOYEES AND TEAMS FOR A • TO JOB WELL DONE. CELEBRATE EMPLOYEE COMPANY ANNIVER• TO SARIES. SUPPORT KEY COMPANY ENGAGEMENT • TO PHILOSOPHIES.

Client Engagement

• TO THANK CLIENTS FOR THEIR BUSINESS. REINFORCE RECOMMENDED CLIENT STRATE• TO GIES. GIVE TO CLIENTS AND POTENTIAL CLIENTS AT • TO COMPANY-SPONSORED TRAININGS, SEMINARS AND CONFERENCES.

Amazon Kindle makes it easy to develop and inspire your workforce through reading. With Amazon’s business-friendly eBook solution, companies can order one or hundreds of eBooks from Kindle’s massive selection and deliver to teams of any size in minutes. Your recipients can read and learn on-the-go on their phones, tablets, and laptops. Discover a new way to enhance your learning programs with eBooks: www.amazon.com/ebooksforbusiness.

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The Power of Data Fluency

By Adina Sapp Data Science and Decision Support Though the role of the data scientist barely existed five years ago, it has now risen to the top of the job market in terms of demand.1 Data scientists can interpret data to create meaningful stories, forecast trends and generate information that drives organizational improvement.

Research shows that data-driven organizations are three times more likely to report significant improvements in decision-making2, and many that have not already invested in data analytics are looking to do so. For some, this means hiring data scientists and investing in big data tools that collect, aggregate, integrate and analyze data from multiple systems.

Because data scientists typically command a base salary of more than $100,000, however, not all organizations can afford to hire these professionals or create a dedicated data science team.3 The organizations with the resources to do so must determine the most effective data team structure for their company.

“

Regardless of the industry or department you manage, working with data will soon be an essential part of all our jobs, if it isn’t already. This could take the form of basic data analytics, data science, machine learning or artificial intelligence.

Many organizations have one centralized team where data analysis primarily resides. With this model, multiple challenges can arise, including bandwidth limitations and information hoarding.

Additionally, there are lost opportunities when the rest of the organization cannot contribute their uniquely valuable subject matter expertise to the decision support process.

DataCamp advocates that data skills should be “democratized” among the entire organization.

When data fluency and skills are shared, organizations are able to make better business decisions.

Difficulties of the Centralized Data Model In the centralized data model, a data team typically works on requests following a tedious or politically driven prioritization process. This can create a bottleneck, which is a problem when information is needed quickly.

MIT estimates that only half a percent of data is analyzed.4 Creating a silo of data tools and restricting access to a narrow group of employees places too heavy a burden on a single team and limits the value of the results.

Communication between the centralized data team and the rest of the organization can also be problematic. Data scientists may have difficulty explaining their analysis to a general audience or use different tools that are not accessible in other departments.

Additionally, if data teams have trouble understanding the context of a request, they may not be able to properly fulfill it in a timely manner.

The team asking the question always has the best context on the question they are trying to answer, and this context can be lost in transfer from one team to another.

1 Columbus, L. (2017). “LinkedIn’s Fastest-Growing Jobs Today Are In Data Science And Machine Learning.” Forbes.

2 PricewaterhouseCoopers (2016). PwC’s Global Data and Analytics Survey 2016.

3 Paysa. Data Scientist Salaries.

4 Democratizing Data Science in Your Organization. DataCamp (2019).

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Benefits of the Democratized Data Model Fortunately, companies can provide the necessary data tools, skills and responsibility to all staff, not just to a dedicated team.5 Harvard Business Review notes that “companies have widened their aperture, recognizing that success with AI and analytics requires not just data scientists but entire crossfunctional, agile teams that include data engineers, data architects, data-visualization experts and — perhaps most important — translators.”6 The democratized, decentralized data model encourages collaboration, leads to better solutions and incentivizes learning.7 This is good for employees and employers because it empowers staff with valuable skills and yields a fuller utilization of the available data.

“The organizations that succeed are those that can quickly make sense of their data and adapt to what’s coming. The best way to enable deeper insights is to adopt a decentralized model where data science expertise is dispersed across an organization,” according to DataCamp.8

Most inquiries are relatively simple requests that anyone with basic training could fulfill.9 But even in the centralized data model, a data-fluent team makes better requests, as they can communicate their request to the data science team much more effectively, yielding better results from the data science team.

Upskilling with Data No matter where you are in your career or what field you work in, you will need to understand the language of data.10 “Working with data will soon be an essential part of all our jobs, if it isn’t already.

This could take the form of basic data analytics, data science, machine learning or artificial intelligence,” according to DataCamp.11 Dr. Hugo Bowne-Anderson, data scientist and educator at DataCamp, will soon be leading a webinar addressing how data can impact your employees’ work, what they need to know and how to go about educating them. To register, visit webinar.clomedia.com/what-your-employeesneed-to-learn-to-work-with-data-in-the-21stcentury.

5 Goldman, J. “Whatever You Do, Don’t Hire a Data Scientist (Here’s Why).” Inc. 6 Henke, N. Levine, J., and McInerney, P. (2018). “You Don’t Have to Be a Data Scientist to Fill This Must-Have Analytics Role.” Harvard Business Review.

7 Democratizing Data Science in Your Organization. DataCamp (2019).

8 Ibid.

9 Democratizing Data Science in Your Organization. DataCamp (2019).

10 Datacamp.com.

11 Democratizing Data Science in Your Organization. DataCamp (2019).

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Talent Activation

Unpacking Skills Throughout the Employment Lifecycle

By Adina Sapp With unemployment rates at record lows, employers are looking to strategically capture the untapped skills of their current workforce rather than seeking new talent elsewhere. The year 2018 closed with an unemployment rate of 3.9% — the lowest it’s been since 2000. Prior to 2000, the rate hadn’t been that low since 1969.1 Business growth is difficult when the unemployment rate is this low. Companies looking to expand their workforce have difficulty finding good workers because the talent simply isn’t available.

Even when new talent can be found, hiring and firing is expensive. As Mike Prokopeak, editor in chief of Chief Learning Officer, put it, “It has always been more expensive to find talent to fill gaps. It may be more advantageous to develop the people who are already in your workforce.” The law of supply and demand means it is difficult to find good employees, and so employers want to retain the ones they have and provide them with the skills the company needs.

This is where organizations like DeVryWORKS come in. DeVryWORKS is the partnership team of DeVry University and works with employers to transform talent development. It does this by breaking traditional university coursework into effective online, collaborative modules that provide a workable skill set more tangibly than a traditional university course of study.

To explore the important topic of talent activation and how to tap into the right skills at the right time throughout the employment lifecycle, DeVryWORKS sponsored a panel discussion at Chief Learning Officer’s Spring Symposium. The discussion was based on the findings of a 2018 study by DeVry’s Career Advisory Board. Panelists included Kimberly Isley-Pesto, HR manager at United Airlines, and Adam Morettin, senior director with DaVita Kidney Care, along with Joe Mozden Jr., vice president of DeVryWORKS. The discussion was hosted by Prokopeak.

Talent Activation vs. Training A common mistake is to confuse talent activation with training or upskilling. As Mozden put it, the definition of talent activation is easy; the hard part is that everyone comes with their own idea of what that means. Mozden defines it as a corporation designing and then prescribing a very specific series of talent activation experiences for an employee over the employee lifecycle: recruitment, onboarding, employment and retirement. “Talent activation moves away from training (a one-time event) and asks how you create engagement for an employee through the entire employee lifecycle,”2 Mozden said.

“

Talent activation attempts to unpack those skills that come at a certain point in time during the employment lifecycle and release them into the organization. — Joe Mozden Jr.

This is different from what has typically happened in the HR space, because it’s about what employees are doing, not what they’re feeling. Employees aren’t always engaged throughout their employment lifecycle due to personal events and other temporary situations, but that doesn’t make them bad employees. The key is for them to still be productive and learn even during times of low engagement.

The takeaway is that talent activation is a series of experiences throughout the employee lifecycle.

The Benefits of Re-Skilling Re-skilling is another component of talent activation. When you have good employees whose skills are no longer relevant, re-skilling

1 Amedo, K. (2019). “Unemployment Rate by Year Since 1929 Compared to Inflation and GDP.” The Balance.

2 Joe Mozden Jr., from the 2018 panel discussion “Activate Talent and Unleash Potential”

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can be a rich option for both the employer and employee. In addition to cost savings, the primary benefits of talent activation are risk mitigation and building employee loyalty and engagement.

Successful Rollout to the Organization There are two essentials to successfully rolling out talent activation: budget and executive buy-in.

Additionally, you must determine the right balance of prescriptive and self-driven learning.

There’s an ROI on talent activation that’s easy to grasp from a short-term perspective as it solves a hiring need; all HR executives are familiar with what it costs to hire and fire. Making a case from that perspective is how you will capture the immediate budget. To succeed in attaining a long-term budget, you must continue to track the long-term data.

Executive buy-in is essential, as best practice training should come from the top down. People won’t engage with an optional set of best practices.

Finding the right balance of prescriptive and self-driven learning depends on the culture of your organization. Meet individuals where they are in the employee lifecycle, but also require them to take initiative. Mozden said, “I’ve seen successful talent activation programs go two different ways: prescriptive and self-serve. They were both correct because they matched the corporate culture.”

Research and simple observation show us that employees all have innate skills, but there are also skill sets that comes with time. Talent activation attempts to unpack those skills that come at a certain point in time during the employment lifecycle and release them into the organization.

This creates engagement and productivity for the employee, and it also creates loyalty between the employer and employee. The result is a competitive advantage for the corporation.

For more ideas on how to approach your talent activation program, be sure to view the Talent Activation recording at video.closymposium.com/ category/videos/clo-symposium-spring-2019.

At DeVryWORKS, we understand that some of the biggest challenges for any business are related to the workforce—hiring skilled people, retaining strong talent, and developing the leaders of tomorrow. DeVryWORKS seeks to truly understand your company’s talent strategies and goals, so we can help you build a brilliant workforce and drive success across your organization. Look to us as the resource you need to support your talent development, skills gap training and talent acquisition initiatives. devryworks.com

Profile

The Weather Man The new CLO of the National Weather Service is taking learning to the masses.

BY SARAH FISTER GALE

J

ohn Ogren didn’t aspire to become a learning leader. He wanted to be a meteorologist.

As a boy he recalls a tornado coming through his community. “It had a huge impact on me as a young lad,” he said. From that point on he was fascinated with weather — and how to protect the community from these kinds of events.

In college he studied meteorology, and he landed his first job with the National Weather Service in Appalachia in 2002. He’s been moving up the ranks ever since.

Ogren honed his skills tracking tornadoes in the Midwest and was later promoted to warning coordinator at the NWS office in Wichita, Kansas. In that role he got to interface with public leaders, emergency management agencies, the Red Cross and other disaster organizations to help them prepare for storm events and keep their communities safe. At the time, NWS was moving in to a new digital era, installing Doppler radar, new satellites and other technology that enhanced its ability to predict weather, and Ogren was at the forefront. “I loved monitoring storms and tornadoes and issuing warnings that would protect lives,” he said.

And he was good at it. Ogren was eventually promoted to national warning coordinator in Washington, D.C., where he became the “Disaster Duke” for the nation, setting policy and working with Federal Emergency Management Agency on disaster preparedness. “It was my dream job,” he said.

So he was as surprised as anyone when he became NWS’ top choice for its first chief learning officer.

Training Came Naturally While working in the district, Ogren spent a lot of time developing training for storm spotters, emergency management personnel and community groups on how to react in a storm crisis. It wasn’t his primary job, but he discovered he had a knack for understanding what people needed from a learning 34 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

perspective and how to provide it. “I’m not an instructional designer, but I’m interested in the process,” he said.

In 2010, he was promoted to director of the NWS training center in Kansas and happily returned to his Midwestern roots. Ogren thrived in the role, creating new modules and content for NWS employees and stakeholders. Over the next few years he slowly began to shift the learning culture in the organization, and to push learning beyond technical skills.

“They need to demonstrate a change in behavior. That’s the difference between training and learning.”

— John Ogren, CLO, National Weather Service It set a new priority for learning so that in 2015, when NWS went through a reorganization, the senior leadership all agreed the organization needed a CLO to “address all of the development needs of the workforce,” said Mary Erickson, deputy director of NWS. Ogren had pushed for the role to be created — but he didn’t want it for himself because it would mean returning to Washington. If the CLO was truly a C-suite position, the leadership felt the role belonged at headquarters, he said.

He was clearly the best person for the job, but Ogren wasn’t willing to leave Kansas. It also made more sense for the CLO to be in Kansas where the primary NWS training center is housed, said Leroy Spayd, portfolio coordinator and deputy CLO for NWS. The executive team ultimately agreed that it made sense for the CLO to be in Kansas, so Ogren took the job.

“He still travels to D.C. a lot,” Spayd said. “But being based in Kansas allows him to keep his hand on the pulse of learning in the organization.”

PHOTOS BY PAUL ANDREWS

Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

35

Profile Everyone Deserves to Learn

To emphasize the importance of this course, Ogren was already fully embedded in the train- someone from the executive team attends every ing culture at NWS, but as CLO he ramped up his new-hire class to speak to the employees and reinefforts and focused on transforming the way NWS force the organizational commitment to learning. thinks about learning as an integral piece of the Erickson, who frequently attends these classes, employee experience. marvels at the way Ogren engages participants.

When he first got involved in training, courses “He tells them stories about his early career, how focused mainly on tech- he identified with the NWS mission, and about nical and science skills past supervisors who helped him course correct,” — teaching people to she said. “His rapport with every class of students use radar equipment is amazing.” and to maintain their Ogren’s team has also developed dozens of credentials. But Ogren online modules covering compliance issues and and his team felt that introducing trainees to information about new approach was too limit- satellites, radars and forecasting techniques. The ed. To foster a strong modules are backed up by job aids built into the learning culture, he felt tools. For example, if someone is struggling to — Mary Erickson, deputy director, that training had to read a satellite image, they can right-click and a National Weather Service touch every employee, job aid pops up. The goal is to make sure people and that his team should deliver soft skills as well as have access to whatever training they need. “We technical skills. want to give people more opportunities to refresh “John broadened our training offerings beyond and build on their skills throughout their careers,” the science to include our mission, culture and who said Jeff Zeltwanger, chief of the NWS leadership we are,” Spayd said. “He is thinking about all of academy division. the learning needs across the organization.”

Ogren has made that happen. Zeltwanger noted One of Ogren’s biggest initial goals was to ex- that before Ogren was made CLO, the Leadership pand leadership training to everyone in a leading Academy was a part-time gig without the necessary role. “Leadership is a behavior, not a solution,” he resources to meet the organization’s needs. “John said. It shouldn’t be a course taught to someone articulated that we need to make training a corpowho is already struggling in a new role, which is rate function with dedicated resources to bring often the case when technical experts get promot- training to people throughout the organization,” ed to leadership roles. Instead, he argues that Zeltwanger said. “It is because of him that I’m in leadership development should be taught early in the position I’m in.” everyone’s career, because at one point or another “we are all leaders.”

In response, his team expanded the leadership academy to include courses for early and midcareer professionals to ensure that as employees move up the career ladder their leadership skills evolve as well as their technical skills.

They also added peer-to-peer leadership development efforts, a mentoring program, and a new-hire orientation course that everyone, from entry-level staff to executive new hires, have to complete as part of their onboarding.

“The course lets them know who we are and why we do John Ogren, chief learning officer of the National Weather Service, believes leadership development the work we do,” Ogren said. should be offered early in everyone's career.

“We all recognized that we needed to create a culture of continuous learning at NWS, but John brought the solution.”

36 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

Profile expected of them, and to discuss the program after the fact to reinforce what they learned on the job.

“When we spend their money wisely it helps us build their trust,” Spayd said. And it results in a greater appreciation of the impact learning can have on their ability to meet their strategic goals.

“Once they experience our training they want more,” he added. “It has become hard to keep up.”

The Language of Weather

Ogren is working to simplify the way NWS scientists communicate with the public and city leaders.

You Gotta Pay to Play Along with changing the type of content being delivered, Ogren’s team has also had to adapt to a completely new way of budgeting for their programs. As part of the 2015 reorganization, training is now funded by each of the organization’s five divisions, which are required to pay for any course they participate in.

“It’s caused us to run it like a business,” Ogren said. This new approach makes his life a lot more complicated and requires constant communication between the learning group and division leaders about what training they want and what it will cost them.

But the shift has delivered a lot of benefits. “It was easier when they just handed out money,” Ogren said.

“But it has resulted in our budget doubling.”

It also ensures every sponsor has skin in the game. “If they want their people trained, they know they need come up with the money,” he said.

If they are forced to pay for training they are more invested in ensuring their people get value from the program, and in turn Ogren’s team is held accountable for delivering value-driven content.

That caused his team to think more strategically about how to measure the impact of learning, which resulted in a project to inventory the organization’s core competencies and to tie proof of those competencies to quantifiable measures of performance and promotion decisions.

Ogren is quick to point out that completing a class doesn’t mean someone is suddenly competent. “They need to demonstrate a change in behavior,” he said.

“That’s the difference between training and learning.”

To ensure training is having the desired consequence, he encourages managers to talk with employees about why they are completing training and what’s

Ogren isn’t only focused on training employees.

He also aspires to simplify the way NWS communicates with the public and to provide more relevant training to city leaders, event planners, schools and other organizations that need to know what to do when a storm hits. “They don’t always understand our language and that’s OK,” he said. Instead of forcing these groups to translate hardcore science, he’s working to change the way NWS communicates with these leaders so they can make decisions about their own response plans faster and with greater confidence. “We spend a lot of time trying to educate scientists on how to speak in a language people understand,” he said. “It requires a major culture shift.”

Being the first CLO in NWS history has given Ogren the freedom and authority to shape the role, and he has benefited from strong executive support. “We all recognized that we needed to create a culture of continuous learning at NWS, but John brought the solution,” Erickson said.

Every day he works with leaders from all five of the NWS divisions to break down silos and ensure everyone has access to the same quality of learning across all mission areas. “John is an empowering leader,” Zeltwanger said. “He articulates his vision, then he trusts his people to do their jobs.”

He is equally good at convincing stakeholders to support his team when they need his help, Zeltwanger added. For example, when they initially launched the new-hire orientation, some smaller groups in NWS didn’t have the budget to put every new hire through onsite training. “John believed that everyone should have the right to come to the class,” Zeltwanger said. So he went to the CFO and fought for resources to fund travel and training so that every new hire could attend. “John leveraged his influence to make it happen.”

That’s exactly the kind of leader Erickson and her peers wanted in this role. “He’s a consummate champion of learning who can think through the challenges that others face and figure out a way to get things done,” Erickson said. CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

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P

riya Parker’s bold approach to gatherings redefines the ways people connect, learn and develop relationships.

As the founder of boutique advisory firm Thrive Labs she helps activists, elected officials, corporate executives, educators and philanthropists create transformative, unforgettable gatherings that allow them to step back from their daily routines, rediscover their motivations and develop strategies for innovation.

What influenced you to write your book?

For far too long we’ve been told that gatherings are about getting the things right: the logistics, the venue, the food, the tech. However, I wanted to write a book that put people back at the center of our gatherings. I wanted to write a leadership book that reminded leaders that gathering the intentional bringing together of three or more people for a purpose is a fundamental unit of power.

A few reasons you should read “The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters” Read “The Art of Gathering” if you want to reimagine your everyday meetings, you have an upcoming high-stakes gathering that you’re nervous about either at work or at home, or if you’re planning an off-site, conference, wedding, summer barbeque, back to school night, family reunion, neighborhood block party, fundraiser, book club, political rally, baby shower or hootenanny.

What are the most important elements to a successful gathering?

One of the most important elements to a successful gathering is to have a specific disputable purpose, to know why you’re gathering and not assume you already know why that is.

You say that “Life is too short to gather in the old Martha Stewart way. Welcome to the new rules of gathering.” What is the No.1 rule that should be followed?

The new rules of gathering are about shifting the assumption that we create meaning through the shaping of things (the crudites) to creating meaning through the shaping of the interaction (the connection).

You were trained in the field of conflict resolution. How did your background there translate to your writing of this book?

As a facilitator, you’re taught to focus on how to make the interaction between people meaningful, provocative and even transformative. Every page of this book is written through that lens.

CATCH PRIYA’S KEYNOTE ADDRESS AT THE FALL SYMPOSIUM! 1 p.m. The Art of Gathering

Register today at www.ChiefLearningOfficer.com

40 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

Digital Degrees and Flexibility The workplace is evolving. Executive education and leadership development must adapt in the digital age.

T

BY SAR AH FISTER GALE | ART BY MA X WELL COOPER

he days of sending rising young executives to an MBA program and then considering them fully trained are virtually over. Today’s leaders are expected to be lifelong learners, which means they need constant access to fast and cost-effective development programs that build on their skills and abilities while allowing them to expand their network of peers.

“The nature of leadership skills is changing so quickly that a lot of organizations no longer believe traditional education can stay the pace,” said Michael Griffiths, lead for Deloitte’s Learning Consulting Practice in New York. “Leaders need programs that enable them to more rapidly change their skills.”

This doesn’t mean the MBA has lost its value.

“Business schools are trying to be more nimble, offering digital degrees and flexible consumption

models,” he said. But with so many options, they are now viewed as just one of many learning steps a leader might choose to take.

In many cases, companies are looking for faster and more future-focused programs that will prepare leaders for the changing nature of work. In Deloitte’s “2019 Human Capital Trends” report, the top-rated requirement for leaders was the ability to lead through more complexity and ambiguity, and almost half of respondents (47 percent) felt their leaders needed to learn how to manage a workforce that is a combination of humans and machines.

Yet companies are struggling to figure out how to accommodate these needs. Only 30 percent of organizations say they are effectively developing their leaders to meet these challenges. “There is a lot of unease about leadership and learning,” Griffiths said.

Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

41

Leadership and the Future of Work The pressure to deliver fast and more targeted leadership development is transforming the executive education landscape, pushing universities, corporate education providers, and internal learning and development teams to evolve their content to make it more meaningful and relevant for today’s executives.

There is more emphasis on how to encourage collaborative behavior because that is seen as an innovation enabler.

“The whole idea of customized content has become a very big part of executive education,” said Michael Chavez, CEO of Duke Corporate Education. Rather than providing leaders with general leadership content and hypothetical case studies, companies want their people to work on real-world, relevant problems that the business is trying to solve.

“Every client we work with is going through some transformation, and they see leadership development as key to these efforts,” Chavez said.

That is causing them to change the way they think about leadership development and what benefits it brings to the organization. Chavez notes that courses about business strategy are less in demand, as companies think more about the specific behaviors and capabilities leaders need to drive the business forward. “Courses on establishing purpose and values, and shaping company culture, are now in demand,” he said. There is also a lot more emphasis on how to encourage collaborative behavior in the workplace because that is seen as an enabler of innovation. “We are doing a lot more change workshops than strategic training programs.”

This is causing many of the traditional leadership and business management courses to be replaced by more future-focused programs with catchy titles like Customer Focused Innovation (offered by Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design), Designing Organizations for Digital Disruption (offered by Duke Corporate Education) and Leading Change and Organizational Renewal (offered by Harvard Business School).

However, Chavez admits creating workshops that teach leaders how to leverage technology and change corporate culture is a lot more complicated that teaching basic leadership skills. “I can spend three hours lecturing about strategy, but you can’t do that with culture change,” he said. Instead, training orga42 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

nizations need to create more collaborative lessons and opportunities for leaders to work on real-world business problems in cross-functional teams.

In that environment, bolting a few company-​ specific case studies onto otherwise general content isn’t enough. Universities and for-profit executive education organizations have to work with companies to build content around their specific leadership challenges and to establish measurable learning outcomes that will tie back to the business strategy to prove their worth. “There is limitless opportunity to create learning content that supports a specific business need,” Chavez said. “But it demands a new way of thinking.”

Programming in the C-suite There is also a new crop of digitally focused leadership development courses that introduce leaders to rapidly evolving technologies and help them understand how to be a leader in a workplace driven by artificial intelligence, robotics and other rapidly evolving tools.

Chris Castiglione believes that for leaders to fully understand the digital age of leadership, they need to learn the basics of these technologies. Castiglione teaches a digital literacy class for master’s students at Columbia University, where he spends half the course teaching students Python, JavaScript and other coding skills. “Companies have so much data that they want to analyze, and Python is a great coding tool for doing that,” he said. He spends the second half of the course teaching them how leaders can leverage these and other technologies to drive business results. “Just because you can use artificial intelligence or blockchain it doesn’t mean you should,” he said. “The trick is knowing when to use them.”

Castiglione doesn’t expect his students to leave the class as coding experts, but he does believe that introducing them to basic skills and vocabulary makes these tools more accessible and allows them to see how new technologies are really just evolutions of what already exists. “If leaders want their companies to take advantage of new technology, they need to stay abreast of these trends,” he said. “Learning to code breaks down some of the barriers and gives them confidence to make decisions.”

In these kinds of courses, it is important to make the connections between technology and leadership, agreed Ed Hoffman, senior lecturer in the Master of Science in Information and Knowledge Strategy at Columbia University in New York.

Hoffman is currently developing a course on the future of work and how leadership must evolve to stay relevant in a more digital landscape. “That doesn’t mean just teaching leaders about artificial intelli-

THE STATE OF EXECUTIVE EDUCATION IN 2019 gence and robotics,” he said. “It’s about connecting these technologies to the human element of leadership to achieve a competitive advantage.”

RECENT RESEARCH BY CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER SHOWS A NUMBER OF FINDINGS. COMPILED BY GREY LITAKER

Networking and Distance Learning Along with creating new content, course designers are also rethinking how and where leaders are going to learn.

The rapid pace of change in virtually every industry means they need to be able to leverage new knowledge and skills quickly, Hoffman said. “Speed, agility and velocity comes down to the right amount of learning at the right time.”

That is pushing many developers to move away from classroom-only courses to put some or all content and communications online, so executives can learn when it is convenient — and without spending days away from their office. Although leaders require more than just a selfpaced learning module to develop the skills they need to guide their organizations into the future. “The notion that you can only learn on campus is no longer the norm,” Hoffman said. However, the networking, collaboration and relationship-building that leaders expect to gain from executive education are still important.

Hoffman addresses these seemingly conflicting needs by hosting three four-day intensive on-campus workshops throughout his 16-month master’s program. “It’s an opportunity for them to build connections and trust — things you can’t do from a distance,” he said. The students, who come from all over the world, spend those days learning and networking, then continue to build on those relationships once they return home. “When you do most of your learning at a distance, you really value that time together, to work, eat, drink and socialize.”

Creating workshops that teach leaders how to leverage technology and change corporate culture is complicated.

Regardless of where executives want to learn, whether they are seeking classic leadership skills or if they want to learn how to leverage the latest digital innovations, the good news is they have lots of options. “There is a heightened interest in executive education right now, which means there are more players trying to meet the needs of students,” Chavez said. The key is figuring out what your people need to learn, and who can provide the format, content and experiences that will best meet their needs. CLO Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

34.7%

of respondents report that

growing the succession pipeline is the primary goal of their leadership development/executive education program.

66.2%

80.4%

of respondents report

of organizations are primarily still using instructor-led training

that their organization spends less than

$4,000 on average per person.

Source: CLO “2019 Learning State of the Industry,” N=537

The top three skills targeted for executive leadership are

strategic planning

emotional intelligence

business acumen

Demographic Distribution of MBA Graduates in Academic Year 2016-17 (most recent year with data) Men

Women White

28.89% 21.42%

Black

5.20%

Hispanic

4.11%

Asian/Pacific Islander American Indian/Alaskan Native Two or more races

3.96% 0.17%

Nonresident alien

9.38%

0.99%

8.49%

4.09% 3.45%

0.22% 1.01% 8.62% 26.9%

Management Demographics Men Women

40%

All management occupations

73.1%

Chief executives 60%

Source: Talent Tracker* *Talent Tracker is a custom analytics service developed by the HCM Research and Advisory Group. Talent Tracker integrates data from open sources originating from the U.S. Census, the National Center for Educational Statistics, World and Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com ChiefBank Learning Officer • July/August

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The Experiential

Leader How immersive learning is changing the way leaders develop.

44 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

BY SAR AH FISTER GALE ART BY MA X WELL COOPER

I

f you are thinking about attending an executive education course this year, be prepared to have a lot of choices. Today’s crop of executive education options offer a vast range of topics, formats and learning channels, most of which are designed to help learners transform their leadership style for a more digitally driven workplace.

This is good news, as recent research suggests that executives need a lot more education to keep up with the rapidly changing workplace. Executive Development Associates’ “2019 Trends in Executive Development” report determined that “digital culture shock” is driving most of the interest and evolution in executive education today as leaders seek new knowledge and skills to help them adapt.

Changing business strategy (34 percent) and digital transformation related to AI, analytics, blockchain and other technologies (22 percent) were cited as the most influential issues facing executives today.

These pressures are changing the kinds of content that executives — and the learning organizations that are paying for their education — are seeking, said Michael Chavez, CEO of Duke Corporate Education. “Strategy courses have become a lot less relevant in the shadow of disruption,” he said. They are rapidly being replaced by content and modalities that challenge leaders to think differently and to engage more fully in the learning process.

Learning by Doing The days of spending three hours listening to a lecture are over, Chavez said.

The new crop of courses are far more participatory. Today’s leaders can choose from a variety of experiential learning environments, where professors leverage design thinking strategies, cross-department collaboration, and immersive learning scenarios that force participants to interact, engage and even act out their roles in leadership scenarios.

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This trend is being driven by organizations that don’t want to pay for their people to just sit and listen, and by instructors who recognize that immersive learning can be a transformational experience. It is also proving to be an appealing model for learners, who are often surprised to find they enjoy the opportunity to engage more fully in the learning process.

That was the experience Alex Katzman had when he attended University of California, Berkeley’s three-day on-site High-Impact Leadership Program.

Katzman, who is chief growth officer of Enervee, an online marketplace for energy-efficient products, wanted a course that would help him evolve his leadership skills to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding workforce. “A lot of other executive ed courses felt more like management training or they were industry specific,” he said.

“This one focused on how to be a better leader.”

Katzman also liked Berkeley because of its respected name and proximity to his office in Los Angeles. But he was surprised by the format the workshop took. All of the instructors came from acting and performance backgrounds, and the content focused primarily on helping participants build their leadership presence and learn how to make emotional connections through leadership. “It was very interactive,” he noted. The course included many physical exercises, work on posture, voice projection and using inflections to create tension in storytelling. “We spent a lot of time practicing how to tell a story in two minutes while creating excitement,” he said.

Katzman hadn’t expected to spend so much time engaging and performing, and he was a little uncomfortable at first, but he’s glad he took the class.

“Learning by doing is so much more powerful than just listening,” he said. He’s now applying those skills on the job, and he feels like it has helped him develop his skills as a leader, mentor and coach.

or negotiate the release of hostages — both courses offered by Group Experiential Learning.

It may sound more like an adventure vacation than education, but these learning programs can have a powerful impact. They force participants to make decisions quickly using ambiguous information, and to collaborate and problem-solve in highstress situations — all skills they need to thrive in today’s workplace.

That doesn’t mean every executive needs to be ready to strap on snowshoes to become a better leader. But they do need to know what they want to get from an education, said Ed Hoffman, senior lecturer in the Master of Science in Information and Knowledge Strategy at Columbia University in New York. “Leaders today are working in a high-octane environment that no-one has ever experienced before,” he said. They have to constantly be assessing their current skills and what they will need to stay competitive in the future.

That includes evaluating whether your current skill set could one day be replaced by technology and what you can do to remain relevant, Hoffman advised. He noted that one of the most in-demand skill sets today is applied data analytics, but it’s possible that in a decade, those tasks will be largely automated.

“It is dangerous to think that the skills you have today will carry you for a career.”

He also noted that executives can no longer rely on their company to make these decisions for them. “You have to take care of your own career,” he said. While some organizations are good at creating and acquiring learning opportunities for their high performers, it is foolish for any ambitious leader to assume that someone else will take care of their learning needs.

Hoffman believes it’s an executive’s job to constantly update their career plans and to commit to being a lifelong learner.

“If you are at a stage in your career where you need to improve your skills, or you want to become a driving force in your organization, executive education can help with that,” Katzman said. He urged learners to look for a program that speaks to them, and to be open to new modalities of learning — even if it makes them uncomfortable. “It can help you develop skills you know you aren’t great at, and that can be a real benefit.” CLO

It’s an executive’s job to constantly update their career plans and to commit to being a lifelong learner.

Take Charge of Your Career While not every executive education course is taught by actors, this kind of interactivity and collaboration is becoming much more popular among trainees and their employers. It’s also bringing new players into the space, including acting schools like Second City in Chicago, which offers an improv-based leadership workshop. In other programs, students work collaboratively to solve hypothetical business problems, and even take on roles in immersive experiences, like having to rescue skiers trapped in an avalanche, 46 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

Sarah Fister Gale is a writer based in Chicago. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

48 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

Designing for Results

It is rare for executive education programs to start with the business need. But they could, and, with some programs, should.

BY JACK J. PHILLIPS AND PAT TI P. PHILLIPS ART BY MA X WELL COOPER

I

magine you are an executive education provider at a prestigious business school. You have some of the most respected faculty in the world, with great content, innovative design, and participants from some of the most admired and respected organizations attending your programs regularly. The feedback from your reaction questionnaires is awesome. The participants love your material and the experience you provide. Clearly, this program is successful — right?

Now, let’s suppose your participants leave this program and never do anything with what they’ve learned. With no application of content, there is no impact on their work, their community or their families. If this occurred — no application and no impact — would you still consider your program successful?

This is a tough question. But for the executive education sponsors, those who pay for it, the clear answer is “no,” your program is not successful. As an executive education provider, you could say, “We gave them a great program and we know they learned powerful content. It is up to the participants to make it work. It’s out of our control.”

This creates a dilemma for executive education. To be successful in the eyes of those who pay for it, usually the top and senior executives, it must add value to the organization.

That often means moving beyond classic behavior change measurement, usually evaluated through 360-degree feedback. The new challenge is for program providers to address the issue of application and impact up front and not wait to be pulled into these issues by the client.

The Problem Executive education has been an important phenomenon in the past two decades. Most universities offer executive or continuing education in some format and the cost, quality and reputation has changed tremendously. It is now estimated to be a $30 billion industry in the U.S. alone.

Globally, that goes well over $100 billion.

With this tremendous growth, use and cost comes a need for accountability, causing some universities and other education providers to measure the value of these services.

Most important, it is causing some of the key clients who spend large sums of money on these programs to question return on investment in these programs.

According to Mihnea Moldoveanu and Das Narayandas’ “The Future of Leadership Development,” published in the March/April 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review, “Chief learning officers find that traditional programs no longer adequately prepare executives for the challenges they face today and those they will face tomorrow. Executive education programs also fall short of their own stated objectives. Traditional executive education is simply too episodic, exclusive and expensive.”

When clients ask for the value of executive education, they normally ask after the program has been completed. That’s probably too late to show the value.

If you want to drive business value, you must start with business value. It is rare for executive education programs to start with the business need. But they could, and, with some programs, they should.

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The Opportunity To meet this challenge, we will borrow design thinking principles from the innovation field. Design thinking has been in the innovation industry for more than three decades. It started with the book “Design Thinking” by Peter Rowe in 1987 and developed further through many others, including Idris Mootee’s “Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation.”

The main point of design thinking is that if you want specific results, you design for those results.

This requires that you clearly define the desired result, and you have the whole team work toward achieving that result. For example, Uber wanted to create a ride service that was less expensive, faster and more convenient than the classic taxi, with a better customer experience. They accomplished this by designing for those three measures: lower cost, less time, better experience.

Let’s reflect on how the success of executive education is currently defined. Consider the options for defining your success of executive education shown in Figure 1. Take a few minutes to select your ultimate definition of success. Select only one value description as the most important.

FIGURE 1: WHAT’S SUCCESSFUL EXECUTIVE EDUCATION TO YOU? Value description

Level

Serve the largest number of people with the least amount of disruption and cost.

0

Participants are engaged, enjoy the programs and see their experience as valuable.

1: Reaction

Participants are learning the latest information and skills to build a great organization.

2: Learning

Participants leave the executive education program, take action, use the content and make important changes.

3: Application

Participants are driving important business measures and having an impact in their work units and the organization.

4: Impact

Participants and the organization have a positive return on the investment of their time and the resources of the organization.

The Fundamentals Most programs are evaluated using logical steps of value, and their sequential use can be linked to a variety of guidelines and models. At the heart of our ROI methodology is the variety of data collected throughout the process and reported at different intervals, as shown in Figure 2. This flow of data is appropriate for executive education as employees react to the programs, learn content in the program, apply what they have learned and have an impact in their work. When impact is converted to money and compared to the cost of the executive education program, the ROI may be calculated.

In addition to these five levels of outcomes, (reaction, learning, application, impact and ROI), there are some impact measures that are not easily converted to money, and they are left as intangibles. These are measures such as teamwork, collaboration, image, stress and job engagement. By balancing financial impact with measures that address individual perspectives and the systems and processes that support the transfer of knowledge, skills and information, a complete story of program success can be told.

If you can deliver business results at a reasonable cost, you can influence the funders who make decisions about executive education programs, protect the investment when it needs to be protected and enhance it when it needs to be increased. The key is to influence the investment decisions with data that connect business results to the program and add value to the organization.

Designing for Results 5: ROI

If you are like the hypothetical prestigious school mentioned at the beginning of this article, you probably selected one of the first two options: serving a large number of participants from high-profile, admired organizations and having them be very pleased with their participation.

As you examine the list, there is a tendency to want to select other options, particularly toward the bottom of the table. Unfortunately, in reality, the vast majority of executive education programs are not evaluated at the impact level, and rarely are they evaluated at the application level, usually with a process similar to 360-degree feedback.

50 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

The good news is that the evaluation of executive education programs can be (and is being) done at the impact and ROI levels. It is just a matter of designing for the desired results and making sure the entire team is focusing on those results. Following is a system that can meet that challenge.

The definition of success of executive education programs should be business impact for organizations, the outcome desired by top executives. With the definition of success clearly defined, the challenge is to design for the desired success. Designing for the results takes the risk and mystery out of the process.

The concept is simple. At every stage in the process, the executive education program is designed with the end in mind — and the end is business results. All stakeholders complete their part of the process with the business results in mind. This transforms the classic program development cycle into a simple design thinking model for business results with eight steps to design for success.

Step 1: Start With Why Align executive education programs with the business. The why becomes the business need and

the proposed program is aligned to the specific business measure, selected by the executive before attending the program.

Step 2: Make it Feasible Select the right solution. To make sure this is the right solution to drive the business measure, the executive is asked a simple question: “Can you use the content of this program with your team to improve this measure?” If the answer is no, another measure is selected until there is a yes.

Step 3: Expect Success Design for results. The success of learning is now defined as, “Executives are using the learning to drive important business impact measures in their work units.” Objectives are set to push accountability to the business impact level. With reaction, learning, application and impact objectives, the designers, developers, facilitators, participants and managers of participants (if they are involved) know what they must do to deliver and support results.

FIGURE 2: FIVE-LEVEL EVALUATION FRAMEWORK Level

Measurement focus

Reaction and planned action

Measures participant satisfaction with the program and captures planned action

Learning

Measures changes in knowledge, skills and information

Application and implementation

Measures changes in behavior and performance

Business impact

Measures changes in outcome measures

ROI

Compares the program monetary benefits to program costs

Step 4: Make it Matter Design for input, reaction and learning. This ensures that the right people are involved in executive education programs at the right time and that the content is important, meaningful and actionable. Reaction and learning data are measured.

Step 5: Make it Stick Design for application and impact. This ensures that the executive is actually using the learning (application) and that it has an impact. Action plans are often used to guide the executive through application and impact. Results are captured from executives at both application and impact levels. Barriers must be removed or minimized and enablers are enhanced to drive results.

Step 6: Make it Credible Measure results and calculate ROI. With impact data in hand, the results must be credible. The first action is to isolate the effects of the executive education program on the impact data. Several options are avail-

able to tackle this step. If ROI is planned, the next action is to convert data to money. Then the monetary benefits are compared to the cost of the program in an ROI calculation. This builds two sets of data that sponsors will appreciate: business impact connected directly to the program and the financial ROI, which is calculated the same way that a CFO would calculate the return on a capital investment.

Step 7: Tell the Story Communicate results to key stakeholders. Reaction, learning, application, impact and perhaps even ROI data form the basis for a powerful story. Storytelling is critical, and it’s a much better story when you have business impact. Narratives and numbers are both needed.

Step 8. Optimize Results Use black box thinking to increase funding. Designing for results usually drives the needed results, but there’s always an opportunity to make the results even better. This involves improving the program so the ROI increases in the future. Increased ROI makes a great case for more funds. When funders (executives) see that the program has a positive ROI, it will usually be repeated, retained and supported.

Following these eight steps provides a simple system to use design thinking to deliver business results for executive education programs. It’s not a radical change, but it involves tweaking what has been used and done in the past. The change is shifting the responsibility to drive the business results to all the stakeholders. It also redefines the success of learning, not just absorbing the skills and knowledge or even using them in your work. Education is now defined as driving impact in the organization.

When executive education programs are designed using these eight steps, we also shift the funders’ perception of executive education from a cost to an investment. With this approach, funders clearly see that executive education reaps an ROI. If the funders or executives do not see it as an investment, executive education programs may be perceived as a cost that could be cut, controlled or reduced. Unfortunately, this has occurred in many situations.

In summary, using design thinking as the evaluation method of your executive education programs leads to optimization of the ROI as programs are improved. Optimization leads to better decisions to allocate funds in the future. The challenge is to incorporate a measurement and evaluation system to show funders the value of executive education programs at the investment level up front so they are more likely to invest in your program and support the participants. CLO 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.

Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

51

Case Study

A Bright Future for State Farm

BY AGATHA BORDONARO

F

or an organization like State Farm, recruiting and retaining the best and brightest is more than aspirational — it’s mission critical. Holding more than 83 million insurance policies, selling about 100 different products and processing more than 39,000 claims a day, State Farm insures more homes, cars and watercraft than any other insurance company in the United States. And its more than 58,000 employees are the ones keeping that motor running. Not only must they be skilled at their jobs, but they also must be invested in the organization to ensure everything moves smoothly.

On top of that, around 10 years ago State Farm began to focus on employee count in larger metropolitan areas, where it was competing with other big employers.

“We were opening huge facilities — in large part call centers — with many IT employees in three major hubs in the south,” said Jeff Yerington, manager of industry education and tuition reimbursement for State Farm. “We were starting to have more and more issues with hiring and retaining these employees.”

So, in 2014, Yerington and his team decided to take a closer, more strategic look at one of the company’s top recruitment and retention tools: its tuition reimbursement program.

The Challenges Through a deep dive into the tuition reimbursement program, Yerington and his team found that the time and effort to process tuition reimbursement requests were quite extensive for State Farm employees when compared with a typical expense request.

There was also a lack of insight into the outcomes of the program. “We had almost no data as far as the impact,” Yerington said. “I had information on two things: how many employees were participating and how much we spent. And that was essentially it.”

Further, Yerington’s team discovered that State Farm employees faced two distinct barriers to participating in the program. First, the cost: Education is expensive, and since they were paying their tuition up front at most universities, employees were limited by their personal financial constraints. Second, for those who did enroll, the plethora of options could be paralyzing.

“We have no limits on what schools our employees 52 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

SNAPSHOT State Farm partners with Bright Horizons EdAssist to reap real rewards from its tuition reimbursement program.

can attend. Our only requirement regarding schools is they have to be regionally accredited,” Yerington explained. “On the good side, it gives employees all the choice in the world. On the downside, if you don’t know where you want to go to school, you’re not sure what program fits you best, etc., you can be really lost — and sometimes the advice of your cube mate is not the best advice in the world.”

To help solve these challenges and improve the program, Yerington’s team turned to Bright Horizons EdAssist Solutions, a provider of strategic tuition assistance program management.

The Solutions Patrick Donovan, senior vice president for education advisory services at Bright Horizons, broke down State Farm’s business challenges into three main areas. First, it needed to streamline its processing of tuition assistance paperwork; second, it needed to instill the program with benchmarks and metrics to assess its impact; and third, it needed to remove financial and other barriers to entry to ensure full adoption and yield maximum benefit to both employees and employer.

“They just wanted better management, better analytics, better options, better discounts along the way and a better user experience,” Donovan said.

To address the first challenge, State Farm outsourced the processing of tuition assistance paperwork to EdAssist. “Our goal for employees was that … the new system would be no different from anything else they would do at State Farm as far as processing and expense,” Yerington said. “What we didn’t want was something that was so radically different that it was difficult to learn. The EdAssist system is very simple to use. We rarely get ‘how to’ questions ever on the actual system.”

Next, EdAssist created benchmarks to measure the starting to get has helped us tweak programs because impact of State Farm’s tuition assistance program. EdAs- we were able to point back to actual numbers.” sist relied on its experience with and knowledge gleaned For example, State Farm had a requirement in from its cadre of clients and learners, as well as on direct place for master’s degree programs that was preventconversations with State Farm’s learning team and re- ing some employees from pursuing the degree besearch into State Farm’s existing tuition program. cause “they were going to have to do something else “Clients send us in their eligibility files, their em- first that would probably take two years, on average,” ployee files, the hire dates of the employees and the Yerington said. But a separate EdAssist study showed departure dates, whether they are in good standing,” that, on average, 93 percent of U.S. employees who Donovan said. “What that means is we can tell clients have used education assistance say they’ve developed directly the difference in retention between people the skills needed for growth within their organization; doing an education program and those who do not.” 79 percent say tuition assistance makes them more With the move to EdAssist, State Farm is now able likely to stay with the organization; 85 percent say the to get detailed data on program is important to retention for particijob satisfaction; and 6 pants in the tuition asout of 10 were offered sistance program versus a promotion, new opthose not in the proportunities within the gram, as well as stats on organization or other graduation rates and professional benefits. spend per school.

These positive benefits The third goal of — Jeff Yerington, manager of industry education were confirmed by State State Farm’s partnerFarm’s internal surveys, and tuition reimbursement, State Farm ship with EdAssist was so the company opted to reduce the two major obstacles barring employees to remove the problematic requirement for master’s from participating in the tuition assistance program: degree programs in March 2019. the cost and the overwhelming number of choices.

“We know anecdotally that we already have a To address the cost, EdAssist leveraged its partner- number more in master’s degree programs than we ships with about 220 schools to offer State Farm em- had prior,” Yerington said. ployees high-quality education programs at discounted Finally, the addition of lower-cost options and rates. To tackle the other issue, EdAssist implemented one-on-one educational advising has resulted in sigfull-service educational consulting services. EdAssist nificantly more — and more impactful — use of the advisers are trained in the particular needs and goals of program. It has also helped shape employees’ experieach would-be participant — from likely background ences at State Farm, resulting in improved job perforto job skills to potential career aspirations — and can mance, career mobility and employee engagement, as direct them to the best-suited schools and programs. well as higher retention, all of which also have contributed to more successful recruiting efforts. EdAssist The Results has found that 84 percent of those who use the tuiBy outsourcing tuition-assistance processing, State tion-assistance program think it was important in Farm was able to reduce the employee count of the unit their decision to join the company in the first place. handling this work by one part-time and two full-time When implementing these solutions, State employees, a significant savings in salary and benefits.

Farm ensured it had executive buy-in and a culture EdAssist’s careful tracking of State Farm’s tuition as- that prioritized employee development. “They sistance program also yielded helpful analytics for Yer- were engaged with us all along the way in terms of ington’s team. It found that 89 percent of participants defining the policy, getting the data organized and in the tuition reimbursement program stayed with to us in a usable and easy format, giving us access State Farm, of those who participated in the program, to their corporate communications folks so that 51 percent were relatively new to State Farm, having we could make sure that the way they wanted to between one and five years of tenure, while 49 percent communicate the program worked within their had been with the company for six years or more. own corporate communication policies — they “Fifty-one percent of our employees in the did all that,” Donovan said. “It was so central to tuition-reimbursement program have one to five years the strategy of State Farm.” CLO of tenure, which tells us that a lot of our new employees really appreciate the tuition-reimbursement op- Agatha Bordonaro is a writer based in New York. She can portunity,” Yerington said. “The data that we were be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

“I had information on two things: how many employees were participating and how much we spent. And that was essentially it.”

Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

53

Top-Down Tinkering From the Ground Up Executive education is expecting change thanks to the ever-present spector of digital disruption.

BY ASHLEY ST. JOHN

A

t the root of so many organizational and societal shifts lies digital disruption. Executive education, it seems, is no exception.

It remains a popular development tool among learning departments — in fact, 56 percent of learning leaders anticipate their total spending on leadership development and executive education increasing in the next 12 months, according to data from the Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board’s “2019 Learning State of the Industry” report (Figure 1). A mere 4 percent anticipate a decrease in spending. Additionally, almost 71 percent report their organizations spend at least $1,000 annually per person on executive education (Figure 2).

The Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board is a group of 1,500 professionals in the learning and development industry who have agreed to be surveyed by the Human Capital Media Research and Advisory Group, the research and advisory arm of Chief Learning Officer magazine. This survey was conducted from January to March 2019.

Despite consistent spending levels, digital and technological transformation is requiring new approaches to executive education and leadership development.

According to BTS’ “2019 Trends in Executive Development Executive Summary,” the top five most highly influential conditions impacting executive development — topped by changing business strategies at 34 percent — all can be traced back

to digital culture shock. (See Figure 3.) And these dynamic conditions necessitate executive programs that are increasingly tied to business strategy and context. The trends study was conducted by Executive Development Associates and is based on the direct input of those who oversee the development of the organization’s leaders for 270 medium and large organizations.

It makes sense, then, that the top skills being targeted for executive leadership, according to the CLO BIB “2019 Learning State of the Industry” report, include strategic planning, emotional intelligence, business acumen and leading innovation (Figure 4). This aligns with the trends report’s finding of the key leadership capabilities that organizations are hoping to address among senior leaders, including the ability to attract, develop and retain talent; the ability to create a compelling vision and engage others around it; and the ability to inspire others (Figure 5).

These priorities necessitate a variety of teaching methods that are anything but traditional, some of which are detailed in this issue’s Executive Education Special Report that begins on page 40. In these times of innovation and change, one thing’s certain: We’ve come a long way since the days of old school exec ed. CLO

Digital and technological transformation is requiring new approaches to executive education and leadership development.

54 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

Ashley St. John is Chief Learning Officer’s managing editor. She can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

Figures’ sources: Chief Learning Officer Business Intelligence Board, N=537 (Figures 1, 2 and 4); “2019 Trends in Executive Development Executive Summary,” BTS (Figures 3 and 5). All percentages rounded.

Business Intelligence

FIGURE 1: TOTAL ANTICIPATED EXECUTIVE EDUCATION SPENDING IN NEXT 12 MONTHS

56%

40%

4%

Increase

No change

Decrease

FIGURE 2: AVERAGE SPEND ON EXECUTIVE EDUCATION PER PERSON 37% 30% 15%

11%

8%

Less than $1,000 per year

$1,000-$3,999 per year

$4,000-$6,999 per year

$7,000-$9,999 per year

More than $10,000 per year

FIGURE 3: MOST INFLUENTIAL CONDITIONS IMPACTING EXECUTIVE DEVELOPMENT 34% 22%

Changing business strategies

19%

Digital transformation (AI, data analytics/big data, blockchain, VR)

Economic conditions

18%

15%

Changing customer requirements

Need for increased innovation

FIGURE 4: TOP SKILLS TARGETED FOR EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP 34%

31%

27% 22%

22%

20% 16%

Strategic planning

Emotional intelligence

Business acumen

Leading innovation

Coaching

Communication

Critical thinking

FIGURE 5: KEY LEADERSHIP CAPABILITIES BEING ADDRESSED 36% 28%

Ability to attract, develop and retain the quality of talent needed to achieve business objectives

Ability to create a compelling vision and engage others around it

21%

20%

19%

Ability to inspire others

Ability to deliver results or is results-oriented

Ability to manage the stress and demands of a real-time overloaded leadership environment

Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

55

POWER continued from page 26

The Powering-Up Partnership Process For the internal client there are several logical steps that need to be taken to lay the necessary groundwork for establishing real supplier partnerships that mimic the principles and behaviors in Figure 2.

First, define your strategic needs over the next 12-36 months to achieve your own and your organization’s goals. These might include growth, innovation, product development and, of course, talent management.

Second, decide how learning and development will impact or be impacted by these goals. For example, global growth might require scaling training capabilities; innovation may involve education about industry disruption; product development may require learning about data analytics for insight, and so on.

Third, determine which capabilities require outside resources to meet these talent development needs.

This will require an internal audit of your design, development and delivery experience and expertise.

When expertise is lacking you should access outside supplier talent.

Fourth, assess the current state of your outside supplier relationships. This process will involve an assessment of the health of these current working relationships against the principles outlined in Figure 2. How do your current suppliers’ capabilities fit with your organization’s strategic needs? And what level of energy will you need to invest in building and maintaining powered-up relationships?

Fifth, create criteria for future supplier selection.

These criteria would include the normal requirements for content and delivery expertise and experience, plus other factors around potential for partnering. What is the breadth and depth of their capabilities? How aligned is the supplier with your organization’s values and styles? What experience does the supplier have both inside and outside your organization’s industry?

How flexible are they in dealing with unexpected occurrences, whether scope, timing or personnel related?

Finally, identify starting points and stage the effort to learn and get to optimal scale. This can be accomplished by starting with one or two initial power-building efforts, either overall or by specific need category. Then take action, learn and build the relationships to scale. (See Figure 3.)

For the supplier, the foundational process for creating real partnerships involves the following steps.

Define your strategic growth plans for the next 12-36 months. This would include everything from revenue generation, expanding internationally, upgrading sales and marketing, and so on.

Refine your marketplace offer and points of differentiation. Ensure you can consistently provide a differentiated offer to the market either through content, delivery or instruction.

56 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

FIGURE 3: ACHIEVING OPTIMAL SCALE ID strategic growth plans

Define L&D contributions

Determine internal vs. external resource needs

Assess current suppliers

Create future external partner criteria

List starting points for powering up right relationships

FIGURE 4: CREATING LONG-TERM VALUE ID strategic growth plans

Refine marketplace offer and difference

Determine target audience

Establish marketing and selling process

Move to strategic partner

Determine your target audience. Identify which organizations will benefit most from your solutions.

This could be determined by a focus on certain job roles (e.g., sales representatives, management); industries (e.g., health care, manufacturing); particular skill sets (e.g., decision-making, leadership); or those problem areas themselves (e.g., growth, innovation).

Establish your marketing and selling process. Develop a compelling value proposition and determine how to effectively communicate it to your target audience and generate leads and sales.

Finally, move from a commodity provider to a strategic partner. This takes time, energy and investment. It involves adopting the six principles in Figure 3 with both parties needing to first see the utility in such an

arrangement, wanting to make it happen and trusting that it will benefit them. The process needed to make such a transition is accomplished by mutually accelerating each organization’s competitive advantage, building their capacity and creating long-term value. (See Figure 4.)

It Starts With Intentional Effort

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erful partnership experiences with Peggy to improve the quality of work with existing and new clients.

As internal talent development leaders search for better solutions to challenges they face, and as external providers look to better serve the marketplace, we believe having a portfolio of typical transactional client-vendor relationships simply won’t work. What both sides need is an intentional effort to begin crafting exceptional partnerships with powerful commitment, communication, credibility, clarity, cadence and collaboration. CLO

Clifford Capone Vice President, Group Publisher 312-967-3538 ccapone@CLOmedia.com

Having a portfolio of typical transactional client-vendor relationships simply won’t work.

Through the creation of a powerful partnership, Peggy found herself sleeping better at night by delivering a well-received and high-impact development program for the sales team. In fact, as time went on, the upswing in a number of key revenue growth and sales performance measurements were linked to the program.

She would often comment on the strength of communication and collaboration with the supplier. Over time, the supplier provided additional support for other critical business initiatives and leveraged the pow-

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57

IN CONCLUSION

The Language Learning Blind Spot Make language learning your fifth learning pillar • BY JOHN AMBROSE

L John Ambrose, former head of strategy for Skillsoft and founder of Books24x7, is president — North America and chief strategy officer of goFluent. He can be reached at editor@ CLOmedia.com.

earning programs and leaders come in all shapes and sizes. However, one thing many have in common, especially in English-speaking countries, is a blind spot around the strategic value of language learning.

Let’s face it, the charter of global learning and development is pretty clear: Define learning priorities, ensure they are aligned with the business and provide a global platform to execute. Today, four major enterprise “learning pillars” exist in almost every company: IT skills, business skills, leadership skills and compliance. It’s time for language learning to be elevated as the fifth pillar.

If you hear any of the following three phrases in your organization, language learning could be a blind spot.

“Everyone at our company speaks English.” Yes, English is the language of business. Yes, your company probably does a fine job screening candidates for conversational proficiency in English. However, if you are in a multinational organization that is focused on growth, up to 50 percent of your employees are in markets where English is not the native language. Sure, they can hold a conversation, but business proficiency is a significantly different standard and needs to be developed and practiced.

“We just let the regions handle it.” Centralized learning programs make good sense: consistent delivery, standardization of reporting and metrics, and, of course, economies of scale. And while most other “pillars” have been centralized, language learning in many cases has not. Think of the number of countries where your company does business. Now, think of the duplication of effort managing expensive local language learning programs of varying quality.

“Language learning is not strategic.” Business today is global, and growth for most companies is in non-English speaking developing markets. Further, companies pay an average of 10-15 percent more for bilingual employees, according to U.S. News & World Report. So why isn’t language strategic? The vast majority of native English speakers in your company had some language instruction at home, in high school or in college. Those latent skills sit dormant in your organization at the same time your company is paying a premium desperately trying to hire bilingual talent.

The economic downside of not treating language learning as a global strategic initiative is frightening.

According to research by The Economist Intelligence Unit, 49 percent of 572 senior executives from public and private organizations worldwide believe miscom-

58 Chief Learning Officer • July/August 2019 • ChiefLearningOfficer.com

munication and messages lost in translation have inhibited major international business deals. Further, 64 percent of the executives interviewed also felt that linguistic and cultural barriers have slowed access to for-

The downside of not treating language learning as a global strategic initiative is frightening. eign markets. More than 86 percent believe that profits, market share and revenue would all increase significantly if their workforce was better equipped to communicate in other languages as and when required.

The good news is that you can course correct with a five-step plan: Evaluate rogue spend. Take a look and you will be amazed (shocked!) at how much money is still being spent on expensive classroom-based and other disparate language learning around the globe. Tally it up.

Align with your global business partners. Communicate the benefits of a centrally coordinated program that frees the business partners from redundant tasks of qualifying, procuring and maintaining many small local relationships.

Choose a truly global partner. Be sure to choose a language learning partner that has the global support in the countries that are key, i.e., China, Brazil, Mexico, Africa and Europe. By buying globally, but working with a partner with feet on the ground in key geographies, you can be assured of the critical local support needed for success.

Rally around the outcomes. Everyone loves positive results and successful KPIs. By elevating language learning to the pantheon of L&D pillars, you can extend your existing scorecards and demonstrate value back to the business.

Look beyond English. Find a vendor who can support you with a variety of business language options.

There’s never been a better time to erect a fifth pillar under your global learning program. CLO

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Women’s Executive Leadership: Business Strategies for Success oct. 21–25, 2019 • mar. 30–apr. 3, 2020

High-Potential Leaders: Accelerating Your Impact People Analytics: HR Transformation through Data apr. 14–17, 2020