A High-Performance Mindset is what drives a CLO
Every CLO has her vision of what nirvana looks like within her organization. A desired, future state on how learning, leadership, and talent management will be run, managed, and operated within her business. Learning leaders are driven not only by their current achievements, but also, by their knowledge of the future people practices their businesses will need to stay competitive. This internal drive in reaching toward this state of high performance is a common discussion point I hear in my conversations with peers. As talent practitioners we strive for excellence in a variety of domains, largely driven by our business’s current internal realities, industry dynamics, organizational maturity, our competitor’s actions, and our current pipeline of innovative solutions, technologies, and services.
Whether it’s increasing your learning function’s analytics and measurement capabilities; developing the future competencies of your Talent Management professionals; aligning better business-centric learning programs; or, evolving from a ‘learning as event, to learning as a process’ mindset. Whichever the business driver may be, as a professional talent practitioner, you are continuously stretching yourself in better leading and enabling your learning function in demonstrably adding impact and value to the business.
The Law of Incremental Improvement
Each year your learning strategies should be incrementally expanding the impact of the learning function upon your business. As you execute your multi-year learning and talent strategies seeking incremental gains each year can have cumulative impact. For example, if your strategy and portfolio of deliverables from 2010-2013 have had an appropriate mix of strategic focus on technology, process, organizational capabilities, delivery modalities, and content, as we enter in 2012 your business should be experiencing the compounding effect of incremental improvements.
A Personal Perspective
Through listening and reflecting with peers and mentors across the corporate learning landscape, there are a few focal points that I have been implementing into my professional practice and embedding within my learning organizations strategy planning and execution.
1. Focus on the learning culture of your organization (and build the tools to sustain it)
Your business’s culture is central to every strategic choice you make as a learning leader. One of my business’s strongest cultural values is on deliberate investments for the long term. We value safety, risk management, and rigorous business analysis. As with many organizations, employees face exceeding work demands, and time constraints, so learning’s products need to be simple, meaningful, and relevant. Therefore, in continuously improving our learning offerings and solutions, my learning function, is absolutely clear as to the learning strategy we are executing, in support of the business’s strategy, and what results we seek to attain from the actions we take.
In approaching opportunities to enhance our employees’ experiences in formal learning programs in 2011, we are undertaking ways to enhance the complete learning experience throughout the learning value chain. At a very tactical level we are focusing on simplifying and enhancing core common tools for both employees and managers.
With the objective to add greater value to both the alignment and participation in formal learning, as well as, application back on the job. We built a globally consistent tool kit and integrated it within each of our offerings. This toolkit comprises an enhanced course description template that is business centric, ensuring we focus on getting the ‘right person, to the right learning experience, at the right time.’ We have also instituted a ‘Checklist for High Impact Learning’ identifying the critical behaviors for both employees and their managers in successfully preparing for and integrating learning back on the job. A standard course summary consisting of critical content, tools, and concepts in each program is included to assist managers in discussing and preparing direct reports for learning (given that many managers may have attended courses years ago, if at all). Standard Manager discussion guides that, in combination with the Checklist for High Impact Learning, ensures strong engagement and alignment discussion with direct reports in meeting management expectations. Finally, a course road map (we call it a High Impact Learning Plan), which is a one-page visual that demonstrates that learning is a process and highlights the sequences of events, actions, and activities the employee is responsible for before, during, and after learning.
We have implemented these common tools to substantiate our investments in learning. In keeping them simple, aligned to key business drivers, and designed into the learning experience, we are building the mindset that these activities are not an additional burden with their existing work, but are rather, accelerators of engagement and enablers of high impact learning for the business.
2. Integrate analytics in making visible, to the business, the impact of its learning investments
If the rest of your business is ‘competing on analytics’, how can your learning function not? This has long been the Achilles’ heel for learning and talent practitioners, and its stature is only growing more significant as the disciplines of Learning, HR, Talent Management, and Human Capital merge. Again, incorporating the law of incremental improvement is a powerful concept in building the strategy, processes, and tools in effectively managing an analytics program. I have found the Talent Development Reporting initiative, that our collective industry is mobilizing around, through the leadership of Knowledge Advisors and many thought leaders, to be both exciting, yet all too necessary in better engaging, demonstrating, and portraying to business leaders the impact of their investments in human capital.
Currently, my learning function is working hard in exploring ways to better demonstrate the value our business investments in learning. We’re focusing on the ‘bookends’ of the event – the before and after, and ways in which to better measure the process of learning occurring and its relation to business outcomes. This topic is nothing new for the learning industry, and many of you, I am sure, have been working with similar intent and focus. As we move to engage participants, stakeholders, and the business around enhanced reporting measures it will be necessary to keep the actions simple, meaningful, relevant, and business-centric.
3. Leverage strategic partnerships in enhancing your value chain
Organizations make strategic choices where to insource and outsource capabilities. My learning function has strategically pursued an outsourcing strategy in particular segments of the curricular portfolio we manage for the business. In executing our global strategy, over the last few years, we have reduced the number of external vendors we utilize. This has provided us with both efficiencies, but more importantly, provided greater effectiveness in my team’s ability to consult and deliver strategic value for our internal clients and stakeholders.
In leading this effort, I have gained clarity and insights in thinking about the value chain necessary in globally scaling and sustaining the high impact solutions we seek to deliver, with external providers. In executing this strategy successfully, this has required a mindset change for both my learning function, as well as the external providers. Internally, we have transitioned from a ‘procuring to partnering’ mindset, and moving from a transactional, vendor management approach to an integrative, ‘long term multi-sourcing’ approach. Externally, the providers have had to learn to better collaborate with peers/competitors, evolve from an ‘event-based mindset’, and recognize how to manage both the strengths and weaknesses of their services, as well as, their peers in order to deliver to the business a single, global, integrated high-impact learning experience, and by extension, high-impact results. This is making my team much more effective in externally interfacing, and I believe, we are making the providers we work with better, which will have results with other clients they work with.
4. Think about the ‘ecosystem’ that you lead
By default, our perspective shapes the way we see the world. Whether, your learning organization is centralized or decentralized, the structure in which you work will contribute to the mental model in which you approach your learning activities. Given the increasing workload and time-compression that many L&D and talent practitioners are experiencing, it is all the more critical to continually reflect and work on identifying, bridging, and reinforcing the interdependencies within and across the talent, learning, and HR functions.
While the need to deliver quick wins is important for any change initiative you might be leading in relation to your learning portfolio, quick wins in isolation from other critical linkages in your organization, could lead to ineffectiveness in the long-term. I have found that a relentless, pro-active, engaging campaign on establishing, deepening, and extending across organizational networks is critical in gaining the support and resources to be a successful learning leader.
5. Relentlessly market and communicate learning’s story
As our organizations flatten and get leaner, the challenges of time-compression and competition for employees’ attention and (interest and motivation) mean that learning functions need to develop long-term communications and marketing strategies. This might involve investments in learning portals, learning management systems, an extension or integration with your communications/public affairs organization, or greater resources committed developing and distributing social media.
In my organization, we intentionally decided not to create additional marketing channels, but instead chose to identify and leverage existing communication modalities our employees already receive and are familiar with. For example, we better optimized the quarterly HR electronic newsletter distributed to all employees, better advertised on the HR Managers tools and resources websites, marketed information on additional programs and learning resources during formal training events, further capturing a targeted ‘captive’ audience. We also began segmenting the appropriate communications to our various stakeholders from senior executives, to managers, and the broader workforce, and tailoring by business function and geography through quarterly business stewardship meetings. In hindsight, it seems obvious, but all learning leaders can learn (and need to be) better marketers.
Stay in Touch with Your Inner Drive
As you plan for 2012, and reflect on the progress in executing your learning strategy, you may need to adjust as your business looks forward. However, it is important not to overlook your own development as a Learning Leader, and how your learning function is contributing to the business. More importantly, don’t miss the incremental improvements you are making as a Learning Leader. With consistency, time, and the cumulative incremental efforts that you are making, you work closer to achieving the desired state of high performance.
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