April 2011 - Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/ Chief Learning Officer is a multimedia publication focused on the importance, benefits and advancements of a properly trained workforce. Wed, 14 Aug 2019 19:21:49 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/cropped-CLO-icon-Redone-32x32.png April 2011 - Chief Learning Officer - CLO Media https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/ 32 32 Outsource Training to Transfer Knowledge https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/28/outsource-training-to-transfer-knowledge/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/28/outsource-training-to-transfer-knowledge/#respond Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:00:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/28/outsource-training-to-transfer-knowledge/ As companies begin to recover, the urgency of training is rebounding and putting outsourcing for expertise back on the rise.

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It is commonly recognized that companies often need effective training programs to transfer knowledge and skills to employees, customers and partners; to retain employees; and to improve speed to proficiency. The approach to that knowledge transfer can vary: Training programs can be grown organically over time, developed in-house, outsourced to a training provider or implemented using some combination of in-house and external expertise.

The decision to outsource often rests on whether internal staff can support the needed volume and quality of training. Overall, enterprises that outsource training are satisfied with outsourcing and expect to maintain or increase spending levels slightly for 2012. According to data from a January 2011 Human Capital Media Advisory Group survey on training outsourcing, more than 50 percent of enterprises use an outside provider to augment some part of their training function (Figure 1). Most often, enterprises use external vendors for content development, training delivery and training technology management.

Training outsourcing is the ongoing transfer of the management and execution of one or more complete training processes to an external services provider. However, it is clear from the survey, conducted in partnership with IDC, in the past several years, this is not the marketplace’s current use of the term. The types of training activities being purchased suggest enterprises use the term training outsourcing interchangeably with any use of external training providers. For the purpose of this article, we will adopt this broader usage of training outsourcing for analysis.

Fluctuating Usage Over Time

In the past several years, there has been a decline in the number of enterprises that outsource part of their training function. The survey results show that in 2007, 58 percent of enterprises outsourced some portion of their training process. By 2010, only about 45 percent of chief learning officers reported outsourcing some portion of their training function. In our most recent survey, the trend appears to be reversing: More than 50 percent of enterprises report outsourcing some portion of their training function.

While the challenging economy was a significant driver of the downward trend, it is likely an equally large driver of the recovery. As companies begin to recover, the urgency of training is rebounding from its nadir during the difficult economic crisis. Enterprises leverage external providers to deliver more training than internal resources can provide while gaining access to better training expertise and controlling costs. The recovery of the use of outsourcing should have been predictable because benefits from and satisfaction with training outsourcing have remained remarkably consistent in the past several years.

Most companies outsource only select portions of their training functions — only about 4 percent outsource the entire training function. This percentage has remained relatively constant, even while the percentage of enterprises outsourcing only portions of their training function declined and then recovered. This makes sense: Outsourcing the full training function is not a decision that is either begun or ended quickly. And most organizations are satisfied with their outsource arrangements, providing little incentive for a radical change in their use of outsourcing.

Spending on Outsourcing

Companies that outsource spend a bit more than a quarter of their training budgets on those services. This is a small increase over 2010 and reflects an increased use of external providers (Figure 2). Seventy-five percent of enterprises that outsource some portion of their training spend under 40 percent of their training budget on outsourcing and half spend less than 15 percent.

For 2011, about 43 percent of companies expect spending on training outsourcing to increase (Figure 3), up from 37 percent who said their spending would increase in 2010. This indicates that companies that are outsourcing are satisfied with their use of external training providers. While the economic challenges have not fully retreated, only 15 percent of companies indicated that their training outsourcing budgets will decrease next year — down from 19 percent in 2010.

Outsourcing Important Activities With Reason

Some analysts and experts expect enterprises to outsource only non-core activities, however, CLOs seem to be willing to outsource both core and non-core activities.

The activities that CLOs identify as most important include both custom content design and development and training delivery. Also important is strategy development, with program oversight and learning technology management following with about equal importance. The importance of activities hasn’t changed much during the past several years, suggesting overall priorities haven’t changed much, either. Figure 4 compares the importance of training functions with the training functions most frequently outsourced. The relationship importance of the activity and activities outsourced for the three areas of custom content, training delivery and LMS is obvious. Training functions that are highly important but require the transfer of management responsibilities to execute, such as strategy development, program oversight and reporting and measurement, show a lower popularity for outsourcing.

Companies are using external training providers primarily for activities that are important but do not require the transfer of management authority.

While other aspects of training outsourcing have only changed slightly, the reasons for outsourcing have shown a significant shift. In the past, companies chose outsourcing to gain access to better training expertise, and to deliver more training than internal resources could provide. These reasons remain consistent with last year.

As recently as 2007, speed to market was a significant rationale for using external providers. During the past several years the importance of speed to market has declined. Even as organizations seek to rebound quickly from the economic crisis, they are less likely to leverage external vendors as a way to get essential training delivered quickly.

Companies that are outsourcing training functions primarily to supplement internal resources do so to have training resources available on an as-needed basis and because they think training outsourcing is a more cost-effective method of creating or delivering training.

Those who outsource seem to be satisfied with their providers. The percentage of CLOs who report being very or somewhat satisfied with their providers overall is up significantly from 2010 — 75 percent, compared to 65 percent in 2010 — but this is down from nearly 90 percent who expressed satisfaction in 2007 (Figure 5).

The most important qualities CLOs consider when looking for a training outsourcer are training expertise and subject-matter expertise. These are the fundamentals for providing high-quality training services and knowing how to impart knowledge to the audience. Growing significantly in importance is vendors’ ability to act as business partners, which reflects an increasing understanding of CLOs on the fluid nature of training objectives and the mutual flexibility required for successful training outsourcing.

CLOs Are Decision Makers

From 2006 to 2007, HR executives became more active in the decision-making, even more so than the CLO or head of training. More recently, however, CLOs and heads of business units have taken on more decision-making authority, which places the responsibility for the business impact of learning and training outsourcing squarely on the shoulders of those impacted by the decision (Figure 6).

Training outsourcing remains a well-established service. The key findings from this survey include:

1. There has been a small increase in the number of enterprises that plan to outsource and the amount companies spend on outsourcing.

2. Companies that outsource are satisfied with the results and expect to increase or maintain their levels of spending with external training providers.

3. Most buyers who outsource choose activities that do not require the transfer of management control to an external provider.

Companies that don’t outsource typically cite satisfaction with their internal training operations, think it is too expensive or believe the subject matter is too complex for outside providers. As enterprises continue to emerge from the economic crisis, will the increased use of external providers hold true, or will organizations attempt to bank their savings on using external providers and attempt to continue to do more with less?

Cushing Anderson is the program director of learning services at IDC. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com.

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Blind Spots https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/27/blind-spots/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/27/blind-spots/#respond Wed, 27 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/27/blind-spots/ Are learning leaders killing their credibility by not working with IT in the way the workforce needs?

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One of your biggest blind spots as a learning leader is killing your credibility with the workforce as well as hampering your ability to deliver results. Learning and development is rarely learner-centered, for example. Once we get past the executives who get five-star concierge-like support, study after study finds that most in the workforce are not getting the tailored learning and development they so desperately need to excel.

HR and IT are not working together in ways the workforce needs, and L&D professionals are hard pressed to demonstrate the impact of their efforts on individual performance and bottom-line results. The professionals of the incoming generation, Gen Y, are demanding a complete overhaul of how you connect with them, coach them and teach them, but only about one-quarter of new managers get the effective coaching or training they need when assuming their new role.

What do your learners find outside of your company? They find that IT and training play together quite well. For example, Apple’s store has over 300,000 apps, thousands of which deliver on-the-fly tutorials plus developmental and assessment tools tailored to every need, many of which are free.

Through coaching portals, the expertise of world-class coaches and how-to gurus like Ram Charam, Marshall Goldsmith and David Allen is available for peanuts. With social networking, most everyone can reach out to peers for advice on most any how-to, and Google is now every employee’s adjunct professor.

Of course, all that carries a big caveat emptor: learner beware. The quality of any individually designed L&D effort could leave a lot to be desired. But what can’t be denied is that you have already lost the battle you’re still waging with the workforce — that, for budgetary reasons, you can’t possibly tailor enough to meet its needs.

Between one-third and two-thirds of your employees are meeting their needs by working around you.

Some examples we found:

• Raveena is a corporate trainer who confides to her trainees that because of budget constraints, much of what she provides is mediocre at best. So she sends them to free online sources outside of the company. After testing them on what they learned, she validates their certificates in required courses they never attended.

• Matt realized that he wasn’t going to stay at his company long enough to benefit from how his company evaluated his work. So he Googled “performance assessment,” rewrote his and got HR to rework their approach to meet his needs, not just theirs.

• Gary found that what L&D provided was so lacking that he built his own internal wiki and started sharing it. His wiki went viral within the company and produced critical bottom-line results, so senior management had no choice but to sanction it after the fact.

• Sean creates computer training for his company’s project management and knowledge-sharing tools. He knew that what the CIO had commissioned from outside vendors was a waste of everyone’s time. So he asked for permission to test a prototype that his team was working on. Within a year, Sean’s prototype had gone viral throughout the company and absolutely no one was using the CIO-approved pet project.

These are not isolated rogue incidents. When we conducted research for our book Hacking Work, we uncovered all sorts of activities that are happening right under your nose.

After several years of clandestine meetings with thousands of people with the promise of anonymity, we found that these kinds of workarounds are extremely common and happening everywhere. And as long as HR and IT are not worker centered, these kinds of workarounds are only going to increase.

Learners are only working around organizational barriers because it’s the only way they can get the personalized training and development they need.

Educational guru Howard Gardner has said, “So long as we insist on teaching … in the same way, progress will be incremental. But now … it is possible to individualize education — to teach each person what he or she needs and wants to know in ways that are most efficient (for the learner), producing a qualitative spurt in educational effectiveness.”

Additionally, Johari’s Window, the psychology tool created in the 1950s, states that one’s blind spot is what is known to others but not to oneself. That’s where L&D is now.

Up to two-thirds of the workforce knows what’s blind to you — that personalized, tailored training and development is easily doable. It’s time for L&D to lead by following its workforce into the future.

Bill Jensen and Josh Klein are authors of Hacking Work. Jensen is the CEO of the Jensen Group and Klein is the CEO of H4X Industries. Both can be reached at editor@clomedia.com.

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Localizing Learning https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/26/localizing-learning/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/26/localizing-learning/#respond Tue, 26 Apr 2011 11:00:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/26/localizing-learning/ Providence Service Corporation is working to cure ills in the U.S. public social service system via a decentralized learning model.

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According to the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare, approximately 100 million Americans receive Medicare, Medicaid or Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits. These numbers are likely to grow in the near term, with an additional 33 percent increase in eligible members in 2013 when provisions of health care reform become effective and community-based services become mandatory.

This increase in enrollees, combined with a tight budget environment, compels states to be smarter about how they spend money. Further, the programs offered for those eligible for assistance are rarely coordinated, resulting in an inefficient, often redundant system.

In 1997, the Providence Service Corporation (PSC) was founded by now-CEO Fletcher McCusker in response to this fragmentation of care and the growing need for Medicaid-funded human services. Since then, the PSC network of owned and managed providers has grown from serving 1,300 clients under one contract in one location to serving approximately 50,000 clients through 547 contracts in 43 states and Canada. PSC’s services have expanded to include workforce development, non-emergency medical transportation, educational services and community corrections programs. As the scope and reach of PSC have grown, so has the need to maintain a well-trained staff of professionals with a wide range of skills and expertise.

Why Transform Learning?

Throughout this rapid expansion, PSC leadership has maintained a decentralized management structure with all programs tailored to meet the needs of each community served. The number of senior executives — six — is tiny for a public company with nearly $1 billion in annual revenue. Within this decentralized structure, PSC requires only two annual learning events for all staff, and until recently any additional learning was driven by the needs of a state or contract. This structure presents a challenge for the company to ensure that staff members are able to access the learning they need.

In 2003, the early seeds for the Corporate University of Providence were planted during a leadership retreat in Dallas. McCusker challenged leaders to develop a strategic plan to standardize — not centralize — best practices for all clinical, business and technological operations. Because PSC services vary widely and are tailored to the local community, a centralized, cookie-cutter approach to providing care and mandating business decisions from the top has never been a goal. Still, any national company must be able to draw on efficiencies of scale to operate within the slim margins dictated by governmental contracts.

Fifty leaders from across the country, representing major departments and disciplines within the organization, began to examine ways the company could increase cross-distance collaboration and decrease duplication of efforts while maintaining the unique operations in each PSC location. Subsequent initiatives resulted in the implementation of a secure intranet, a national quarterly newsletter, shared documents folders, an online message board to exchange ideas and online learning courses, many of which are commonplace in the world of business but not so much in the field of human services.

The foundation for a national approach to distance learning also was put into place, and in 2005 the Corporate University of Providence (CUP) was formalized with its stated mission: To support strategic goals by providing learning and development opportunities that cultivate ethical leadership and professional and personal growth for staff at all levels.

From the outset, PSC’s commitment to its decentralized management structure presented a challenge to implementing a national learning and development approach. With only two annual compliance learning events for all staff, CUP needed to marshal national resources to keep costs down and learning effectiveness high while also meeting local needs. CUP administrators worked with key company leaders to identify duplicate learning needs that could be met across distance. Clinical learning emerged as a priority.

Many PSC employees carry licenses in social work, therapy, counseling and service-specific categories such as substance abuse or community mental health. It can be costly to maintain these licenses, and in the past, individual staff members often assumed the cost. In response, CUP leaders completed a lengthy application and review process, and in 2005 CUP became a licensed provider of continuing education units (CEUs), first receiving accreditation by the National Social Work Licensing Board and later a number of National Counseling boards. CUP also subcontracted with Essential Learning, a provider of online health-related courses, to increase CEU availability, expanding certification from three to 21 national and state accrediting boards.

The Impact of Decentralization

Over time, the need to measure distance learning’s impact became a priority, and in late 2010 CUP studied the fiscal and clinical viability of three learning modalities: classroom-based, online courses and a blended learning approach, which combines teleseminars — human interaction is an important way to gain abstract clinical skills — with the convenience of online learning material. The results showed comparable effectiveness in knowledge transfer and application, with a tremendous cost benefit for the virtual learning modalities versus traditional in-person options — $18.50/$19.64 per unit of online/teleseminar courses compared with $66.74 per unit for classroom-based instruction.

Part of this study calculated the actual cost to provide a distance learning course. To reach a dollar amount, the research included the hours needed to develop a course, technology costs, staff productivity lost and instructor cost, and found the cost to provide virtual training is approximately $48 per unit. During the first three quarters of 2010, PSC staff completed nearly 70,000 online training hours eligible for CEUs. An additional 900-plus staff completed CUP teleclasses offering more than 2,600 CEUs. With the aforementioned cost data, CUP provided training valued at $3.5 million in less than a year.

In 2009, CUP began to offer a high-potential leadership development program (HiPo) to enhance skills in leaders who demonstrate talent, commitment and the ability to advance within the organization. The HiPo program responds to PSC’s decentralized business model needs by embracing the company’s core values and vision as a whole and focusing on the unique challenges of each region’s leadership.

Effective leadership requires a director to think and act quickly as well as balance staff and client needs with the realities of a tight budget. New leaders and even seasoned professionals do best when given the guidance and support they need along with the freedom to be autonomous. The HiPo program seeks to counter the Peter Principle where every employee tends to rise to his or her own level of incompetence using individual responsibility as a critical success factor. Rather than ask managers to complete a standardized leadership learning event or seminar, the coaching model promotes self-awareness and personal accountability so that leaders can develop their strengths and seek support when needed.

Each participant works with his or her direct supervisor and a coach to identify benchmarks that are monitored throughout the program. These benchmarks could include fiscal performance, staff engagement and retention, and service outcomes along with leadership development and personal goals. Some staff successes for those who completed the first two rounds of the coaching program include:

• Competitive bids won in two states, with another pending

• Reduction in outstanding accounts receivables from $275,000 to $25,000

• Increased revenues: The goal was $8 million; the actual number was $8.3 million

• Reduction in payroll costs by 11 percent

Additional anecdotal metrics are being gathered through follow-up surveys.

Spread Learning Around

PSC is currently beginning a third round of the HiPo program by soliciting nominations from high-level company leaders. Participants who complete the initial program continue to meet online and via teleconference to maintain and build on their progress and business results. Through this new community of practice, leaders can exchange information, success stories and challenges in an arena that provides support and a human connection for ongoing professional growth.

CUP initiatives also include other business units in the company. Monthly roundtables are held within functional departments such as human resources and quality assurance so that employees with similar responsibilities can exchange support and success stories. A supervisor boot camp has been created so that line staff promoted to supervisory positions can gain management knowledge regarding FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) and EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) regulations, how to operate within a budget and more. Social networking also is gaining acceptance as a way to transmit information when needed in real time. As awareness of CUP as a company resource has grown, train-the-trainer classes also have been developed to draw on more talent throughout PSC.

Expansion of the global business community means the decentralized workplace is becoming the norm. Even when business decisions are directed from the top of the leadership pyramid, the message is interpreted differently by each manager along the line. The Providence Service Corporation has created a culture that values autonomy partnered with accountability. The Corporate University of Providence provides a growing network of communication and learning across distance to ensure continued success — even during these uncertain economic times.

Michelle Pitot is vice president of organizational development at Providence Service Corporation and an adjunct faculty member in the School of Public Policy at the University of Arizona. She can be reached at editor@clomedia.com.

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Learning to Serve Veterans https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/25/learning-to-serve-veterans/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/25/learning-to-serve-veterans/#respond Mon, 25 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/25/learning-to-serve-veterans/ Veterans can count on the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' Acquisition Academy to help secure the development they need once they come home from war.

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Lisa Doyle says her work as a public servant and as a learning leader is her chance to give back. As chancellor of Acquisition Academy for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Doyle has responsibility for all development of acquisition professionals — a target audience of roughly 40,000 individuals, including contracting professionals, program and project managers, facility managers, logisticians and technical representatives.

The VA’s mission — “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan” by serving and honoring the men and women who are America’s veterans — is one that’s close to her heart. Not only are her father and brother veterans but Doyle also has spent most of her career in government roles beginning with an entry-level position in acquisition in the U.S. Department of Defense. Sixteen years later, she moved to the U.S. Department of Commerce, where she remained for six years before moving into private industry to build a training institute for a consulting firm that worked closely with the government.

“Having knowledge and expertise in the field of acquisition, I knew what they needed to be trained on and how they needed to be trained,” Doyle said. “So I was able to develop a robust curriculum, stand up a highly successful training institute, and I did that over six years. Then the VA was interested in standing up their own academy, and because I love to build things and had the opportunity to start something from the ground up, I took the position and came back to government. I’m a public servant at heart, and helping other public servants perform their jobs better and making a meaningful difference will be my leadership legacy.”

A self-described lifelong learner and voracious reader, Doyle said she can never learn enough, never experience enough and never take enough in. She works to share that love of learning with the interns who come to take part in the acquisition internship school — one of several schools — in the VA’s Acquisition Academy. Upon acceptance, Doyle presents the interns with sponges to signify their responsibility to absorb and take in as much as they can as well as to expand their outlook and commitment to put 100 percent of themselves into the program.

The ability to create, execute and share a strategic vision is one of Doyle’s greatest contributions, according to Richard Garrison, vice chancellor for the academy’s program management school.

“She drives the standard of excellence for the academy,” Garrison explained. “The next piece she provides is empowerment. She’s more of a leader than a manager, and you have a lot of different types of leaders. You have micromanagers who either do it all themselves or it has to be their way. Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum where Lisa falls. She makes certain we come to a common understanding of what success will be, and she allows you to really excel and achieve that success by building on that initial vision to make it your own. She’s there when you have ‘What do I do now?’ questions. She’s there when you say, ‘I need you to go fight this battle for me.’”

The VA spends more than $15 billion annually to buy the goods and services needed to care for the country’s veterans. Much of the organization’s work is the result of some sort of contract, and the acquisition professionals who attend the academy are responsible for executing and managing those contracts. “President Obama has charged us with doing that effectively and efficiently,” Doyle explained. “We call that our fiduciary responsibility — to spend that money wisely. So we teach the students who come here for training how to do that by giving them the technical, interpersonal and leadership skills they need.”

It sounds fairly straightforward — teach a targeted group of professionals how to navigate contracts for goods and services — but as is the case with many learning leaders who serve clients who work full- time, Doyle must convince their managers to release them to take part in learning interventions.

“The greatest challenge is helping supervisors and managers understand that training is a force multiplier, and if they give the employee time away from their job, I will send them back better people,” she said. “My reason for being here at the academy, my raison d’etre, is to change behavior and improve performance. If managers and supervisors will allow them to come here, they will be able to work faster, better, smarter. That’s what I try to communicate across the VA to all of those managers who have to sign off on their employees to come to training — to embrace it [and] understand that they will get a return on their investment.”

Doyle’s predilection for building things from the ground up came in handy as she has not only developed the academy’s workforce, she designed the 80,000-square-foot building where it’s housed.

“When I worked with the architect and furniture designer I said, ‘Close your eyes and think of a normal government facility, and we’re going to do the opposite,’” she said. “I used a lot of color, texture, fun and funky fabrics, a lot of different woods, different kinds of glass. I’ve made it into an environment that breeds innovation and creativity, but I’ve done it in a very cost-effective manner.”

Creating the right learning environment is critical because it can take several years to earn specific credentials. Each of the five schools — the acquisition internship school, contracting professional school and program management school, with supply chain management and facilities management schools expected to follow later this year — has curricula meant for multiple levels from beginner to advanced. For instance, the contracting professional school, which trains and certifies the VA’s existing contracting workforce, has levels one, two and three. The program management school, which trains and certifies the VA’s program and project managers and contracting officer technical representatives, has entry, mid- and senior levels. Each school’s curriculum has several classes in each level.

To enhance their learning experience, interns can serve on job rotations at 47 different locations, and rotations increase in length and complexity as their knowledge and skills increase. Often when the interns go out on rotation assignments, their new managers want to keep them, Doyle explained. “I tell them, ‘I have to bring them to the academy, train them a little bit more and then I will infuse them into the workforce and give them back to you,’” she said.

This year, Doyle and her team also will launch a program for wounded warriors, including veterans returning from Iraq, who need to be reskilled, retooled and inculcated back into the workforce. Alongside traditional interns, the veterans will serve as acquisition interns, learning how to buy goods and services. They also will receive stress management skills training to help them deal with any physical, mental or other changes they may have as a result of service in Iraq.

The Acquisition Academy offers a flexible melange of learning, including classroom-based activities, learning laboratories with simulations, e-learning, job rotations and video teleconferencing. Interns execute mission service projects where they actually serve veterans as well as go on field trips to VA medical centers and hospitals to experience the mission firsthand.

“For example, when we went to the VA medical center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and the director was giving us a tour, she said, ‘Running this medical center is like running a city,’” Doyle said. “She pointed to a building and said, ‘That building over there is our laundry facility. Without the contractor and the contract that you award to operate that facility, I don’t have clean sheets for my beds, and I can’t run a hospital without clean sheets.’ The interns were able to see clearly how the contracts they work on help the veteran by executing our mission.”

These types of mission-reinforcing trips and service projects do much to aid retention efforts, Doyle explained, but the academy has other metrics by which it gauges learning impact. For instance, it has established a learning standards office, led by a learning standards officer, responsible for evaluating and assessing the instruction, content and delivery across all five schools.

Still, determining ROI can be tricky. “When we’re looking at return on investment, we’re looking at our contracts being awarded faster, more efficiently — are we saving more money, are they being managed more effectively, are we getting the results we’re looking for that the contract was awarded to achieve?” Doyle said. “We’re engaging with stakeholders to understand if their employees are performing better on the job, if there’s increased productivity, increased employee retention; there’s obviously increased bench strength when we send the interns out.”

Doyle already has met her goal of establishing the VA’s Acquisition Academy as a learning standard for use in other government agencies. “When I started the academy, I said, ‘I want to get this right for the VA first, then I want to open it up governmentwide,’” she said. “In the very first year I was able to do that, and I’ve served eight other cabinet-level agencies thus far. As I serve more agencies, I will need more space, more people, more resources, and I would say the next challenge I will face is outgrowing my space and not being able to handle my throughput.”

Anticipating growth will not prevent Doyle from constantly improving the learning currently available, however. Nor will she cease leveraging the sizeable discounts her operating scale allows her to obtain for veterans and other federal agencies’ or establishing the power of learning throughout the government.

“We have nowhere to go but up in terms of growth, in terms of serving not only the VA but the federal workforce,” she said. “I’ve hosted many visits here at the academy from distinguished visitors. Members of Congress have been here, and I’ve hosted visits from their staffers on three different occasions. As a result of one of the visits, Congressmen Connolly and Nye sent a letter to the director of U.S. OPM [Office of Personnel Management] and OMB [Office of Management and Budget] that basically said the academy should be used as a benchmark or as the training provider for other agencies.”

Until formal plans are made for VA-style learning to extend to other government agencies on a larger scale, the Acquisition Academy will continue to fulfill its mission.

“We’re here to ensure that people who come through our doors walk out with skills that will improve the VA’s performance,” Garrison said. “Training time is time not spent fulfilling the mission from a lot of people’s perspectives. Lisa helps them understand that it’s not time away, it’s time you’re investing in that individual to be a force multiplier when they come back.”

Kellye Whitney is managing editor of Chief Learning Officer magazine. She can be reached at kwhitney@clomedia.com.

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Values-Driven Leadership https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/22/values-driven-leadership/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/22/values-driven-leadership/#respond Fri, 22 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/22/values-driven-leadership/ Bottom-line results can be improved by changes in leadership culture. Retention rate, customer satisfaction and shareholder value can all be affected by a value-driven leadership.

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The business challenge for organizations today is unmistakable: Build profitable companies that benefit people and society. This contradiction represents the classic paradox that many leaders face — the dilemma of the “what” versus the “how.” The best-run organizations today focus on achieving two sets of results: business and people. They understand that merely getting one or the other is not enough for long-term growth and sustainability.

The values-driven leadership approach readily embraces this dilemma and recognizes that business and leadership are full of contradictions. This approach requires a high degree of stewardship and accountability from leaders at every level of the organization. It is a form of leadership that is based on service to others — individual — and to a greater purpose — organizational and societal — and is both ethical and practical.

The starting point of a values-driven organization is the individual leader. A leader cannot connect to a set of organizational values without first having gone through the exercise of identifying core individual values and then determining alignment between the two. Values clarification work requires that we ask ourselves the tough questions such as: Who am I? What do I stand for and why? Where am I going? Why would others want to follow me? What will people say about me after I’m gone?

These questions help leaders tap into their personal experiences and identify their truth-to-self moments — times in their past where they have either stood for something meaningful and lived their values — promoted integrity — or compromised and sold out on their values — promoted duplicity. It is probably best summed up by Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner in The Leadership Challenge: “Clearly articulating, and more importantly, demonstrating ones’ values, forms the basis of a leader’s credibility — and credibility in leadership is character-based.”

Values-driven leadership must be lived out in the everyday behaviors of leaders at all levels to be considered real. Leaders must be authentic and active or their hypocrisy will be easily exposed. Values-driven leadership, when successfully integrated into an organization’s culture, produces noteworthy benefits, such as higher employee retention, fulfillment and satisfaction; improved customer satisfaction and client relations; and increased shareholder value.

Values-driven leadership at the organizational level is more important today than ever before. Values-driven companies succeed in the marketplace by focusing on the triple bottom line: people, planet and profit. They deliver exceptional business results by providing leadership in ethical practice, social contribution and environmental impact.

Values-driven leadership implies a conscious commitment by leaders at all levels to lead with their values, connect them to organizational practices, and create an organizational culture that optimizes performance, accountability and contribution. In today’s world, the product or service you provide is important, but who you are as a company and how you deliver on your brand promise is even more important to long-term success.

Values-driven leadership is guided by a compelling and inspiring future-focused vision that organization members can connect with rationally and emotionally. This vision, underpinned by a core set of values, forms the basis of credibility with organizational stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, shareholders, communities and employees — present and future.

The extent to which organization members can rationally and emotionally connect with the organization’s vision drives higher levels of engagement, fulfillment and performance as measured by an organization’s scorecard. In his article “Building a Vision-Guided, Values-Driven Organization,” Richard Barrett cited research indicating that as much as 39 percent of the variability in corporate performance is driven by the level of employee fulfillment.

The effectiveness of the leader is the single most important factor in attracting and retaining key talent. In that same article, Barrett also notes that 69 percent of variability in employee fulfillment is attributable to the capability of the immediate leader.

Ultimately, values-driven leadership is about understanding the extraordinary privilege and responsibility that leadership carries and living it out on a daily basis. As Bill Pollard, former CEO of ServiceMaster Co., said: “Know who you are, know what you believe, know why you believe it, know where you’re going and know why it’s important for people to follow — that’s your responsibility.”

Thomas J. Griffin is a strategic partner for the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership and the Center for Values-Driven Leadership at Benedictine University. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com.

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Working With Vendors https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/21/working-with-vendors/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/21/working-with-vendors/#respond Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/21/working-with-vendors/ What are some critical elements for effective outsourcing relationships? Here are three key criteria Tamar Elkeles uses to select vendors.

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I recently moved from a business unit role into the learning field and am finding it difficult to determine which external vendors to work with in my organization. There are so many vendors to choose from and it’s overwhelming. What are your strategies for selecting high-quality vendors, and what is the best way to work with them?
– Marc

We are so fortunate to have such an amazing and large group of vendors in the learning world. I have been using external vendors, whom I refer to as my partners or adjunct staff, since I entered this field, and I would not be able to do my job without them.

I started using vendors to augment my learning staff nearly 20 years ago, and I am still using many of those same vendors today. When I first created my learning organization, I made the decision to outsource most learning design and delivery, and that model has worked very well for nearly two decades and has proven to be successful because of the vendor relationships that we established.

A critical element of effective outsourcing is consistently using an in-depth process for vendor selection. Independent of the type of work external vendors may do for you — designing curriculum, stand-up delivery, learning technology and systems, executive coaching, online learning — there are three key criteria that I use to select vendors.

Flexibility: The best vendors demonstrate significant flexibility with their models, their work style, their delivery approach, their technologies, their staff and their pricing.

Some vendors have a set model, approach or structure that they will not adapt or change — those are vendors I typically stay away from. Early on in my career I evaluated a highly reputable leadership development provider that had a great curriculum; however, this provider insisted on delivering a three-day management training program. This vendor wasn’t willing to divide the content into four-hour sessions and wouldn’t reduce the number of training days or modify curriculum to fit my management’s needs.

Companies are all different, and solutions need to be customized based on individual business needs. Initial interactions with vendors are good indicators of their flexibility — look for signs that demonstrate adaptability and willingness to embrace change and modify their solutions to fit your needs.

Cultural fit: It’s critical to assess the cultural fit of all vendors before they are exposed to your management and employees. If you work in a highly structured organization and the vendor has a very unstructured approach, it doesn’t matter how great the content is, it is not going to be a good fit for your organization.

Test vendors’ knowledge of your business, your products and your employees. They should have a good understanding of your company and your organizational culture if they want to work with you. Interview them as you would any employee — make sure they have skills, knowledge and fit with your company. They will be a part of your adjunct staff, and they need to work well with your internal learning team.

Be resourceful and do your homework. Try to find clients the vendor has worked with that are representative of or aligned with your industry, market, business or company culture. Typically the best vendors are those that have a wide range of clients from various industries, which can bring you diverse perspectives and broaden your learning.

Partnering: The most valuable vendors are sincerely interested in being your business partner. They have a long-term view of their relationship with your company and you. They work hard to collaborate with you, your team and your key stakeholders to make sure that everything they deliver is of the highest quality and relevance to your organization.

Ask vendors how long they have worked with their clients, how many engagements they’ve had with each of them and how they work together with internal staff to deliver business solutions. Many of the vendors I use are willing to take risks, be innovative in their approaches and try new solutions because they are our partners.

A successful vendor partnership is beneficial for both you and the vendor. If a vendor isn’t willing to create new solutions along with you, it probably isn’t the best partner. True partners grow and learn from each other, and that’s the key to having a successful vendor relationship.

Tamar Elkeles is chief learning officer and vice president of learning and development at Qualcomm and the author of The Chief Learning Officer: Driving Value Within a Changing Organization Through Learning and Development. She can be reached at editor@clomedia.com.

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Developing Multidimensional Leaders https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/20/developing-multidimensional-leaders/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/20/developing-multidimensional-leaders/#comments Wed, 20 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/20/developing-multidimensional-leaders/ Leaders today can’t be one-dimensional, narrowly focused on only their greatest strengths. Innovation, social change and business transformation require more.

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In a constantly changing business climate, leaders should not model themselves on archetypes from the past and expect to meet the challenges of today’s workplace. More specifically, they cannot rely solely on their isolated strengths in leadership to infuse passion and energy into their work and those they lead. Multidimensional leaders stay objectively alert in order to make strategic decisions within a context of ever-changing circumstances, parameters and variables. Such leaders are developed to possess multiple leadership facets. They understand that great leadership requires a range of competencies and skills and know their own personality traits can work both for and against them. Unfortunately, not enough of these leaders exist.

Last year, Development Dimensions International (DDI) surveyed 1,130 supervisors and first-level managers to understand how they’re overcoming the challenges of their jobs and what is holding them back from being successful. Results from “Finding the First Rung: A study on the challenges facing today’s frontline leader,” released in December, show that 42 percent of new managers do not understand what it takes to succeed; 89 percent have at least one blind spot; and only one in 10 leaders is actually groomed for the job. Half of the respondents took the leadership role for an increase in compensation — only 23 percent actually wanted to lead others.

“Organizations as a whole do not prepare leaders for what they should be ready to encounter,” said Jim Concelman, vice president of leadership development at DDI. “One of the first things learning leaders need to do is develop the leaders of leaders. The most influential person in the success of a new manager or leader is that person’s leader. We need to equip managers to effectively select the right people for leadership roles and then effectively coach, develop and bring new leaders along slowly but surely.”

Concelman also believes leaders need to realistically evaluate their own skills in each success area in order to focus on improvement.

“A lot of business systems already have good immediate feedback,” Concelman said. “You can get quarterly, monthly, daily and sometimes hourly reports on several elements, but leadership is different. You can’t go to a place on your system or computer screen and see, ‘How am I doing as a leader today in this hour?’ The only way to find out is through assessments, and that’s not something we’re currently equipping leaders to do in our organizations.”

In a separate study, DDI asked more than 200 managers going through a frontline leader assessment program to rate themselves in seven leadership skills: coaching, communication, delegation, gaining commitment, judgment, planning and organizing and problem analysis. DDI compared leaders’ self-ratings to their actual performance during the assessment and found that 89 percent of the managers had at least one leadership skill where they rated themselves above their actual skill level.

Lacking the self-insight to know that one needs to improve, managers will turn down — or not fully engage in — development opportunities that would fill in missing skills. If the disparity persists, it will become a detriment to the individual and his or her organization and teams.

Because many leaders excel in one particular dimension, they do not see the necessity of improving. But no matter how good one-dimensional leaders are at that one thing, they cannot provide the kind of leadership that leads to innovation, social change and business transformation.

“We expect effective leaders to be good at something, for example, driving execution or creating an important strategic decision,” said Jeffrey Sugerman, president and CEO of Inscape Publishing and co-author of the forthcoming book, The 8 Dimensions of Leadership. “In studies we conducted, we thought a leader would be judged an effective leader if he or she was good at one of those things. Much to our surprise, the ones who were viewed as most effective were good at everything, maybe to differing degrees, but they weren’t just good at one thing. The effective leaders we found were much more flexible in the range of leadership styles and competencies they could bring to their organizations.”

“The flip side of that [is] those given overall poor ratings by their peers, subordinates and managers were not missing strengths,” said Mark Scullard, director of research at Inscape and one of Sugerman’s co-authors. “They had very pronounced strengths, but they were given poor global ratings of leadership effectiveness because there were some very glaring absences in their performance and their repertoire of skills.”

According to Sugerman, Scullard and co-author Emma Wilhelm, the eight dimensions of leadership are: pioneering, energizing, affirming, inclusive, humble, deliberate, resolute and commanding.

“We’re not asking people to make superhuman changes in their personality,” Wilhelm said. “It’s very small changes that make such a big difference. That change happens when a leader understands why they’re having blind spots and has the support of their managers.”

Scullard agreed. “You need to have strong support from above and constant reinforcement,” he said. “People need to believe these qualities are important to the organization. Upper management needs to see a commitment to leadership development to encourage subordinates to take ownership of their growth. A majority of leadership development has to occur independently, but it’s much more likely to happen if there’s a culture of development.”

Ladan Nikravan is an associate editor of Chief Learning Officer magazine. She can be reached at lnikravan@clomedia.com.

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From Required to Inspired: Education for 21st-Century Realities https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/18/from-required-to-inspired-education-for-21st-century-realities/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/18/from-required-to-inspired-education-for-21st-century-realities/#respond Mon, 18 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/18/from-required-to-inspired-education-for-21st-century-realities/ Leaders and institutions that succeed going forward will not do so through 20th-century systems of coercion and motivation, but through new systems that place values at the center of an organization’s operations, leadership and culture.

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Take a moment to look around an office, or better said, the physical and virtual spaces that constitute an organization. In the typical workplace, one finds a mix of employees from different age groups, diverse educational and cultural backgrounds, and varying experience levels.

Never before have companies asked so much of employees:

They need employees to partner with colleagues around the world who come from different cultures and speak different languages.

They want them to go beyond merely serving customers by creating unique and deep relationships with them.

They expect their people to do more with less.

They also expect their employees to represent the company and nurture its brand, not only when they’re on the job, but whenever they publicly express themselves in tweets, blog posts, emails or any other social or socially networked interaction.

Organizations increasingly ask their employees to go beyond continuous improvement by conceiving and implementing disruptive innovations that deliver the step changes companies need to thrive amid global competition and more frequent crises.

Leaders and institutions that succeed in inspiring these game-changing behaviors will not do so through 20th-century systems of coercion and motivation, through carrots and sticks applied against rules and policies. Such behavior will be inspired through a new system that places values and principles at the center of an organization’s operations, leadership and culture.

Learning teams need to stop developing leaders for a bygone era of stability, orderliness and command-and-control hierarchies — even the terminology here is wrong. The term talent management, for example, implies tight compliance and monitoring that actually impedes rather than encourages creativity. Efforts should center on inspiring and unleashing talent, not managing or restricting it. Progressive organizations are now focusing on how to move from required to inspired — to create corporate cultures that harness the best of people. When employees are inspired, they create intellectual capital in new and creative ways. For example, dozens of new products, many of them very substantial, have emerged from Google’s culture of ground-up innovation.

A new standard of leadership is demanded that inspires people to unleash their passion, potential and ability to connect and collaborate. This approach requires a greater pursuit of meaning in work; new, higher levels of trust and transparency; living sustainable, not situational, values rooted in deep human, social and environmental purpose; and the understanding that how companies do something today is far more important than what they do. Leadership development professionals not only need to understand these realities, they need to inspire principled performance from others and lead organizations to new levels of success and responsibility. Progressive approaches to educating the workforce and inspiring them by connecting around mission, vision and purpose are key steps in this approach.

Engage to Inspire: Moving to Inspirational Leadership

In the mid-1990s, to reach their diverse workforces, companies introduced e-learning. No longer did all employees need to meet physically in order to discuss and learn about job requirements, expectations, rules and laws. Organizations instead provided educational material through technology that was readily accessible to their entire workforce.

E-learning had its downside though — it created gaps between people and could be fatiguing. Leadership development professionals began to evolve their learning strategies and explore blended and hybrid approaches that bridge cultural gaps and counter online fatigue. They provided networks and learning forums that support learners’ on-demand access and drive for knowledge in every medium possible. With direction from corporate-hosted blogs, wikis and discussion forums, workers were encouraged to create their own user-generated content and use peer-to-peer knowledge sharing to enable personalized learning. Users could place themselves in real ethical scenarios, bringing more relevance and ownership to education programs. With this new social learning approach, collaborative learning began to replace traditional teaching in corporate culture.

Collaborative Learning Feeds a Culture

The days of watching, reading and listening to lectures are almost gone. The future is about conversation and application. The workforce is transferring more trust into peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, not top-down dissemination. Leaders are seeking to keep education fresh and to ensure great impact and adoption. Therefore, curriculum is going beyond compliance to a “roll up your sleeves” commitment. The workforce wants to experience education through working with others — through collaborative learning.

Collaborative activities also help promote cross-discipline and cross-departmental teaming, which enables healthy dialogue by breaking down silos and communication barriers that normally disrupt or challenge corporate culture. Social learning environments allow the learner to experience the scenario or risk unfolding, which can be followed by a knowledge-sharing exercise where a manager-led discussion, either live or virtual, supports peer-to-peer dialogue. As a team, participants wrestle with an ethical dilemma and formulate recommendations for solving the issue. Through this process, teams have the opportunity to process and absorb the knowledge that will guide their actions towards responsible business conduct in real-world situations. Consider adopting a collaborative learning strategy that can be integrated into the enterprise, such as in regular business processes, decision making and awareness education.

A business’ corporate culture will not change overnight. However, adopting a blended approach of learning formats can help ensure a sustained and impactful learning process. Development efforts don’t have to bog down the learner into one pattern of learning and should feature a multitiered teaching approach that copes with generational gaps in technology use and expertise. Always refresh, remind and offer encouragement. Ultimately, learning that sticks is learning that can shift behavior and reinforce and reshape your corporate culture.

David Greenberg is the executive vice president of knowledge and solutions at LRN. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com.

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Is Anything Being Learned Virtually? https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/15/is-anything-being-learned-virtually/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/15/is-anything-being-learned-virtually/#respond Fri, 15 Apr 2011 10:00:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/15/is-anything-being-learned-virtually/ Virtual learning has pros and cons, but with proper design and a focus on relationship building, learning leaders can capitalize on benefits and minimize risks.

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Virtual technologies are giving organizations and their learning executives the ability to design and deliver a new generation of learning experiences. Companies can bring together more people easier and cheaper than ever before in real-time communities that can stretch around the world in an instant. But at what cost to an organization’s culture and to employees’ engagement and sense of belonging? As people grow accustomed to virtual experiences, and as virtual collaboration platforms steadily become the norm, are our organizational communities being enriched in a larger sense? Or, as the title of a book from Sherry Turkle suggests, are we increasingly becoming “alone together”? Is there any learning going on in a virtual environment, or is it just a big lie we’ve all agreed to believe?

There are benefits and unintended consequences of virtual learning, and overuse of these technologies is not without risk. A communications diet restricted only to virtual experiences can result in a strange kind of famine in terms of what employees need to nurture their relationships with each other and with the organization that pays their salaries. In a 2009 interview on the PBS television show “Frontline,” Turkle said virtual communications can provide the “illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” The corporate equivalent of that is that virtual learning may afford the “illusion of collaboration without the demands of collegiality.”

At the same time, the benefits of virtual learning and collaboration — the ability to engage people in a rich learning environment and to stimulate additional conversations and experiences — far outweigh the risks, if virtual learning can be planned and designed effectively.

Beyond the One-Room Schoolhouse

One of the hallmarks of the virtual learning environment is that it competes with e-mail, instant messaging and social media. Not everyone sees this interruptive environment as a solely negative force, however. Eric Davidove, senior director of the Learning and Development Center of Expertise at Yahoo, likens the traditional corporate learning environment — in its simpler, classroom-based mode — to an old-fashioned schoolroom where students learn the same thing at the same time and are not allowed to speak to each other during class.

Neither the monolithic learning experience nor the constant interruptions is necessarily ideal from the learner’s perspective. However, given the choice, Davidove said he would choose the latter “because those so-called interruptions are actually helping me learn,” he said. “For example, in a virtual environment, I can ask other students a question, or debate one of the main points presented by the instructor, all without halting the presentation itself. In the schoolhouse paradigm, I can’t do that because it’s disruptive.”

Further, those opportunities aren’t necessarily interfering with the learning experience. “The false presumption the classroom gives teachers is that they actually have the full attention of engaged learners,” Davidove said. “Just because people are looking at you as you lecture doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about tonight’s dinner or last night’s ball game.”

The virtual environment actually gives instructors more ways to engage learners and then monitor that engagement. “In a physical classroom, it’s difficult to gauge who’s involved and who’s not,” he said. “But in a virtual environment, I can ask people to participate in a survey or poll, or I can have them microblog their thoughts, monitor a tweet stream or have side discussions while I’m leading a session. They’re not giving me 100 percent of their attention, but they probably weren’t doing so anyway. These technologies let me engage learners in a richer way in the material and experience — which is what we ultimately want anyway.”

Meeting Isn’t Always Learning

In the virtual environment, bringing people together is now so easy that one can overlook that the experience still must be designed. The need for specialized virtual learning design skills is critical, according to Christina Griffin, a learning architect at Accenture. “If companies blur the distinction between a meeting and training, they are likely to fall back on the ‘put up a presentation and talk to it’ kind of pedagogy,” she said. “Without good design, the focus of the learning experience can be lost; organizations should not be surprised when they then lose participants’ attention.”

Griffin said there are several important elements of solid virtual learning design. First, train instructors in the nuances and needs of virtual instruction. “Instructors might be fantastic in front of a live audience, but they may not understand the facilitation techniques needed to bring a virtual classroom to life. Asking if there are any questions is not enough. In a virtual environment, you have to ask specific questions about specific content, solicit opinions and follow up to engage participants in discussion and reflection. This works best through open microphones, but directed-chat exercises, polling, whiteboarding and breakouts can be effective too.”

Second, effective interface design is important to direct learners’ attention and to prevent cognitive overload. “Think about the screen your learners will have open during the learning event, and concentrate just on what’s suited, moment by moment, to the experience at hand,” Griffin said. “That might involve turning off the chat function temporarily to focus your people in the right direction. Or, if you are using webcams, turn those off occasionally to focus on a particular online activity.”

Third, the facilitator should make it clear that people may be called on by name for commentary and opinion to enhance the learning experience. Open up the microphones and direct a question to a participant or two. There may be “gotcha” moments if people aren’t paying attention, but that’s not the point. It’s a way to make sure participants are invested in what’s going on. They become active contributors, not passive receivers.

Finally, remember that a virtual event should be part of a greater blended learning experience. This spring, Griffin and her team are releasing a 40-hour virtual course that will replace one week of her company’s traditional three-week, in-person new-hire orientation. The course combines knowledge- and skill-based events, pacing the week so that a two-hour online session, for example, might be followed by a small group session at the participant’s local office. It is helpful for online participants to connect with each other visually through webcams, and then instructors have the ability to see learners and interact with them directly.

“One key to a good virtual experience is variety,” Griffin said. “This is important not only to help with learning retention, but to more faithfully mimic the work environment our people are in every day. Some of the offline events we include ask people to network globally to accomplish a task — something they will do all the time as employees. Or they might have to adjust their work schedule to get something done with part of their team located in a different time zone — again, something they’ll encounter on the job. It immediately puts them into situations where they have to innovate as team members, while working with a culturally diverse group.”

Davidove said this kind of variety can channel potentially disruptive technologies toward the goals of the learning event and its sponsoring organization. “Distractions can be harnessed as part of the virtual learning design to keep participants occupied so they don’t check out on you,” he explained.

Focus on Relationships, Not Technology

Hand in hand with good virtual learning design goes the subtler, harder work of leadership and cultural development needed to set the ground rules and to ensure that relationships are created and nurtured as organizations rely more on virtual interactions.

“People should take precedence over technology,” said Mary Jo Burfeind, vice president of human resources for Health Care Service Corp. “We need to give our attention to human beings first, or else we risk losing the ability to interact effectively with others.”

Sherry Turkle also made this point, based on the research she conducted that led to her book Alone Together. Relationships are partly about risking ourselves to each other, and texting and other virtual communications can be used to shield ourselves from that risk.

“I don’t have to get involved,” she said in the aforementioned 2009 PBS interview. “It’s more efficient.” Relationships can be demanding and complicated because they require negotiation. It’s risky if people use technology “to skip and to cut corners and to not have to do some of these very hard things,” she said. Utilizing virtual learning in the name of efficiency, organizations can risk weakening the relationships that are the basis for their culture and distinctive human capabilities.

Leaders need to model relevant behaviors to establish strong relationships in increasingly virtual organizations. Honor people by paying attention to them; ignore a text message when it comes in on the phone if involved in a face-to-face conversation; take a few moments of a virtual interaction to engage in some personal information sharing. Beyond setting ground rules, leaders have a critical role to play in establishing and modeling which virtual behaviors are acceptable and which are not.

Further, establishing relationships needs to be one of the purposes for a virtual learning experience. It’s not just about disseminating information. This is part of the proper use of interactive technologies in virtual learning. “The idea of social presence is critical in designing an effective virtual experience — making sure you’re not just talking at your participants but that you’re building up a community and making participants realize they are part of something,” Griffin said. “We want participants to share their knowledge with others to make their experience, and everyone else’s experience, better. You may learn something from other people that you didn’t know. And, in that process, we can strengthen the entire organization and culture.”

In the end, virtual environments are not the only ones where educators have avoided some hard truths about whether they are designing optimal learning experiences or not. Does effective learning really take place in a large university lecture hall where a teacher talks uninterrupted at hundreds of students? It’s debatable.

On the other hand, there are important truths about learning that virtual technologies can actually encourage. For example, learning is heavily dependent on interaction; therefore, properly designed and applied social media technologies can enable greater networking and the multiplication of learning’s benefits.

Missteps will be made as learning professionals learn to cope with and integrate new technologies into virtual environments. Whether such technologies can become an effective tool or simply more sophisticated distractions is, for now, an open question. In that regard, we’re all still learning.

Craig Mindrum is a strategy, talent management and communications consultant and author. His most recent book is Return on Learning. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com.

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Think Locally, Act Globally https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/13/think-locally-act-globally/ https://www.chieflearningofficer.com/2011/04/13/think-locally-act-globally/#respond Wed, 13 Apr 2011 01:01:00 +0000 http://dev-clomedia.pantheonsite.io/2011/04/13/think-locally-act-globally/ Done right, international service projects do good for the communities they serve as well as develop leadership strength and valuable market intelligence.

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Looking to develop emerging leaders? It may be time to expand your borders.

While long-term international job rotations have been a fixture of executive development for some time, opportunities are limited and require employees to pick up stakes and move halfway across the world. Short-term service projects offer an alternative way to develop leadership bench strength and do some good globally in the process.

Companies like IBM, Pfizer and Dow Corning are sending emerging leaders into emerging markets to do service projects up to a month at a time and building leadership skills, better teams and valuable insight into key emerging markets as a result.

“It’s a very different kind of leadership development from traditional executive education in a classroom,” said Deirdre White, president and CEO of CDC Development Solutions (CDS), a nonprofit organization that works with corporations to match employees with service projects in developing countries.

“Going and touching and doing something with your own hands and your brain are a lot different from the passive learning experience that so many of the leadership development programs offer,” she said.

Working in conjunction with a company, CDS identifies local organizations in emerging markets and assigns skilled professionals to three- to four-week service projects aimed at promoting economic development and job creation. White said one program in Angola with an oil and gas company created $230 million worth of contracts for small- and medium-sized businesses and 2,600 jobs over a five-year period.

IBM sends 500 employees a year on international volunteer assignments in countries identified as emerging markets for IBM services. Last fall, drug maker Pfizer sent a cross-functional team of employees from marketing, research and project management to Peru to work with the National Cancer Institute of Peru and local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to raise cancer awareness and develop clean water sources.

White said the country and type of assignment identified depend largely on the corporation’s objective. In some cases, that objective is to gather important intelligence in a key emerging market.

“The participants could report back on some of the particulars of their experience that they thought might affect the future design of the kind of materials that they were making,” she said.

In others, the objective is to provide a challenging learning experience to shape emerging leaders. In many cases, it’s both.

Using a company blog, a group of 10 employees from specialty manufacturer Dow Corning communicated the challenges they faced working with NGOs in Bangalore, India. That link also allowed those local organizations to tap into the expertise of the company’s 10,000 employees back home and served an important business purpose.

“They want the future leadership of the company to understand what it means to operate in those markets, what are the day-to-day challenges that people face,” White said.

International service projects can also help boost teamwork and collaboration among leaders working far apart from one another.

“The more you talk about global corporations, the harder it is to feel like you’re a part of a team,” White said. Creating a sense of cohesion and cooperation among employees that are working in locations as widely spread as New York, India and South Africa is a challenge.

“But when you … put them on a team in Lima, Peru, for a month, they start to understand the different operations of the company, the different types of people that work there, the different types of functions, and they’re all together in a way … they have never felt until they’re a part of this team.”

To maximize this result, IBM mixes people from different disciplines and countries, deliberately bringing together employees from marketing, sales, finance, human resources and IT into one team.

Many companies already engage in service projects back home — from volunteering with local community groups to building houses for Habitat for Humanity — to boost employee engagement and give back to the community. But to fully leverage service for leadership development, White recommended focusing on professional skills-based assignments directly related to an employee’s job role over a three- to four-week period, not just a one-day or one-week project.

“This is service at the heart of it … this is skills-based volunteer work where they’re using their core skill sets to help these organizations,” she said.

Representatives from IBM, Dow Corning and Pfizer are joining CDS at an event this Thursday in Washington, D.C., to share practices and ideas. Two years ago, White said five companies partnered with CDS. Now it’s up to 20.

“It’s still fairly early days in terms of this programming and how they’re going to incorporate it, but I think you’re seeing so many more corporations start to do this kind of work,” she said.

Mike Prokopeak is editorial director of Chief Learning Officer magazine. He can be reached at mikep@clomedia.com.

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