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.

As learning leaders our job is to cultivate the necessary conditions for driving effective organizational engagement, capability development, and productivity. So what happens when learning leaders have no time to learn? As learning functions have gotten leaner, while organizational learning needs are growing larger, there is an inherent tension for learning practitioners to not overlook their own development. This is and has been the a tension for employees, but I'm hearing/observing through colleagues that the sheer workload and time-compression is inhibiting reflection, application, and innovation for learning professionals.

This is a case of the shoemaker's children going barefoot.

Some ideas:

1) Take the one sentence a day diary approach - what was the one clarifying question you heard that day, the business performance opportunity you uncovered, or a remaining challenge you are working on? Capture your state of mind now, you most likely will not replicate it tomorrow.

2) Think about the problem you are addressing and the people you are currently collaborating with, then think about who is missing. Follow up with a phone call to keep a broader circle connected with your actions. Take a minute now in order to accelerate later.

3) Make the paradigm shift from reflection being a passive activity to an active state. In the workplace, we all become action-oriented and reflection gets lost as a thing that's nice to do. From my observations in developing leaders, a differentiator and often an under-developed skill and behavior is deliberate practice and reflection. There is never going to be more time, so decide to stop doing something less effective, and choose to insert the occasional strategic pause into the day.

I received two good questions from a business leader today. I've been working on piloting a new tool, which I believe will add value to some of our internal learning solutions. This particular business might test the tool as I continue to build the case for a broader enterprise approach. As we discussed, it became evident that he was already sold on the pilot of the tool, but his concerns went beyond the immediacy of testing and observing the impact of the tool for the business.

He essentially asked two questions: a) what if you rotate jobs while we are midway through the pilot, and b) what if the pilot is successful, but you can't convince the rest of the enterprise to join? In hearing the first question I assumed he was refering to the need for me to specify near-term support, and the second question was related to my ability (or inability) to successfully persuade his peers of the value of the tool. However, on reflection, I believe he was asking two more pointed questions.

1. Contemplate the edge of your contribution

I'm close to both this particular tool and its pilot. Through my lens, I can see how this integrates and enhances other learning solutions and assets. The root of his question was anchored on ensuring that the many other identified stakeholders become champions, advocates, and supporters. My contribution has a certain bandwidth, and proximity, and I need to ensure the value chain is there to sustain the work and energy being invested. You might say this is just a good practice in change management (and it is), but to actively contemplate beyond your edge of contribution, challenges one in proactively fostering other influencers to ensure appropriate uptake of work to ensure sustainability.

2. Leveraging interdependencies is harder for early adopters

Other organizations will be able to leverage the insights and lessons learned from this pilot. Going first involves some form of risk. So risk mitigation is paramount. Therefore, be explicit in attempting to isolate critical enablers and drivers which may accelerate others to leverage and build upon your work. Resources may be scare, priorities may compete, and there may be alternative strategies. When undertaking pioneering work, don't overlook the whole, to the detriment of the singular. It's also much harder to beat to drums other than your own. Part of doing something better and or different requires additional effort and energy to assist others get in getting over the perception gap, and up on the uptake curve.

Having reflected on these questions, I'm not sure the leader was intending to create a teachable moment, but I've turned it into one. The questions, while simple at first, have brought me closer to staying mindful on thinking beyond my spheres and networks of impact, and to be effective in always increasing my edges. As well as, making sure to build a compelling narrative for early adopters. To articulate their responsibilities in supporting peers not only see in the possibilities of utilizing new tools and solutions, but assisting and accelerating their capacity for uptake.

It's that time of year again. In the latest Labnotes from the Mlab there is a nice example of an Australian software company testing new processes and practices in reviewing individual performance. I like the approach they have designed in attempting to break the mode of an "annual rite of passage approach" to evaluating performance, and instead embedding and sustaining an ongoing "rhthym of analysis and focus, coaching, and results."

I appreciate following, learning, and being provoked by peers on topics such as this. Organizational context matters. Size, breadth, industry, culture, demographics - all play parts in Talent Mangement professionals' ability to innovate and experiment in people practices.

In reading Chapter 5 Team Effectiveness in Theory and Practice in Industrial and Organizational Psychology by Cooper and Locke, there were some great gems the authors compiled through their collective years of researching the area of team effectiveness.

Lesson 1 - "Senior management must understand that too many directions can result in no direction at all."

Lesson 2 - "Organizational direction gets lost in the downward cascade."

Lesson 3 - "Direction cannot be over-communicated. Received messages must be constantly checked and the intended message received."

Lesson 4 - "Rapidly changing business environments can undo efforts to maintain a clear, consistent direction."

Lesson 5 - "Those responsible for articulating direction are themselves sometimes unsure what the direction should be. They 'get it' in different ways, at different times, and from different sources. Exposure to successful teams, in particular, can reinforce managers' own commitment to the collectiv direction that they are supposed ot be advocating."

Lesson 6 - "It is often tempting - but a mistake - to overemphasize the performance benefits of large teams and ignore their coordination costs."

Lesson 7 - "Creating a balance of technical skills multiple teams can suboptimze the technical performance of some teams. BUt taking a differentiated view of skill levels in composing a team offers the opportunity to find useful and productive roles even for those individuals who are technically less proficient."

Lesson 8 - "Cross-training increases task interdependence, cooperation, and team effectiveness, but often is prohibitively expensive and resisted by line management."

Lesson 9 - "Team stability is critical to team effectiveness, but market pressures, new strategies, and competing goals can make team stability a low priority for managers."

Lesson 10 - "Teams can make good use of start up tools to help establish norms and work processes."

Lesson 11 - "It is difficult to implement  high quality team-based reward and recognition system. Local managers may need help devising open-ended programs that tie rewards to team-level performance, provide meaningful payouts, and reinforce both superb performance and continuous improvement."

Lesson 12 - "Training intact teams is crucial, with learning experiences spread out over several weeks or months to enable the teams to apply their newly learned skills."

Lesson 13 - "Team-level performance information systems are critical. These systems can never be started too soon, and they must be constantly assessed and modified as teams' objectives and priorities change."

Lesson 14 - "Teams must take time to actually use the information systems in solving problems and refining work processes."

Lesson 15 - "Allowing managers to experience working in teams themselves before asking them to work with other teams increases their coaching capabilities."

Lesson 16 - "Managers can be encouraged to manage teams rather than individuals by increasing their spans of control, but this process can go too far. The ideal span of control is three to four teams, depending on the teams' level of maturity and performance effectiveness."

Some nice points to consider based upon your own contexts and organizational landscapes.

I've been sitting on the fence, as others have jumped onto ipads, I've been watching them. I've been listening to the new features and applicability of the tool to work and learning. But, I've been holding out waiting for the second generation. Well, it seems that it may not be too far away.

Also, if you haven't read P. Berman's blog on why he had to give up the ipad - it's here

1. Start with your strategy - if not, everything else is just expended effort

Some insights while in a workshop with Willie Pietersen, from Columbia b-school. "Structure follows Strategy" - often our actions and intentions are shaped by the current structures we are embedded within. The challenge is if your current structure can fulfill your strategy. This is often the case as Strategic Planning is done in a cyclical, time-bound, ritualistic manner. For example, something that is done every 3-5 years. However, if strategy is defined as a continous, learning cycle than it is a living and adaptive focused investment of effort and resources, which can change. Therefore, the structure may change as required by the strategy an organization is pursuing.

- "How can you get away from the urgent, and focus on the important?" Often in service organizations like HR, we respond to the immediate, pressing, and urgent fires that need to be put out, with the good intention of delivering a quality service to our clients/partners. The unintended consequence being that it pulls us away from the important work we are already working on - hence, further straining already finite resources. Can having greater clarity, unity, and agility in your strategy help re-balance this inbuilt tension?

- "Insights are an extraction industry." Like gold mining where you need 4 tons to get an ounce - generating strategic insights is difficult, laborious work.

- If you're not a value center, then you're just a cost center. How are you generating and delivering value and what insights are delivering for the business that no one else is?

- Turning insights into actions is a doing activity. All to often reflection is seen as a leisure or an indulgence - something no one has time to do. As Talent Management leaders we need to build the mindset that thinking/reflecting/pausing/contemplating are doing activities where insights turn into actions.

- When the cost constrained, efficiency arguement comes to a proposed learning solution - remember the phrase, "Is the value of the learning bigger than the cost of the possible mistake."

- Key Takeaways after two days with Willie a) A non-decision is an action, b) ask yourself what you will stop doing, c) we all have customers - always, d) put everything you do on a trial by fire every 2-3 years, e) Build Gap Champions - rather than hide gaps, highlight them and tackle them.

2. Learning Transfer should be integral in the sum of all actions and moving parts delivered by the learning organization

"...the most significant gains in transfer will come when learning is more tightly integrated into the process and reward systems that already matter in the firm. The challenge is not how to build a bigger and more influential transfer support system, it is how to make transfer a more integral part of the existing organizational climate."

3. Differentiate your approaches in how experts and novices learn - novices are like sponges and SME's are like bricks

- a) SME's organize content around their knowledge, rather than the context of the job, b) SME's fail to distinguish between what's nice to know and what is essential, c) SME's tend to leave out critical underlying information, d) SME's often chunk too much information together, e) SME's don't understand the need for frequent practice

 4) What Really Motivates Workers?

HBR's 2010 #1 Breakthrough Idea from Teresa Amabile. Demonstrates that the greatest motivator for knowledge workers is a sense of progress. Beyond rewards, recognition, emotional support, and clear goals - a sense of progress in one's work is the strongest motivator. As supervisors, this falls directly in our sphere of influence - in other words how much focus and effort (on our part) are we putting on ensuring our team members are experiencing daily progress?

5) Ask "Why are we going so fast?"

Speed is important, but to what end-goals are you racing toward? Can individuals, teams, and/or organizations fall into "acceleration traps" - where everything speeds up in doing more with less, particularly in our current economic climate and focus on efficiencies. Things to look out for - 1) over-loading employees with too many activities, 2) "multi-loading" - asking employees to do too many different kinds activities, 3) "perpetual loading" - depriving the workforce of any hope in retreating to recharge their energy.

Every feel like your talking about the surf rather than surfing. I find that happens to me often, living in Houston. Years of living near the beach in South Australia spoiled me. A couple of years back I would've laughed if you'd say I'd find myself commuting down I-10 to sloppy surf along Galveston coast. Jokes aside, thinking about how we can often find ourselves spending more time 'knowing' (talking about surfing), rather than 'doing' (pulling on the wetsuit and paddling out there) is an everpresent problem - aka the knowing-doing gap. Next time you find yourself struggling to make a change, just ask yourself "are you surfing or or are you just talking about it." Practice makes you just a little better. TIred, sore, and perhaps even frustrated, but a little bit better - and that's the goal.

A nice little posting on how we view surfing as a metaphor for deliberate practice.

Moonshots are big lofty goals, like when President Kennedy said we’d go to the moon. In the area of management, Gary Hamel has called for Moonshots in Management (HBR, Nov, 2009, pp. 91-98), cultivating a paradigm shift in how the future of the management profession must continue to evolve within the shifting social structures, technologies, and volatile business environments. Similarly, Jim Collins in exploring corporate strategy in Good to Great, likened moonshots to Big, Hairy, Audacious, Goals, or BHAGS, which become a “unifying focal point of effort, galvanizing people and creating team spirit as people strive toward a finish line” (p. 202, 2001). Learning leaders need to do the same for measurement within their own business contexts.

Moonshots and BHAGS become critical touchpoints in the narrative learning leaders must build for a transfer-driven mindset in their organization. Setting such stretch goals for ourselves, our teams, and our organizations, in better measuring the impact and value of the investments in learning, enables the business to accelerate forward. A movement from a train and hope, to an intentional and business-results mindset takes hold. Measurement is hard work, and it often does not involve flipping a switch off and on. That is why it is, continues to be, and will remain a dominant and prevalent theme in the corporate learning literature and consulting domains. Time, investment, and senior executive buy-in are critical in building a robust measurement ecosystem. Remember, from little things big things grow. Establish a blueprint and strategic plan of the initiatives and investments you’ll make over the next three years. Articulate how these investments align to and support the overall business goals your firm has targeted. Demonstrate the linkages between what you have done in previous years, achieved in 2010, and how these accomplishments integrate into your future plans. Overtime you can establish the foundation you need, the structure you require, and the accessories you desire: all in fulfilling the moonshots you set for measurement.