Chief Learning Officer - January 2008 - (Page 26)

clo profile NAME: Ron Lawrence TITLE: Vice President, Organizational Development COMPANY: VF Corp. SUCCESSES: • VF has excellent retention rates among its high performers and rising talent as a result of extensive talent development and robust performance management practices. • VF believes in and utilizes a “leaders teach leadership” approach. For example, in the VF Leadership Institute, a weeklong, biannual program for rising leaders across the global enterprise, teams compete on a business case program judged by the CEO and other corporate officers. This program was profiled in a BusinessWeek article in October 2006. • VF created an innovative talent development program called EMC2, a leadership mentoring program. EMC2 stands for Executive Mentoring Cohort 2 (the first cohort was a pilot), and is the company’s formal mentoring initiative. It pairs senior and junior leaders together on a monthly basis. LEARNING PHILOSOPHY: ”We hear constantly these days that the only sustainable competitive advantage for any organization is its workforce, and it’s true. Technological advancement and globalization continue to change the nature of work, so developing each member of the team to learn and contribute in new ways gets more important every day. My favorite line of poetry is Tennyson’s exhortation ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,’ for that’s how you become better at anything — by never being complacent and satisfied with where you are today. In fact, it’s why I remain a student!” “To be really effective in OD and training, work at a macro level requires spending a lot of time thinking about HCM strategies and the HRIS foundation that underlies it.” — Ron Lawrence, Vice President, Organizational Development, VF Corp. which are critical as VF faces the baby boomer exit wave and associated knowledge loss over the next five to 10 years. Lawrence said his team is aggressively working to capture that knowledge and develop it in the company’s next generation of leaders. Further, this activity must take place on a global scale, which is part of the reason Lawrence is called on to act as an organizational force between various departments, bringing them together with a core curriculum designed to advance the business. “We have a workforce that’s spread all over, and it’s a heterogeneous workforce with a lot of different functions,” he said. “You’ve got employees working in retail stores in North America, individuals in knowledge-worker jobs throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. You have people who work in manufacturing facilities in Costa Rica. The workforce is diverse, and in the midst of all that you’ve got different locations to try and service people, which is why elearning is a good solution for us.” The challenge of VF’s geographic employee spread goes hand in hand with a related issue Lawrence called “America-centric ways of thinking,” to which he said the learning and development agenda is vulnerable despite his team’s best efforts. “We’re really trying to move beyond those ways of thinking and operating at times because we are a global company, and we know that we need to operate globally,” Lawrence said. “We have people from international backgrounds in our top leadership, so as a company we’re very aware that we need that diverse set of opinions and mindsets. We try to involve partners and associates in Hong Kong or Belgium so that they are part of shaping our training agenda and determining priorities.” Despite best efforts for inclusive program development, Lawrence said there is often content that’s very specific to one environment — diversity is one example. “Diversity training in the states doesn’t look nearly the same way when you go to do it in Europe,” he said. “The focus might be more on awareness of cultural differences. We try to recognize that and work with it. There’s a responsibility for everyone, but at the same time there’s the pragmatic side, which is prioritizing what will help the company deliver results the soonest, in the best way.” Using that bottom-line thinking to power the learning function, Lawrence said he devotes a great deal of energy to leadership and managerial development and professional skills training. Programs in these areas are delivered via a variety of methods, including instructor-led, blended and self-paced learning materials. Stateside diversity training for awareness purposes, for instance, is delivered using an online prework module followed by a highly structured, instructor-facilitated half-day session. January 2008 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 26 http://www.clomedia.com

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Chief Learning Officer - January 2008 Editor’s Letter Table of Contents Imperatives Selling up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five Environment Sips of Knowledge at E. & J. Gallo Winery CLO Profile Productivity UST Global: Opening Employees’ Eyes to New Learning Tactics Applying CRM Concepts to E-Learning Human Capital Capital One: Experiences in Innovation Learning Solutions Macy’s: Using Feedback to Develop One Leader at a Time Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - January 2008

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