Chief Learning Officer - January 2008 - (Page 45)

learning solutions high-potential program. The mentors are there to guide the candidates through the process and prepare them for what to expect as they move on to their next role in the company. Vidal-Brown said that every leader from the CEO down is a ready and willing mentor when called upon. The in-depth assessments and training for FedEx Kinko’s executives are another point of pride for Vidal-Brown. Viewing personal relationships as the basis for great leadership, the program takes candidates away from the office for a week devoted to progressive team-building activities and personal reflection. “The later part involves making a ‘leadership compass’ as a way to personally guide not only how one leads in the workplace but how they lead in their personal life as well,” Vidal-Brown said. The team-building exercises at the retreat use related role-playing business scenarios to help determine how, as a leader, an employee would react in a particular situation. The candidates are given individual feedback on their reactions to the simulations and then formulate a personal plan with their mentor on how to overcome any shortcomings, based on the exercise. Such a personalized leadership program doesn’t come without its share of challenges. As a large and rapidly growing company, FedEx Kinko’s is training more and more employees to be leaders within their organization every day and strives to maintain a certain level of personalization in development for each position. “Our biggest challenge is how we provide leadership training to the mass number of leaders we need to train, prepare to open our new stores and still make it personal,” Vidal-Brown said. “We have to train so many people so quickly that the ramp-up time for them to be a leader is a little more aggressive than it has been in the past or with a company that isn’t growing nearly as fast. How do we create enough time in our program to allot for that personal reflection when we’re moving at a very fast and aggressive growth pace?” She believes that’s a worthy goal for creating good leaders who will, in turn, make sound business decisions and help the bottom line. “If we treat our people with creating an outstanding experience focused on their development and making this a great place to work, then they will create that same experience for our customers, who, in turn, drive the kind of revenues and profits and ongoing business to FedEx Kinko’s,” she said. In addition to training a large amount of people quickly, sizable organizations are challenged to consistently follow individuals’ progress as they go through the program. Baker & McKenzie, an international law firm with nearly 4,000 attorneys spread out over 40 countries, has revamped and personalized their leadership program recently to help include this as a priority. Working with both the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) and a professor from the London Business School, Baker & McKenzie has developed a basis of ideas on how to train its future leaders to be great. “To be a great leader, you’ve really got to understand yourself, your own style and preferences and really figure out how you’re going to leverage those strengths and how you’re going to address some of the development areas,” said Greg Walters, chief talent officer at Baker & McKenzie. “We’ve built it as a process rather than a one-off program, which is a fundamental piece of it to allow people to practice stuff back on the job and for it to be very work related. We take people through a yearlong process.” Similar to Macy’s and FedEx Kinko’s leadership development programs, Baker & McKenzie’s is broken down into phases of preinterviews, assessments, mentoring or coaching, actual work time and review. One of their assessments is a customized 360 evaluation based on predetermined personal qualities Baker & McKenzie deem necessary to be an effective leader. “We did a whole mapping exercise between the 14 personal qualities we have that we feel make up the success of this firm; we did a mapping exercise of those against the CCL database of their hundreds of competencies and found the ones that directly correlated with them,” Walters said. “We already had the qualities our firm wanted. They were set a while ago, and it became a sort of matching exercise of our different outlets” Having spent years as a CLO, Walters knows from experience the more personalized your leadership development is, the more engaged and effective your leaders will be. He says this particular program is far and away the most personal he’s seen. Baker & McKenzie’s program does stand out in one respect, because the firm uses both internal and external mentors and coaches to guide candidates through the program. The external executive coach is intended to be an objective sounding board the employees can talk to and ask questions of with professional confidence. The internal mentor is there to oversee the day-to-day behavior of the candidate within the company. Where the executive coach can talk broadly and generally about leading others and the personal attributes it takes to do that, the internal mentor can talk specifics and give direct and immediate feedback while on the job. While his experience taught him such personal practices are always beneficial to the individual and the organization at large, Walters was initially worried about the audience this time around. “Lawyers are by nature skeptical people,” he said. “I think there is a level of reasonable skepticism around the whole idea of leadership assessments and the whole inward-looking, ‘what I look like as a leader’ mentality. I think people thought that’s a very soft skill, very emotional intelligence, where many lawyers, I think, will naturally want to focus on the IQ side rather than the EQ side.” Macy’s, FedEx Kinko’s and Baker & McKenzie’s leadership development programs have different needs and operate under a different scope, but all three share one thing in common: the pursuit of personalization. Walters was more than pleasantly surprised with the results of the first few programs, which he said were overwhelmingly positive and proved their efforts were worth the time spent. “One of the partners said it was one of the most impactful weeks of his life, which was a nice little quote to get back on the evaluations of the programs,” he said. — Ben Warden, bwarden@clomedia.com 45 January 2008 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - January 2008

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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