Chief Learning Officer - April 2008 - (Page 30) PROFILE Lehman Brothers’ Hope Greenfield “When Lehman hired me, there was no focus whatsoever on leadership development in the organization. There was sort of requisite product training or early-career training, but other than that, there was nothing.” – Hope Greenfield, Chief Talent Officer and Managing Director, Lehman Brothers ethics program. “Expanding Our Culture of Integrity: Conversations on Ethics” was not a compliance program, Greenfield said. Instead, it dealt with the kinds of deep questions that occasionally must be addressed around what’s right and the best ways to deal with the dilemmas and gray issues that crop up in business and in employees’ professional lives. Greenfield and her team rolled out the program in sessions led by the top several hundred managers from business groups across the firm. “They’re quick, a couple of hours long, which for us is still meaningful. They’re very engaging, with actors demonstrating some scenes, but the idea is for senior managers to delve into the questions and then lead discussions in their own group,” she explained. “In our next phase, we’ll do online pre-work, and then we’ll have managers meet with some of the more junior people in their organizations and have some dialogue with them. That way, we can touch everybody in the firm in a way where we know the quality of the conversation that’s going to take place, and yet we can be more efficient about how we’re getting to people with some of these messages.” Having an adjunct faculty of several hundred people who can help facilitate programs also helps control learning costs. The firm has an annual learning and development budget and clear expectations for what it will or will not spend resources on. “I don’t know if that’s really controlling the costs because, if you added up [leaders’] time, it would be a bill I’d never pay, but it controls the budget costs,” she said. “At a firm like Lehman, at the end of the day, the way we pay people is based on their revenue and profit. No one wants to spend money they don’t have to. We’re always looking for ways to leverage what we do in one part of the business to what we can do in another part 30 Chief Learning Officer • April 2008 • www.clomedia.com of the business, and we get a lot of receptivity for that. “If in one part of the business we need to build out our project management skills, and another part of the business wants to do the same things, we’ll leverage those programs across the business. We built derivative programs for banking which we’re using with some modifications at our fixed-income divisions. We try to do things smart in terms of not recreating the wheel because that’s just really costly.” It makes sense that a financial services firm would be concerned with the bottom-line costs associated with learning. Metrics are a big part of that, but Greenfield said providing hard proof of learning and development impact is difficult. However, the company does look at retention and employee satisfaction statistics relative to people who have participated in learning programs. “We look at development plans that we have, we map people’s development plans to our business plans and now we’re trying to map our growth with our talent, but those aren’t really metrics around learning,” she explained. “Those are metrics around the strategy and how we’re thinking about our talent and talent development. Metrics around learning are hard. We’ve got lots of anecdotal information around revenue. People come to our programs and, as a consequence of working with and meeting other people, go off and do things with clients they wouldn’t have done before. But that still doesn’t give you any information about learning.” Instead, Greenfield has focused her attention on providing the kind of targeted learning activity that will create significant bottom-line differentiators, such as development programs to aid those who deal directly with customers. CLO-RADIO Hope Greenfield, chief talent officer and managing director at Lehman Brothers, talks with Senior Editor Kellye Whitney about the importance of teaching employees to do the right thing. Listen to the interview at www.clomedia.com/podcast. “A few years ago, we had a big effort to build people’s capabilities on client focus. They came to us and asked us to build a whole set of programs around client focus. We did, and we’ve seen huge improvements in client focus for the firm, one of the things that we get cited for,” she said. In the next year, with the help of senior management, Greenfield said she plans to expand some of Lehman’s diversity initiatives with focused leadership programs for women and other diverse groups, but the biggest initiatives will be around strategy and talent development. http://www.clomedia.com/podcast http://www.clomedia.com
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