Chief Learning Officer - July 2008 - (Page 24)

Was it a success? Apparently so, because the company has since asked the university to formulate a similar program for all its units for delivery at locations in South America and Eastern Europe, each with its own speciﬁc cultural anomalies. Speciﬁcally Tailored Course Content The human resources department of a large company recently asked an executive education department to design a course for its personnel that had nothing to do with HR skills. It wanted a program to teach department personnel the languages of ﬁnance, accounting and marketing. Why? Because only then, the HR department head reasoned, could his personnel understand their places, their roles and their effects on the corporation’s balance sheet. He wanted them to know where they could ﬁnd the costs of such things as recruiting, hiring, training and turnover on the balance sheet and how investments in these areas would pay off. Then they would be able to determine how the changes they proposed Each corporation has the right to deﬁne the characteristics of its leadership team and then turn to its educational partner and say, “Make this dream a reality.” would affect the ﬁrm’s overall success. But why marketing? The HR director said that nine times out of 10, when the human resources department wants to initiate a new program or change an existing one, it is met with resistance. The marketing aspect of the executive education custom course was designed speciﬁcally to teach the HR professionals within that organization how to brand their offerings and effectively communicate the HR value proposition to internal customers. Immediate Application Whether we are talking about learner-driven teaching methods, ﬂexible delivery formats, critical mass and 24 Chief Learning Ofﬁcer • July 2008 • www.clomedia.com global reach or developing skill in the language of business, the ultimate test of collaboration between a CLO and a business school partner is the application of new learning for the beneﬁt of the company and the participant. Many custom executive education programs do this by embedding projects into the program structure. The CLO needs to be clear about the ﬁrm’s overall business situation, the management development implications of its business challenges and the resulting learning agenda for the company. The business school provider must listen, question and challenge to identify and structure tangible business issues into effective learning vehicles. When this communication occurs, a company can achieve immediate beneﬁts from the application of learning to speciﬁc projects, as well as long-term beneﬁts as the participants continue to apply their learning to new situations. For example, a regional beverage distribution company wished to develop general manager skills among its sales and operations managers. The participants were divided into teams, and each was assigned a company challenge in areas such as overtime, route optimization and implementation of new information systems. The teams had one month to research the topics and return with formal recommendations. Program instructors and the company’s top management accepted and implemented the teams’ recommendations, saving thousands of dollars and reallocating resources to new initiatives. Using business projects as part of a customized learning experience makes it easier to assess the effectiveness of a program and the company’s return on investment. For example, it is easy to identify the number of program projects that “go live,” retain executive sponsorship and achieve their business metrics. Getting Tomorrow’s Leaders Today What are the leadership traits corporations need to be looking for as they enter the second decade of the 21st century? There is no one correct answer to this question. Each corporation has the right to deﬁne the characteristics of its leadership team and then turn to its educational partner and say, “Make this dream a reality.” This is how the CEO of a Houston-based energy company deﬁned it. She asked her executive education partner to develop a program unique to her company that would help in “developing the skills and talents required of tomorrow’s leaders.” She was very speciﬁc in what she wanted and outlined her requirements in a letter to her educational partner. http://www.clomedia.com

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

Chief Learning Officer - July 2008 Contents Imperatives Selling Up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five A Customer-Driven Approach to Molding Tomorrow’s Leaders The Home Depot: Accelerated Leadership CLO Profile Birth of a Salesman: Selling Learning to Solve Business Issues Selling Learning’s Potential at Siemens Transform Corporate Learning With a User Network Wiki Training Increases Productivity for RMC Vanguard Mortgage Lessons From the Feds: Mapping Learning to Strategic Initiatives Department of Labor Centralizes Content Synchronous and Asynchronous: What’s in a Name? Coping With Cultural Barriers to E-Learning The Manager’s Responsibility for Employee Learning Case Study Business Intelligence In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - July 2008

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