Chief Learning Officer - July 2008 - (Page 33)

IN PRACTICE SELLING LEARNING’S POTENTIAL AT SIEMENS guage. That’s the wellspring of trust between business managers and learning professionals. “It’s being able to deliver on what you say you’re going to deliver on and showing them the results and doing it in the timeline you promised,” Lamoureux said. “It’s really as basic as that — and developing those relationships where they understand that you fully understand the business drivers and that you have the business acumen and can gain the trust and credibility. It’s focusing on results.” Those organizational assets were evident in the execution of a workforce respect program that the learning team expected would drive an increase in employee complaints in the short term, but in the long run would actually create a more equitable working environment for employees. The learning team delivered the program, acknowledged both the pain and gain, but in the end, demonstrated not only a decrease in complaints but also a broader slate of beneﬁts to the company. Lamoureux said the practice of simply talking to business partners and being open to their suggestions and also being ﬂexible and open-minded in terms of learning solutions can effectively demonstrate the kind of reciprocity required for meaningful partnerships. It’s also important for learning professionals to understand relationships are one-half of a critical success formula for selling learning and earning the trust of decision makers and business partners. “Relationships can go a long way, but quite often we need to show the business rationale for what we’re doing and how we’re moving forward,” Lamoureux said. Successfully selling learning across the enterprise requires one to deﬁne the business case, gain consensus about it, execute the work and then measure and reﬂect the impact to build trust and win support for the next collaborative initiative with a line of business. “There’s both a trust and a data piece to that,” Lamoureux explained. “Business partners can really only convince themselves. If you show them data and show them facts, it’s hard to argue with that. And if it’s coming from trusted source, that can seal the deal.” In summary, if you want to sell learning, you’d better know your customers, understand their pain and map valid solutions that have proven that they can solve that pain. Demonstrating the capabilities and relevance of yourself and your team as opposed to merely promoting an off-the-shelf solution will help you close that sale. CLO Anthony A. D’Agostino is a vice president and principal in the learning practice of ACS. Joseph Daniel McCool is an author and an online columnist for BusinessWeek. They can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. onserae Toles, director of the U.S.-based Learning Campus for Siemens, a global group of companies in industry, energy and health care, said learning professionals should be more proactive in positioning themselves as partners with the lines of business and changing the way learning is perceived. “Learning has to be more closely aligned with the business. I can’t repeat that enough,” Toles said. Siemens’ Learning Campus, part of the company’s corporate headquarters, previously focused on fulﬁlling nontechnical learning needs and providing learning resources to Siemens’ multifaceted operating companies in the United States. “When I took over the leadership role in July 2007, we began working differently, starting by identifying program and functional owners to work more closely with,” Toles said. “It was like turning a new leaf. Once we began collaborating more directly with these key individuals on tasks including global project management, Six Sigma or ﬁnance, we got a much better sense of what their business needs were. The result is that we’re now better able to provide more relevant solutions for their businesses.” Toles said Siemens is working toward having these business and functional owners collaborate and take full accountability directly with their business-line partners. “I think there’s now a clear recognition of the value of closer alignment and the importance of supporting a learning culture within our organization,” she said. In order to sell these beneﬁts internally, Toles said learning teams should develop business acumen and a strong connection between business operations and the value of learning for the individual business manager. “Demonstrating solid business acumen and skills goes a long way in helping learning managers prove their value proposition to businessunit management,” Toles said. In addition to understanding internal clients’ business needs, Toles said learning professionals should demonstrate greater ﬂexibility when addressing the structural and social realities inside individual operating units. For example, her learning team observed that Siemens project managers own their projects in different ways. Some own one or two high-value projects. Others may own several low-ticket projects. As a result, training needs to be calibrated with these and other differences in mind so the appropriate resources can be brought to bear in a timely manner. Toles’ U.S. learning team also was charged with supporting a global project management initiative to bring a new learning platform to U.S.based project managers across several sectors. Its success, Toles said, continues to hinge on the learning team’s ability to promote the value of collaboration with the lines of business it’s trying to support. “To start, we had to understand the business strategy and the challenges involved. We also needed an ongoing dialogue about the speciﬁc learning needs, so we really understood the nuances involved,” Toles said. “Then we placed someone on the team who had practical business expertise. The person was versed not only in learning theory but could interact effectively with the business owners themselves from day one.” CLO S – Anthony A. D’Agostino and Joseph Daniel McCool 33

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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