Chief Learning Officer - August 2007 - (Page 28)

clo profile NAME: George Wolfe, Ph.D. TITLE: Vice President, Global Learning and Development COMPANY: Steelcase University, Steelcase Inc. SUCCESSES: • Led the effort to create a corporatewide leadership development program, which was awarded a Gold CLO Learning In Practice Award for Strategic Alignment in October 2006. • Led the effort in developing talent management processes that were determined by Bersin & Associates as leading practices (Bersin & Associates wrote a case study that described it in August 2006). • Created strategic alignment from a decentralized learning and development organization into centralized learning and development with common vision, mission and processes to bring value to Steelcase’s internal clients. • Created an executive development program that selects high-performance, high-potential employees globally while engaging the CEO and his senior executive team in the selection of high-potential employees, decisions on challenge assignments, monitoring participants’ developmental progress and providing critical coaching and feedback. LEARNING PHILOSOPHY: “Learning can be, and should be, a strategic advantage for knowledge companies. If leveraged right, learning can become a catalyst for improved company performance, a competitive advantage, and it can act as a differentiator. It also can act as a means to engage the entire workforce, providing opportunities for employees to connect value directly to their work while experiencing personal and professional growth in the process.” board, able to get that kind of recognition, but we are moving very aggressively in that direction.” Wolfe pointed to one general manager who ran a business within the company as an excellent example of what can result from participation in this particular program. This general manager aggressively engaged himself and his team in the leadership development program curriculum (scheduling and completing all the program pieces takes about a year and a half). Wolfe said this manager practiced and used everything he was taught, and in the years that followed, he ran the most profitable part of the company. In the past six months, this former high-potential candidate was promoted to a seniorexecutive position and now reports to the CEO. tomers (usually vice presidents and their teams) to identify the performance behaviors needed to achieve business results. “This is really a highly disciplined process — being able to identify what the business results of a function such as sales are, what they hope to achieve at the end of the fiscal year and be able to dive in with the right kind of questions and applied processes to come up with identified behaviors that will help the sales force get to their business results,” Wolfe said. “The salespeople already have some of these behaviors, which is good news, but there are always gaps. It’s those gaps that we begin to fill by creating learning programs to support those performance behaviors. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking sales or HR, IT or legal — we can go across any discipline in our company.” Wolfe said Steelcase’s vice presidents value these programs. “It doesn’t take long to get a few testimonials — ‘If you haven’t been working with Steelcase University, here’s what it’s been doing for me’ — and pretty soon you develop a lot of interest,” he said. “I’m not saying that we’re 100 percent, across the “Not to say that he didn’t have the capacity and the business knowledge to begin with, but he’s given testimonials of how our mission-critical leadership program has contributed to the success of his organization, and he states this very publicly,” Wolfe said. “It helped him to strategize, mobilize a plan and energize his people. That’s just one example. There are many individuals who leveraged different parts of what we have to offer as a corporate university, who really took it seriously and applied it.” Wolfe said getting people to use what they’ve learned is every CLO’s biggest challenge. “People will go to classes and courses because it’s the thing to do, to check it off their list,” he said. “But when you get back into the real world, you don’t connect the dots to apply those performance behaviors into the work that you do. It’s almost like, ‘Learning is over there, my work is over here.’ Our corporate university is doing a better job of helping people understand how to do that.” To aid Steelcase employees in making those connections, Wolfe uses Gilbert’s Performance Grid. This concept finds that although a CLO might have the best capability or learning program money can buy, implementation and/or adoption August 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 28 http://www.clomedia.com

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