Chief Learning Officer- September 2008

ofﬁcers because of the importance of leadership,” he said. “We engage in very powerful conversations with our senior ofﬁcers, and I get lots of direction from them about their goals, needs and wishes. Again, the ﬁrst two components of the business model are leadership effectiveness and associate satisfaction. To be able to deliver on that, I have to have access and availability to our most senior leaders, and I have that whenever I need it.” To measure how well the organization is doing, there’s the Culture Survey, in which associates have the opportunity to give feedback, and the Customer Beat Index (CBI). The most successful year in terms of business results was 2007, and it also was U.S. Cellular’s highest performance on the Culture Survey. In that survey, 97 percent of U.S. Cellular’s associates participated, and of those, 97 percent said, “I am proud of what we are accomplishing.” “We have all the ﬁnancial measures of any other telecom, but the two key things that we pay attention to most are an internal measure of health, the Culture Survey, and an external measure of health, the Customer Beat Index,” Grifﬁn said. “We deploy a thirdparty vendor to contact customers after they’ve had an interaction with U.S. Cellular, and we ask them to evaluate how effective that interaction was. The CBI data and metrics give us an indication of where “In many ways, you can say I’m living out a dream here.” – Tom Grifﬁn, Vice President of Organizational Learning and Chief Teaching Ofﬁcer, U.S. Cellular we need to teach better and where we need to create more capability in our associates.” True to his military background, Grifﬁn persists in practicing the motto of “second to none.” As he looks to the future, he ticks off a list of additional improvements: instituting more e-learning activities, assessing and improving the business model and linking organizational learning to business performance. “We want to make the explicit connection between learning and business performance. We’re going to connect our work to elements of the business more concretely in the future than we’ve ever done in the past. One of the best compliments our CEO can ever give any part of the organization is to refer to them as a contributor, so I want to make sure that as we move forward into the future, we are contributing at a very high level.” CLO http://www.teds.com http://www.teds.com

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

Chief Learning Officer Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Imperatives Selling Up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five Lifestyle Learning: Improve the Bottom Line With Behavioral Education Tracom’s Social Style Model CLO Profile IOL: Determining the Impact of Learning Communicating With the Boss About Impact Mission Accomplished? Measuring Success of Corporate Universities Borrowing Measurement Practices From Investors Value Creation With Human Capital Investment Business Impact Analysis at Chrysler Learning or Performance Enhancement: Which Is It? Best Practices in Global Project Management Training Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

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