Chief Learning Officer - October 2007 - (Page 38)

environment in practice: INTTRA: Using Global Learning to Better Enable Talent Management Learning has a way of making its presence known in business. Organizations realize learning can alleviate some of the production or process woes they experience or that additional development opportunities can pave the way to greater productivity. Talent management is no different. The growing industry around management of the employee life cycle often benefits from the services and expertise of those in the learning space, particularly when the company in question is experiencing rapid growth. INTTRA, one of the largest multicarrier e-commerce platforms for the maritime shipping industry, created INTTRA University for just that reason. Serving about 230 employees globally, the university’s main goal is to ensure the management team is aligned to a specific set of behaviors to help plan for and sustain the rapid growth the company has experienced since 2001. Lisa Bell, vice president of organizational and people development and former vice president of HR, said INTTRA was an entrepreneurial start-up filled with technicians trying not only to create products, but to sell them. When the business took off, the company scrambled to migrate its technically skilled personnel into leadership and management roles. “How do you ensure they’ve got the interpersonal and the business strategy and vision skills? This is when you talk about talent management,” Bell said. “We want to ensure that if someone’s a terrific technician, and we have an opportunity for them to be a manager, that they succeed. Of course, we could hire someone externally, but they’re going to come down on the learning curve on subject-matter expertise. We’ve got a treasured foundation of people who are subject-matter experts about our industry, and we’ve made the decision to move them along to be managers.” Fusing learning and talent management strategies also helps set the right tone in an organization. Bell said at INTTRA, people clearly see they have opportunities to develop their skill set using on-the-job training activities, that they can grow within the organization. “Somebody in technology that shows an interest in the commercial side can throw their hat in the ring and say, ‘I’d like to see if I can do that job.’ It’s both an upward and a lateral promotion,” Bell explained. “I had somebody a couple of years ago in our quality assurance department express that he’d like to move to commercial, and we gave him that opportunity. It worked out, and now he’s back in quality assurance as a manager overseas on that assignment.” INTTRA operates in a knowledge-based industry, Bell said. People bring a skill set to the table, and they are given an opportunity to help move the company forward and be successful. There must be some give-and-take in the relationship, however. Understanding the value of learning as an investment and a necessary piece of a complete talent management strategy is one reason the company continues to use face-to-face, classroom learning opportunities when so many global organizations are taking development online. “If they’re doing business travel, we encourage people to take a class at the same time so that they have two vantage points,” Bell said. “They’re now taking a class in a different culture, and they are also taking a class with people in a different department that they don’t have a connection with. We’ve made the INTTRA village smaller. Now, it’s not just a name on a telephone directory — they know somebody overseas.” Bell also said being a small company helps offset learning cost considerations, but she said the main benefit to holding global classes is the relationships that develop. In mid-2004, when the company was facing tremendous growth, INTTRA placed learning at the helm of its efforts to not only change technicians’ mindset to embrace management opportunities, but to implement a corporate culture and exercise internal branding. Part of this meant embracing the concept of a high-performance team. “Usually, technicians are sole practitioners,” Bell said. “We’ve given them the additional interpersonal, strategic, visionary skills to be cross-functional within the group. That produces efficiencies, and we become more productive. We’ve been able to train probably 95 percent of the people in INTTRA University on alignment and our values, where in large organizations, you may train divisions, but you don’t have everybody on the same ramp-up to move forward. “People understand that by having that relationship with somebody overseas, they can give that person a call or send an e-mail and say, ‘I’m working on this project. Can you help me out?’ In our company, it’s a collaborative effort. That’s how we have been successful.” — Kellye Whitney, kwhitney@clomedia.com with delivery in the form of teaching by “trainers.” This process is largely the transfer of information from the expert to the learner. Through that transference, the enterprise’s overall human capital assets are increased by having more employees with the skills required to implement the specific business model. The role of knowledge development is much more complex. Knowledge has more to do with the development of learner capabilities than the assimilation of external information. The learner has much more responsibility in the development of knowledge and takes a far more active role in the deployment of the final know-how. With learning, the process is much more about internal development than external assimilation, and the outcome has more to do with the development of capabilities than with storing information. Of critical importance are learner attributes, including: • Synthesis: This is a very important capability in the global world, where knowledge is being created at an accelerating rate. Being able to acquire, evaluate, select and prioritize information is a valuable asset for the organization. • Analysis: This is the ability to derive conclusions and implications from information and organizational priorities. The development of analytical capabilities involves disciplined thinking and logical constructs that can stand up to thirdparty scrutiny. • Critical Thinking: This is the capability to challenge the status quo, as October 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 38 http://www.clomedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - October 2007

Editor's Letter Table of Contents Letters to the Editor Taking the Lead Trends Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial Elements of Social Media Arrive on the Learning Scene Trend Micro: Making Learning More Modular CLO Profile Learning’s Role in Talent Management INTTRA: Using Global Learning to Better Enable Talent Management Operationalizing Communities of Practice U.S. Army: Sharing Lessons from the Field Looking Back, Moving Forward Leveraging Business Data to Develop Strategic Learning Solutions Chrysler LLC: Metrics, Score Cards and Automobiles Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources Connecting the Dots: Recognizing Talent Development Differences at Nonprofits Nonprofits in Health Care: Learning at ENH Case Study Business Intelligence Case Study In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - October 2007

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