Chief Learning Officer - November 2007 - (Page 28)

clo profile NAME: Michelle Blieberg TITLE: Global Learning Officer, Investment Bank COMPANY: UBS SUCCESSES: • Established a development board to drive learning initiatives. • Rolled out the ASCENT program to develop high-potential employees. • Launched SUMMIT program to build managing directors’ leadership and collaboration skills. • Restructured and created a vision for the learning function. LEARNING PHILOSOPHY: “I’m very much in favor of outside-of-the-classroom, experiential and long-term learning that’s delivered by senior leaders and other leaders in the firm.” “Learning is a very powerful lever that companies should use to execute their strategy.” — Michelle Blieberg, Global Learning Officer, UBS Investment Bank catch up. I’m amazed at how much of the vendor stuff I get that is still instructor-led. The group that I find is the most engaged in helping us do this is line managers. They intuitively know that people learn by doing. They just don’t know how to put a framework around that to make it happen.” Blieberg already has applied this philosophy in two major learning initiatives: ASCENT and SUMMIT. (The mountain themes are derived from UBS’ Swiss roots.) The former is a two-year program that is in its third iteration. Although it started out with 250 participants per year, it has since been expanded to 300 to accommodate employees from outside the investment bank. “We’ve been able to expand with the same staff and budget,” Blieberg said. “The goal of ASCENT is to increase retention by 50 percent and build a global community of senior leaders, so that by the time they get to the top, they know each other and solve business challenges together.” In ASCENT, two teams are assigned to a UBS leader, such as a managing director or even a board member, who in turn help these groups work for several months on business challenges they’ve selected. “We have now finished the first classes, and about 50 percent of these (solutions) have been implemented to some degree,” Blieberg said. “That’s one of the hardest things to do in learning: to conduct serious learning while doing real work.” SUMMIT is a higher-level initiative targeted at 1,400 managing directors (MDs) that lasts 18 months. (As with mountain climb- ing, the SUMMIT comes after the ASCENT for learners within the UBS investment bank.) The program kicked off in May with a threeday “base camp” in Miami, and a similar event was held in Barcelona, Spain. Another is slated to take place next February in Singapore. Interestingly, the attendees’ assigned base camp locations have nothing to do with where they’re based, as one of the main goals of the program is to create expansive networks among UBS’ globally dispersed leaders. “One aspect of SUMMIT is the exposure our senior leaders get to organizations outside financial services,” said Maria Bentley, global head of HR. “This helps them learn about other leadership challenges and approaches and to bring back those different perspectives into their working relationships at UBS. These are genuinely new ways for our people to learn, and their feedback on the impact on them as individuals has been extremely positive.” At this base camp, participants get the opportunity to interact with some unique leaders, none of whom are from the financial services industry. For instance, those at the Miami event met with Ed Villella, the head of the Miami City Ballet and one of the most celebrated ballet dancers of all time, to try to learn from his experiences. “He gets people to stretch beyond what they believe possible in a very holistic and innovative way,” Blieberg said. “People have left some of the top ballet companies in the world to join him. We’re going to send in a team of MDs not to be lectured by Ed Villella, but to get a 10minute overview and then find out what they need to learn from him. How has he become November 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 28 http://www.clomedia.com

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Chief Learning Officer - November 2007 Editor's Letter Table of Contents Imperatives Selling Up, Selling Down Strategies Take Five Rediscovering the Essence of Learning Cornell University Maintains Productivity While Pursuing Higher Education CLO Profile How Loyalty and Employee Engagement Add Up to Corporate Profits A Strategic Foundation The Evolution of the LMS Ariba: Growing Sales Skills in Conjunction with LMS Technology Leveraging Change to Build Productivity Equinox Fitness: Leveraging Change to Build Productivity Tangibles or Intangibles: Where’s Your Value? Raising the Stakes: The Strategic Role of the CLO Case Study Business Intelligence Case Study Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - November 2007

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