Chief Learning Officer - November 2007 - (Page 46)

productivity Such a model would proceed, not by presenting employees with a “fait accompli” direction and then “inducing” them to perform in accordance with it. Instead, it would actively involve people in the vibrancy of discovery and dialogue. And although it could not possibly take into account every opinion and every nuance of employee sentiment and thought, it would still give employees in general a message loud and clear: Your brains are the intellectual capital of our company. Your input into the future direction of our company matters. Impossible? Consider some recent work directed by David Vachell, head of learning and development at BT International, the global telecommunications company. When Vachell came onboard, immediately he was asked to help BT’s sales and customer service employees adapt to a new selling environment centered on value-based sales and solution selling rather than the sales of individual products and services. Vachell took what he describes as a “collaborative network” or “social learning” approach to this goal. “We began by bringing together quite large groups of people (40 to 50 people at a time) for an intense workshop,” he said. “A great deal of our time was spent discussing what good sales practice would be. The most important part of the workshop was the dialogue of the people with each other. In effect, they worked out for themselves what the new performance environment and learning curriculum might look like.” That initial work was then followed by a three-month period during which diverse groups worked on projects specific to their particular performance environments. These were “real-life work projects” (or, as Vachell describes them, action learning projects) that were then informed and refined by interaction with colleagues and a senior facilitator or coach. At the end of that period, each of the teams came back and presented to colleagues the outcomes of the projects on which it was working. “In effect, we were asking them to simultaneously develop the business and develop themselves,” Vachell said. “They used the change ideas coming out of the initial workshop, as well as the subsequent dialogue with their peers, to create programs that had an immediate impact on how BT went about enabling its sales and service employees.” How successful was the program? “I went to every closing event for this program,” Vachell said. “Many of the participants, including some very experienced people, came up to me and said this had been a transformational program for them because they actually had become a different person in the process. They said this approach had taken them far, far beyond a tactical approach to improving their sales methodology — they had actually had reason to look at themselves differently.” The evidence of success is more than anecdotal, however. Vachell and the management team have run numbers that show the program’s return on investment exceeds 500 percent and could be as high as 1,000 percent. For Vachell, the success of the initiative was founded on several distinctive characteristics: the learning program was peer-driven, guided — but not stifled by — management and based on a facilitative rather than a didactic approach. No one is better placed and prepared to be the catalyst for this new approach to effective change than learning executives and the enterprise learning function. It’s time for learning leaders to step up. Fighting the “Rubber Band” Effect of Change Organizations also must beware of the “rubber band” effect of the traditional approach to leveraging learning as part of managing change. Vachell describes this approach as one in which the learning and development organization comes along “only in a supporting role to train people in how to use new processes or how to talk to people differently rather than being a proactive partner in identifying innovations or strategic targets.” David Smith, Accenture global lead for talent management, goes so far as to describe companies applying that approach as “laggards” in terms of their ability to apply advanced workforce performance principles to drive improved business performance. For nearly a decade, Accenture’s HighPerformance Workforce Study has tracked the trends of industry leaders versus laggards when it comes to workforce management in the pursuit of better business performance. “According to our research and experience, companies that are not staying ahead of the curve are simply going out and building programs to support a major strategic or organizational change,” Smith said. He also said the problem with that approach arises when the company’s learning fundamentals are missing. “By the time the company has ramped up, figured out what it needs to do and then designed and rolled out the right training programs, the company has moved on to the next November 2007 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 46 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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