Chief Learning Officer - December 2007 - (Page 80) VANGUARD Silver, Division 1 Cynthia Scott-Williams, Senior Director of Human Resources, Adaptive Marketing This year’s Division 1 Silver Award winner in the Vanguard category is Cynthia Scott-Williams, senior director of human resources for Adaptive Marketing. Scott-Williams faced the following challenges in managing learning at Adaptive Marketing: a growing corporation; a young and inexperienced leadership team as a result of frequent internal promotions; lack of leadership alignment within independent subsidiary businesses; limited resources; and no structured development plan for its leadership team. The company’s Corporate University was mandated to deliver learning solutions to the entire corporation. It tripled its learning demographic by including all seven of its subsidiaries located in Canada and the United States. Corporate University created a complete leadership strategy to invest in and support its human capital. This initiative lessened the leadership skills gap within all subsidiary companies’ leadership teams by providing a universally applicable, developmental framework to align all leadership competencies. Silver, Division 2 Bryan Murphy, Executive Vice President and Chief Claims Officer, Farmers Insurance This year’s Division 2 Silver Award winner in the Vanguard category is Bryan Murphy, executive vice president and chief claims officer for Farmers Insurance. Murphy was head of worldwide claims for Zurich Financial Services (parent company of Farmers Group Inc.) for one year before assuming his current position. Like all corporations in America today, Farmers is engaged in an ongoing battle to recruit and retain top talent. Any human resources professional will tell you that the number-one personnel problem facing American business today is the aging of the baby boomer generation and the staffing crisis it will cause. Any human resources professional will tell you that the number-one personnel problem facing American business today is the aging of the baby boomer generation and the staffing crisis it will cause. Every year, the Farmers claims organization is in recruiting mode, hiring more than 2,000 new claims representatives in its key lines of business: auto physical damage, property, liability, commercial and workers’ compensation. Serious human capital issues are involved in finding the best candidates, training them thoroughly and moving them efficiently into fields where they can quickly become productive employees. Equally important is the continuing education of more than 10,000 claims incumbents — all of whom must remain up to date on the new policies and coverages that the company offers to Farmers insureds, while continuing to meet all regulatory compliance requirements set forth by the states in which it does business. It is because of Murphy’s vision and support that the new University of Farmers, Claims, was created. As the claims organization’s principal learning advocate, Murphy led the charge to make learning an integral part of every Farmers claims employee’s job. He changed the organizational mantra from “valuesbased, performance-driven organization” to “values-based, performance-driven learning organization.” And he forcefully advocated the acquisition of a new, more robust learning management/learning content management system to support the university’s operations. Corporate University sought to create a centralized learning organization that would combine the speed and efficiency of an internal training department with the credibility and subject-matter expertise of an external learning solutions provider. Based on needs assessments conducted with the company’s senior executive team, Corporate University was asked to pursue two key learning focuses in developing its leadership bench strength: defining and aligning both leadership competencies and interpersonal communication strategies. December 2007 Centralizing leadership training under Corporate University allowed the company to expand the learning opportunities available to all corporate staff. This year, more than 40 percent of the company’s total leadership demographic was able to participate in core leadership trainings in order to engender a consistent leadership language across the organization. In the upcoming fiscal year, performance evaluations will now include all the leadership competencies that were trained across the organization. Corporate University also has resulted in an overall savings of $64,000 per year to Adaptive Marketing. I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 80 http://www.clomedia.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.