Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 39)

Getting people thinking and acting in new ways is the primary “drag,” if you will, on an organization’s perfect speed. Rapid ILT means HCSC is not dependent, as in the old days, on classrooms and scheduling and having an instructor around. Yet, the organization can still provide workers with the one-to-one interaction that is vital to creating a learning process capable of shaping new behaviors in line with strategy. Ever Closer to the Business Beyond speeding up the development process, are there other ways for learning and development to get closer to the business and keep it more continuously agile? This is a question currently top of mind for Mike Barger, senior vice president of ﬂeet operations at JetBlue Airways and head of its training organization, JetBlue University (JetBlue U). Barger is a founding board member, as well as a student, in the Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership established by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Barger has completed a master’s thesis and is in the midst of doctoral research on the application of a balanced scorecard methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of a corporate learning function in shaping corporate strategy and then keeping it on track with what’s actually going on throughout the business. In Barger’s words, his current research “is all about building a case for the fact that learning functions often do not have a great mechanism in place for aligning what they do with the needs of the business. We talk about it a lot because it’s a hot topic. But few people have a good sense of how exactly to do it. Many learning executives have a difﬁcult time putting together an annual learning plan, much less a strategic learning plan to support the business.” A second dimension of Barger’s work is reﬁning the scorecard capabilities that would help learning executives articulate to a management team the links between the learning function and business outcomes, and then actually evaluate the effectiveness of the learning function in meeting the aligned goals it set out to accomplish during the year. At JetBlue, Barger has found a way to use the trained employees coming out of JetBlue U to offer insights to the business. “It’s a fairly common occurrence,” he said, “to have people leave your classes or leave your corporate university and then go out into the business to ﬁnd that what they just learned isn’t really the way things are being done.” That could mean either of two things. First, that the business isn’t really serious about its intentions — that it’s telling development people to teach something that the business has no intention of embodying in real work. Second, it could mean the learning function is lagging behind the real needs of the business. Either way, something has to be ﬁxed. So Barger has created mechanisms for learners — employees entering the DID YOU KNOW? workforce with fresh eyes — to identify The balanced scorecard for the university opportunities to idenwas originated by Drs. tify misalignments between learning Robert Kaplan and David and performance and help the company Norton as a performance as a whole be more agile and move in measurement framework. the right direction. Source: Balanced Scorecard Institute “This approach helps a learning executive like me to sit down with a business unit lead and say, ‘OK, so here’s the deal: Either you need to change the policies and procedures to meet what the business is actually doing, or you need to help us make sure the people understand that what we’re teaching is the way we should be doing business,’” Barger said. “That’s something that we have spent the last couple of years getting our arms around, and it has been incredibly productive for JetBlue University and the business as a whole.” Business-Oriented Teams Another insight is to make sure the teams put together to develop new organizational and workforce capabiliAGILITY continued on page 87 Chief Learning Ofﬁcer • December 2008 • www.clomedia.com 39 http://www.clomedia.com

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

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial The Future of Learning CLO Profile Learning Opportunities Embedded in Social Networking ManTech Leverages Knowledge Management Approaches for Social Networking Agility Training for the Learning Organization Creating an Agile Organization With Learning 2.0 2008 Learning In Practice Awards Corporate Social Responsibility: How Can Learning Contribute? Union Fenosa Corporate University: How CSR Education Impacted the Bottom Line Training in the 21st Century: Everything Old Is New Again Zions Bancorp.: Connecting the Dots Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

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