Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 42)

CLO OF THE YEAR Rebecca Ray Senior Vice President, Global Talent Management and Development, MasterCard The best learning leaders, in Rebecca Ray’s opinion, adapt to a changing landscape, exhibit thought leadership, collaborate with and learn from others and ultimately have a keen understanding of their business. People such as Frank Anderson, Ted Hoff, David Vance and Kevin Wilde, all former CLOs of the Year, embody these qualities, and now Ray’s work at MasterCard during the past three years has placed her in this select group. When MasterCard went public in 2006, Ray, who is the senior vice president of global talent management and development and Chief Learning Ofﬁcer magazine’s 2008 CLO of the Year, was an active participant in the change. “There were many senior leaders who recognized early on that this was a learning opportunity,” Ray said. “Given my rank here at the ﬁrm, I, like others, was brought into the conversation, and all of us were expected to think through — given the role that we all play — how do we help MasterCard in this transition? “Our employees needed to understand: what’s our strategy, what’s our business model and what’s their role in continuing MasterCard’s 40-year track record of success? So it was my task to come back to folks and say, ‘We need to provide support to employees at all levels to prepare for and thrive during this change.’” Ray and her department not only had to engage people in the change, but they had to ensure employees understood the new realities of this environment. MasterCard would no longer be an association or a private company, but instead a public one, which meant there would be a number of signiﬁcant changes on the horizon. To prepare the workforce, Ray worked with the senior team to articulate key messages and create learning solutions; develop a robust learning team that would have the skills and abilities to support the change; and implement the tools that would help people understand MasterCard’s new strategy and its new marketplace. “That was our way of helping MasterCard, just the way that many others were thinking, ‘What can we do to help from a regulatory, or legal, or educational or communications perspective?’” she said. To guide employees through this metamorphosis, MasterCard built three Learning Maps that detailed the organization’s strategy, business model and the competitive landscape. “The strategy map deployment was the single greatest learning event in MasterCard history,” Ray said, because the organization’s leadership was involved. And the maps still can be found hanging in work stations all around the globe. “Against the backdrop of an extraordinarily busy time, we asked senior business leaders to become certiﬁed as table captains to lead a discussion around a series of strategy maps. We asked the CEO to make a new video to play at the beginning of any session where he’s not physically present, [and we asked] people to take half a day off the ﬂoor or away from clients to participate in a session,” Ray explained. “Without their strong partnership, I know that we would not have been as successful. But we were able to articulate the need, and it was extraordinarily successful from a learning perspective, from a deployment perspective [and] from a leadership perspective.” But going public was just one step in MasterCard’s journey, Ray said. “It’s not an end all and be all in and of itself,” she explained. “We are on a journey to continue the level of performance and success that MasterCard has enjoyed. “I’d like to think I’ve been helpful in these last couple of years in part of that process, but it was an environ- 42

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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