Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 52)

VANGUARD AWARD • SILVER • DIVISION 1 Kathy Hennessy Senior Director of Organizational Effectiveness, NetApp Steve Wilson Director of Executive Development, NetApp This year’s Silver Division 1 winners in the Vanguard category are Kathy Hennessy and Steve Wilson. Hennessy is senior director of organizational effectiveness, and Wilson is director of executive development at NetApp, a technology company that provides network storage, delivery and management solutions. Rapid growth and the need for a uniﬁed focus prompted NetApp’s learning executives to revamp the company’s learning organization. NetApp more than tripled its revenue in the past three years, from less than $1 billion in 2005 to $3.3 billion today, and has experienced a 37 percent increase in head count each year. It was clear that the factors that enabled past success at NetApp would not be sufﬁcient going forward. So Hennessy and Wilson devised a strategy to help managers understand the need for a new approach, highlighting the cross-functional coordination that would be required for success and demonstrating the interplay between short-term execution and long-term decision making. This involved the development of a highly customized simulation for the top 125 executives in the company. Participants were divided into teams and were required to manage the growth and proﬁtability of a ﬁctional business over the course of three days, with each day signifying a year in the business. The teams were required to assess market conditions and revise their ﬁnancial forecasts to adapt to unexpected events. Ultimately, the teams began to understand how to address immediate challenges without derailing the long-term business strategy. The simulation experiences were so successful that Hennessy and Wilson’s team was obliged to roll them out ﬁrst to directorlevel employees and then to the NetApp professional services staff. The proactive approach is particularly effective because NetApp leaders are forced to look beyond their functional areas and gain an understanding of other areas of the business, while the expanding workforce has a common, tried-and-true toolbox with which to address various business challenges and opportunities. VANGUARD AWARD • SILVER • DIVISION 2 Lucy Dinwiddie Vice President of Organization Development, ConAgra Foods This year’s Division 2 recipient of the Silver award in the Vanguard category is Lucy Dinwiddie, vice president of organization development at ConAgra Foods. Dinwiddie has been instrumental in helping ConAgra improve internal placement and ultimately unify its corporate vision and methodology. Prior to initiating enterprise-wide learning programs in 2006, the company had been highly disparate and business-unit-centric. Not only did it ﬁll 70 percent of director-level and higher positions with external talent, but market challenges such as the high cost of commodities and energy, and acquisitions and divestitures also contributed to a fractured focus. To create a more uniﬁed outlook, Dinwiddie and her team — with the support of senior executives — created the Leadership Excellence Series (LES). Geared toward the company’s top 150 executives and running six months long, the LES program had three primary goals: to bring together all business units under the umbrella of the One ConAgra identity; to facilitate leaders’ success in a new matrix organizational structure; and to identify and develop leadership competencies speciﬁc to ConAgra’s current challenges, which included an increased customer focus. The results of the LES program to date have been promising. In the past year, Dinwiddie and her team have reduced reliance on external talent in director-level and higher positions from 70 to 50 percent, with an ultimate goal of a 30 percent. Further, users have rated the program a 4.4 out of 5, and 99 percent of participants said they would recommend the program to others at ConAgra. Thanks to the LES program and Dinwiddie’s leadership, ConAgra gradually is eradicating siloism, improving bench strength and uniting workers under a common vision. 52

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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