Talent Management - July 2008 - (Page 35)

“Without that, it’s doomed,” Peshawaria said. “The ﬁrst thing I would suggest is to build sponsorship for the idea. Encourage ofﬁcers to go out and teach and become part-time trainers.” In the past two and a half years, Hyatt has trained 4,000 operational managers in North America to be trainers. Because the mandate came from the top, the hotel chain had senior leadership support from the beginning. “If we want to be successful delivering service to our guests, we need to make sure the message our employees hear every day [is] consistent with respect to service priorities and delivery,” said Christy Sinnott, vice president of learning and development. “We [have taken] each department, identiﬁed the service and skills necessary for management-level and hourly staff and literally brought in every operational manager across the country and trained them in the material and how to be trainers.” After the required skills and service standards were set for each position, members of the corporate operations and learning and development teams created the tools and resources necessary for managers to be successful in this new role. All of the operations managers were then brought to a central location and trained. Afterward, the managers returned to their hotels and retrained all their employees. “Our continued focus is how we can help our managers to spend more of their time with our employees and guests,” Sinnott said. “We continue to work with our corporate operations team to ﬁnd efﬁciencies whether that [is] new training tools, resources or even how to use technology to make their jobs more efﬁcient.” Sinnott said since this transition to a train-the-trainer model, one of Hyatt’s biggest challenges has been ensuring each new manager receives the appropriate training and support at the hotel level. To help, the hotel chain has implemented a system of checks and balances to ensure all new managers go through training. “We have regional managers based throughout the United States that do follow-up, and we also have a corporate operations team that meets with new managers to [make sure] they are receiving the proper training and assist them in that role,” she said. Before training became the operational managers’ responsibility, they had to buy into the idea. HR and talent concerns had to take a backseat to more immediate business needs. “We made a uniﬁed decision with operations that this was going to be operations training,” said Doug Patrick, senior vice president of human resources at Hyatt. “It provides a sense of ownership and increases the interaction between the employee and manager, which is what we want. We want them to be on the ﬂoor and intimately familiar with their people.” Both Morgan Stanley and Hyatt have seen advantages to non-trainer training, as it makes leaders more accessible to employees and helps create a learning atmosphere in which senior executives, business-unit lead- ers and managers share knowledge for the betterment of the workforce. “Teaching is learning twice, so it helps us solidify key concepts in teachers’ minds,” Peshawaria said. “[Also], it’s very hard for a senior business leader to stand up and talk about good leadership in front of 100 people and then go back to business the next day and not behave the way they were talking.” Technology also can be used to drive peer-to-peer learning. As instant messaging, social networks, blogs and wikis become part of the fabric of corporate life, employees increasingly will interact online. Corporations can harness this opportunity to fuel informal, peer-to-peer learning, as Morgan Stanley has. The ﬁrm recently launched the Talent Directory, a kind of corporate Facebook. The directory is on the company’s intranet, and all employees create proﬁles and list their key skills and experiences. “If I want to talk to somebody or learn about collateralized debt obligations, I go to the Talent Directory,” Peshawaria said. “I keyword search and people who have listed that as their expertise come up; then I can click on them and set up some time to talk. It’s still [in its infancy] because most people haven’t even ﬁlled out their talent pages, but early adopters have, and we’re encouraged.” Two Heads Are Better Than One Employees can be trained for hours on end and still not be prepared for every issue that surfaces because most learning occurs on the job. Thus, employees should have resources such as mentors to turn to when formal training initiatives end or are unavailable. “[Training] doesn’t give us everything we need to do our role,” said Tom Floyd, founder and CEO of Insight Educational Consulting, a professional consulting ﬁrm. “If you are in a [mentor] relationship, getting exposed to other things you need to do your job, you can actually get up to speed quicker and more effectively.” Part of the beneﬁt of a mentoring partnership is the two-way learning experience. It’s critical that any mentoring program be voluntary, so both participants contribute equally. Mentoring programs also require training, as mentors should be prepped on their role. “You need some type of training program before you let them loose as mentors, so you’re communicating, ‘This is what being a mentor in our company means, and here [are] some different tools we’d like you to use throughout the process,’” Floyd said. Because experiential learning is so important in the hotel business, Hyatt has implemented an informal shadowing program, as well as more structured mentoring initiatives. “We have managers who work in the kitchens periodically so they can understand what the kitchen has to go through,” Patrick said. “Training’s not just classroom. It’s all forms of learning, and predominantly, we learn best experiencing what happens on a daily basis.” July 2008 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com 35 http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Talent Management - July 2008

Talent Management - July 2008 Editor’s Letter Human Performance Leading Edge Learning Connections Guest Editorial Passive Candidate Recruiting: Evolving with a Changing Workforce How Do They Feel? Sec Regulations and Executive Compensation Performance Management: A Retail Perspective Train the Non-Trainer Management-Go-Round: Developing Future Leaders Netflix Creates Its Own Script for Talent Management Intuit Spotlights Strategic Importance of Global Employee Recognition Make HR a Profit Center: Automate Technology to Gather Tax Credit Data Offshoring and the Impact on Talent Management Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

Talent Management - July 2008

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