Training Industry Magazine - Spring 2015 - (Page 48)

CASEBOOK ANSWERING THE CALL FOR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT BY MICHELLE EGGLESTON Innovative organizations challenge conventional businesses by pushing the envelope inside and outside of company walls. Great leaders inspire change and grow opportunities for development to drive their business forward. As America's Un-carrier, T-Mobile is reinventing the way consumers and businesses buy wireless services. With approximately 55 million customers, T-Mobile has revolutionized the wireless industry by eliminating annual service contracts. Its customers are unwilling to compromise on quality and value, and T-Mobile is committed to listening to what consumers want and responding with solutions that smash wireless industry norms. In order to do that, T-Mobile is constantly challenging the status quo by listening to its employees. Recently, T-Mobile's customer service organization and its frontline leaders were asking for more development to strengthen core competencies and grow in their position. This call for development was answered by T-Mobile's Customer Service Learning and Development team. "Our disruptive market forces have changed the game for our industry, redefining what it takes to win, and as a result, our bold Un-carrier strategy must permeate every aspect of how we lead," said Jennifer Falkenberg, director of customer service learning and development at T-Mobile. "Success depends on leaders who can inspire their teams to produce great results and do what's best for our customers, lead through ambiguity, and navigate and simplify complexity. And because of that, we must continually develop leaders. In the end, leaders shape and exemplify the customer experience from the coaching and development they provide their team." 48 T-Mobile's Learning and Development (L&D) Leadership Development (LD) team conducted focus groups, interviews and did a lot of research to understand the training needs of its leaders. After analyzing the data, it became clear that leadership training was not easily accessible to learners and that their approach to leadership development was going to have to change. The team realized that they needed to bring back the focus of leadership development for the customer service team. They needed to make training and development simple and accessible when they need it. DEVELOPING A STRATEGY In 2013, a small and mighty team of five set out to design a strategy that would make learning opportunities easily accessible to over 1,500 frontline customer service leaders. With a daunting task ahead, the team needed to get creative due to tight budgets and limited manpower. "We are very resourceful and we are wired to perform," Falkenberg said. "We value being scrappy and being bold at the same time. We have a fearless mindset and take the right risks to make a difference. We realize that every penny we spend is our own, so we try to be very resourceful and leverage whatever we can." The team quickly set to work, making sure business objectives were aligned with training goals, while still ensuring a positive return on investment without sacrificing quality and value. They developed a training framework that tied together the business strategy, which required buy-in from the top-down.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Training Industry Magazine - Spring 2015

Soft Skills Make Up Vital Part of Corporate Training
Table of Contents
Guest Editor: Leadership: The Artichoke Effect
Focusing on Mindsets and Attitudes
The Importance of Soft Skills For Trainers
Social Simulators Bring Training to Life
The Power of Storytelling in Organizational Development
Leading Change with Resilience
Why Perspective Selling Makes Sense
Harnessing the Power of Teamwork
Collaborate to Innovate: Building an Innovation-Friendly Business Culture
Are You Using the Best Metrics to Evaluate Your Skills Training?
Influencing into the Future
Culture: The Enemy at the Gate of Innovation
Casebook: T-Mobile: Answering the Call for Leadership Development
Leadership is an Inside Job
Vendor Selection Tips for Corporate Sales Training
Checking Your Motivation to Lead
The Real ROI of Leadership Training: Soft Skills Lead to Hard Results
Closing Deals
Company News
What's Online
Training Talk

Training Industry Magazine - Spring 2015