Executive Summary

Objective:

To develop a culture of continuous learning that reflects a commitment to breakthrough performance while remaining a productive approach to professional development.

Breakthrough performance is driven by enterprise contributors who:

• Prioritize work based on organizational goals, not the individual job

• Know and understand their peers’ workflows

• Understand organizational context, not just formal structures

• Identify and initiate change, not just react positively to it

Learning experiences should support the development of these behaviors at every opportunity.

Approach:

I conducted interviews with senior leaders while in Toronto in July and observed training sessions for both comany employee onboarding onboarding and professional sales training for the new SE cohort.

Findings:

Based on interviews and observation, I concluded that there is general consensus among senior leaders that “learning” happens early but not often and is heavily weighted to the onboarding process. Incoming associates are introduced to a heavy amount of material that skews toward company-related information and then shifts to individual streams of job-related tasks and processes, rather than professional skills building. The learning is not supported post-session with additional coaching by managers or peer support but, in fact, might be negated by managers tightly correcting associates to operational metrics that focus on process tasks as opposed to outcomes.

I believe senior leaders generally agree that currently we do not do enough to support first-time managers and seasoned managers have never really been developed in-role. So their success has been rather serendipitous and not consciously designed for. Nor do we do enough to support “selling off the product” or “insight-driven sales”. In addition, we must do more to elevate research skills beyond an ITRG-process orientation toward a “trusted advisor” posture that includes consultative skills and insight generation.

Deploying an L&D Strategy:

Learning leaders should focus on directing choice, building learners, and driving shared ownership of the learning environment, as these are the critical drivers of learning-enhanced performance.

This means that L&D will need to:

• Steward learning choices toward a select number of relevant and appropriate learning opportunities • Build learners by emphasizing “how to learn” relevant business skills and knowledge rather than focusing on “what to learn”. • Sustain learning by developing and supporting on-going work-relevant learning through peer networks, technology platforms and informal assignments.

In a productive learning culture, what and how employees learn is driven by the right opportunities, capability and the environment. And this means we must ensure that employees have access to the right, and only the right, learning choices — a select number of relevant learning experiences that are available at the right time for development.

We must also ensure that employees know how to learn. Though it is important for them to understand which skills and knowledge are necessary for success, our ever-changing business environment — in which an increasingly greater number of new and unfamiliar situations are appearing — makes predicting what will need to be learned difficult if not impossible. Thus, teaching employees how to learn, what behaviors to display while learning, and how to apply learning in new and unfamiliar situations is far more important to a company’s success.

And finally, we must create a learning environment in which employees are supported in their learning, everyone contributes to learning, and everyone is held accountable not only for their own learning but for the organization’s learning.

In summary this means that we must:

• Align leaders to the Leadership Behaviors for $100MM business • Right-size learning opportunities across the organization • Advance the organization’s learning capability rather than teach content • Drive shared ownership of organizational learning, not just individual learning

Below, I run through the next steps for achieving success in the above areas. Align leaders to the Leadership Behaviors for the $100MM business

Recalibrate and level set current leaders to new direction. Focus on “what got us here, won’t get us there” posture and the need to elevating our game.

Next Steps:

Develop & Deploy “Leading the $100-Million Enterprise” Program for Senior Leaders a. Mapping the Road to 100 b. Business Model for Growth: The ITRG Difference c. Self-Management in the Growth Enterprise d. Coaching Teams for Breakthrough Growth & Engagement e. High Impact Product Support: Partnering for Sales Acceleration f. High Impact Member Engagement: The Anatomy of Renewals g. The Member-Centered Research Process: Driving Toward Insight

Deploy Peer Leader Consulting Protocols a. Leverage Thursday Learning Days b. Implement Five for Friday Commitments c. Implement Workout Groups

Right-sizing Learning Opportunities — Audit Existing Learning Opportunities

Use analytics to make data-driven decision on content relevance:

• What is the potential of existing learning content to improve learners’ performance & achieve development goals? • What is relevance of learning content to learners’ roles? • Net promoter score on learning experiences —would participants recommend learning to a peer?

Use informed judgment to cut content based on business acumen:

• Align with key business strategy and goals

• Align with talent implications of strategy

• Identify key skills gaps to achieve strategy

Next Steps:

Create a “Dean’s Council” of senior ITRG leaders who could help L&D identify skills gaps, align with current content and suggest new content and learning experiences.

Focus on prioritization, teamwork, organizational awareness and problem-solving as business-driving skills areas for improvement.

a. The next most important group of skills are: Proactivity, Self-awareness, Influence, Decision making/Judgment

Pare Down and Segment On-Boarding

a. Rebrand “Onboarding” as focus on ITRG culture & history — “Traditions” a la Disney. b. Reduce ITRG-related content to one- or two-day session by deploying much of “house-keeping” material to web-based pre-reading. c. Focus live learning in on-boarding on critical ITRG-culture related learning of greatest significance — supplement lecture with discussion of “issues”. d. Redesign “Member Experience” module — Currently “Adventures of IT Professional” — could be supplemented with “Trusted Advisor” or additional “year in the life” roadmaps. Point is, get participants thinking about members’ workflow e. Leverage “Quarterly Fixed” schedule to spread learning out across manageable time frame to support off-cycle hires and reinforce learning for new hires.

Rebrand Professional Responsibility Learning for New Hires as a “Fast Launch & Coach” Program a. Focus professional responsibility learning (Sales & Research) during on-boarding to the critical process behaviors required b. Have new associates shadow successful individuals & receive coaching until they can attend Foundations c. No more than two days.

Develop & Deploy ITRG Foundations Program — a program that introduces foundational business acumen and insight generation skills to research and sales teams. a. Structured Analytical Skills — Best in class consultative research skills & more b. Financial Acumen and Business Models – understanding the physics of any business c. Client-facing Advisory Skills — stakeholder analysis, professional communications, issue alignment

Develop & Deploy First-Time Managers Program a. From doing to managing others b. Communicating across the matrix c. Peer to Peer Networking for impact d. Prioritizing for Enterprise Impact Advancing the organization’s learning capability, not just teaching content

Design learning solutions to boost awareness of the right learning behaviors to display not just to obtain terrain knowledge:

• Emphasize reciprocal contribution, extraction and prioritization in learning design to ensure that learners share and use appropriate knowledge and expertise at all levels of the organization, extract useful lessons from learning to modify their perceptions, behaviors and problem-solving, and pursue learning based on their immediate needs and relevance to future roles in order to increase job-relevant knowledge bases. • Blend formal learning with “Share and Learn” peer interactions and “Try it Out” experiments on the job, reinforced with reflection and discussion with senior leaders and peers. • Deploy tools to support on-going learning such as “Learning Event Interview Guides” and “Learning Plans” and “Learning Resumes”

Some additional behaviors learning should support:

• Effectively transferring ideas from other parts of organization into one’s own work • Improving procedures and/or processes based on the ideas of others • Effectively transferring skills and knowledge to coworkers • Providing useful new ideas for products, services and/or process improvements for others • Improving work methods, techniques or tools for others

Design learning technologies that enable employees to build learning behaviors not just consume content:

• Target learning behaviors in the design of technology platforms. • Use technology to support social relationships in the workflow • Allow for user-generated content within technology platforms to drive relevance and stickiness

So for instance, when designing a learning portal, focusing on simplicity and ease of navigation will support more effective information seeking behavior; allowing the portal to be used both on the job and in the classroom will drive practice of new skills and feedback; and promoting collaboration and sharing opportunities in the portal will support sharing and use of new knowledge to improve work.

Next Steps:

Develop & Deploy a Peer to Peer Coaching Protocol a. Implement structured process for ITRG associates to seek guidance from, and give guidance to, each other. b. Leverage technologies to support and sustain effort.

Deploy Technology to Scale Learning a. Leverage existing platforms for impact to pare current offerings and extend into other terrains (Commercial Tribe) b. Investigate additional learning reinforcement platforms to embed learning beyond the classroom

Deploy Business Impact Evaluation of Learning a. Moving beyond smile sheets to business outcomes

Driving shared ownership of organizational learning, not just individual learning

Partner with HR to align incentives to support group learning and tie learning to business performance. Where possible emphasize group incentives and team success.

Next Steps:

Prioritize creating a learning environment that is fair, open, relevant, safe and clear a. Learning opportunities, both formal and informal, should be available based on merit b. Learning paths should be transparent c. Learning paths must include safe spaces to fail/struggle d. Learning paths must be business relevant & functionally specific e. Evaluation must be honest, transparent and time appropriate

Support empowerment and direction by building context to help employees prioritize learning a. Create transparency into corporate strategy and connect learning to achievement of business outcomes b. Partner with associates to create personally relevant learning paths c. Emphasize network performance and create visibility into others’ workflow

Foster ground-up ownership of learning by creating discussion guides that help teams define what they want the environment to look like and create an action plan for how to get there a. Deploy tools like Learning Resumes and Experience Plans to help teams identify what they have learned and what they need to learn b. Enable team dialogues around action plans for growth

Support collaboration and execution through team accountability a. Deploy tools and templates that support collaboration b. Identify and Model Collaborative behaviors in workflow

Create a rewards and recognition program that rewards groups that collectively support learning a. Shine a light on team learning & new process implementation b. Leverage technology to recognize process improvements

Teach managers how they can empower employees to own the learning environment a. Deploy coaching modules on workflow embedded learning b. Distribute discussion guides for coaching interventions