i4cp Chief Learning & Talent Officer Board: In-Person Meeting

Meeting Details

The Best of getting Hybrid Work Right

The first presentation/discussion of the day was with Kevin Oakes and Tom Stone.  The Best of Getting Hybrid Right was culled from almost two years of i4cp sessions on that topic.  A recording of the presentation can be found above and the slides (available for download) contain many best practices from i4cp members. Highlights include these major take-aways:

• Demanding a return to the office is a mistake.
• Flexwork works.
• Innovation and performance aren’t contingent on employees working onsite.
• The pandemic has redefined leadership.
• Offices will be reconfigured (not abandoned), and employee benefits will be expanded.
• High-performance hybrid requires flexibility—not rigidity.
• On-site workers need flexibility too.
• Success with truly flexible work requires planning and targeted effort.
• "Because the CEO said so" is not a sound reason to return to the office.

The group echoed several lessons drawn from the best practices. They agreed that the purpose of the office is increasingly about connection and collaboration.  Many are creating special events just for that purpose and some are redesigning office spaces and setting up hoteling options.

Kevin and Tom talked about the dangers of being too prescriptive in setting policies for hybrid work, suggesting guardrails were the best practice. “Let managers manage” was the mantra.  Board members discussed some examples of working with managers to help them develop agreements for how their teams would work within broader company guidelines.  And it was noted that the organization owed managers tools, technology and resources to help them work effectively.

Having a listening strategy was another key takeaway from the “best of” series. The group talked about how they use employee surveys as well as more frequent listening tours, surveys and events (some invented during the pandemic; but continued beyond) to stay in touch with employee concerns. A key lesson was: “Never do a survey unless you are committed to follow up and act.”

Tom and Kevin went through case examples of seven hybrid challenges: Onboarding, Communication and trust, Culture and employee experience, Teams, relationships, and networks, Holistic well-being, Meetings and hybrid meetings, and Measurement. You can find all of them on the presentation slides and in the recording.

High Impact Leadership Development

Brenda Sugrue, CLO at EY and current Member Co-Chair led a discussion of High Impact Leadership Development.  She set the stage by reminding the group that leadership development is not only a perennial topic of concern for the Board; but was once again listed as a top concern in the i4cp 2023 Priorities and Predictions study. The group agreed that this is an especially critical time to rethink leadership requirements. Changes in the workplace, the workforce (including skills shortages), and in technology are placing new demands on leaders.

Brenda noted that, right up until today, thought leaders continue to decry the lack of proof that the billions spent on leadership development are having the desired effect. She shared EY’s own leadership development journey since 2015 and how they measure impact on multiple dimensions.

Small groups then met to share ideas around these questions:

1. What have you already done in your organization that has increased the impact of your leadership development activities?
2. What are you planning to change to increase the impact of leadership development?
3. How do you monitor the impact of leadership development?

Among the ideas shared when the group reconvened were:

• People are going back to fundamental leadership skills/behaviors; but applied in the new work context and to leading digital transformation. But many organizations are taking an entirely new perspective, focusing more on the whole person, on self-reflection, empathy, and dealing with stress and burnout. And all agreed with the 14 key leadership behaviors highlighted by i4cp research. The group also agreed that, while they might be applied differently in different organizations, leadership capabilities are universal.
• Many have added new modalities and dimensions to the typical leadership seminar format. They shared ideas about immersive workshops. Shorter intense programs, virtual sessions, JIT modules coaching and mentoring. And the group echoed the i4cp finding that the most critical aspect of leadership development may be leaders teaching leaders.
• Some members have developed ongoing communication programs, feedback processes, and even recognition programs to reinforce the leadership behaviors they teach.
• Though the group agreed that more needs to be done to measure the impact of leadership development they noted that there are really two kinds of leadership programs, “Hygiene” and “Targeted.” Hygiene programs tend to be broadly targeted and broadly based. (i.e., Every leader should know how to give good feedback.) They are often part of a general curriculum.  Targeted programs are aimed at individuals or small groups and designed around specific issues or gaps.  They must be personalized, situational, leveraged, and sustainable. Targeted programs more easily lend themselves to measurement. But ultimately, all measures should be about impact, about Return on Expectations, that is, we agree is the change we wanted to see.
• Might we ever want to try to measure the cost of not doing the leadership development (the inverse of considering ROI)… especially for new hire leaders who won't even join the organization if leadership development is not available?

The Board concluded that for leadership development we admittedly take a larger leap of faith regarding the value of the program than we might for sales training, customer service training, or other areas where we believe we can more directly and objectively measure change.

The board would like to continue to share lessons learned in leadership development.

Specifics include the use of simulations and non-traditional delivery modalities.

The Next Frontier of Talent Mobility

Next, Linda Jingfang Cai, global head of learning & talent development at LinkedIn, joined us virtually to discuss The Next Frontier of Talent Mobility.  She began by noting that job skillsets have changed dramatically in the last eight years and that change will double in the next four. The number of jobs requiring degrees is plummeting, and the new skills showing up on LinkedIn have grown astronomically. “If you are not changing jobs,” she said, “jobs are changing on you.”

Linda reviewed LinkedIn‘s skills first approach to talent mobility and how her company is using it to address issues of skills gaps, talent attraction and talent retention. Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of LinkedIn‘s approach is to rely on self-reported skills and strengths. As she put it, “rather than looking at experiences on a resume and guessing what skills those experiences represent, we ask people to tell us.”  She told the group that people are extremely honest about reporting what they are good at and tend not to even mention the skills they don’t feel confident about. The group expressed some unease about self-reporting. Notably, EY starts by inferring skills from resumes and then asks first the person and then the person’s manager to validate those inferences.

Linda shared three critical aspects of the LinkedIn approach:

• Empower employees to design their own careers.
• Celebrate nontraditional career paths.
• Make it every manager’s responsibility to be a career advocate.

In the ensuing discussion the group said that the biggest barriers to talent mobility are figuring out the technology, getting and maintaining the data on internal skills in the organization, finding out what it is that people want in the way of career development, and getting managers to give employees time to develop,

Linda pointed out that the latter may be the toughest and requires a culture that understands “talent flow” – the notion that, as a manager, you are not just giving up talent, you are getting it.  She pointed out that employee surveys can be enhanced to gather great information about what employees want.

One board member reporting beginning to use a manager dashboard to show manager how long people have been in their current roles and what kind of career movements they have made.

To view the recording of Linda's presentation, click here. (Note:  The audio volume is low for the first 1:20 seconds.  Please use the audio transcript feed on the right side of the screen during this time.)

Creating a Culture of Learning

After lunch the group briefly discussed Creating a Culture of Learning, another of the top issues for the CLTO board. The group discussed the seven characteristics of a learning culture as reported by i4cp research:

1. Active knowledge sharing permeates the organization
2. Learning is an espoused organizational value
3. Leaders (at all levels) are involved in teaching others and reinforcing learning’s importance
4. Learning is reinforced in both hiring and leadership development
5. The organization measures learning’s effectiveness
6. Managers are rewarded for mobility and development
7. A culture of learning is about four-way accountability (organization, leader, manager, learner)

The group agreed that the greatest barrier or enabler of a learning culture is how the organization approaches risk.  Learning requires taking risks.  Many organizations never create clarity about risk and have varying responses to risk or especially failure. Many don’t live up to their stated values about it and therefore discourage learning.  The next most common barrier is simply time to learn.  To address this concern, some member companies have prescribed set asides for learning. (One day a month, two hours a week.)

The group noted that a critical responsibility of the talent function is to show the connection clearly and repeatedly between learning and business success (and personal success.)

The Board asked that we have further conversations on the subject, among other things to talk more about these two questions:

• Can you engender curiosity, or is it a trait you must hire for?
• What is the best evidence of a learning culture?

The group would like to have another session just for sharing best practices.

Lessons Learned from Moving from a Large to a Much Smaller Organization

Three Board members shared Lessons Learned from Moving from a Large to a Much Smaller Organization.  Diane Holman (Chief People Officer at Virgin Pulse) shared six key lessons:

1. Good is good enough.  She pointed out that, in larger organizations, we may tend to try to get everything worked out perfectly before implementation. In her current organization they don’t have the time for perfection, and she discovered that they will accept less than perfect and get great value.
2. Speed rules.
3. The power of relationships. The ability to make deep connections with critical players moves things forward faster and with better buy-in.
4. Growing up is never easy.  There’s a lot less infrastructure than you think. Build it.
5. All roads lead to YOU!  Get comfortable doing it yourself.  The upside is that you can be in charge if you choose to be.
6. Making an impact every day. It is easier to see in a smaller company; but it is what we are all doing.

Cheryl Doggett (VP Global Talent Management at Intuitive Surgical) echoed Dianne’s six points and added a few more. She learned to focus on the highest impact and sometimes for the quickest wins. She also saw that sometimes people need to be reminded that the changes you are making are not attacks on the culture or values, just new ways to live up to them.  She found that she could do more than you think with modest resources and how to be more agile and quick.  Another lesson was to think about how much the organization can absorb, an issue that is easier to see in a small company. She noted that it was easier to see how personal learning is for each person who goes through it.  And she learned to use social media to find talent and resources. And, perhaps most fundamentally, Cheryl said you learn to “just start.” A bias for action pays great dividends.

Michael Killingsworth, Head of Learning & Development for Cross River Bank, added these ideas to the mix:

• As a one-man band, Michael had complete autonomy, and with that came speed. But it also reminded him of the responsibility he held to get it right.
• He discovered that, in a small, young company, resistance to change can come from the nearness to the founder and founding way of doing business. It’s not so different from what can happen in a larger company – just more visible.
• One of his greatest lessons was to “steal with pride,” to repurpose what had been successful in his past endeavors and not to think he had to do everything new.
• Being in it alone meant that he really had to think about every aspect of the ADDIE model, because he was doing them himself.  It was a great reminder of how critical every step was; but he also saw the good enough principle at work.
• He learned that success isn’t about building a program or solution that lasts forever; but rather one that works now and for as long as you need it.
• And, perhaps most fundamentally, that you can’t fix everything and everyone; but you can make a real difference for everyone you can touch.

Performance Management

The group next took up the topic of Performance Management. After acknowledging that the topic is very broad (see the definition below authored by i4cp in 2015) the group agreed that most of the current discussion of PM focused not on strategic or operational goals of the process, but on the development and administrative aspects. Specifically, the key concerns are about the frequency and nature of appraisal discussions and the use of ratings and rankings.

Tom Stone presented the results of the pulse survey that was given to the Board in March.  Among the key results were that the overwhelming majority of companies (81%) still use annual ratings; but stack ranked or forced distribution are rarely used.

The movement to abandon ratings has largely played out; but the trend toward more frequent discussions has not, with the majority holding such discussions more than once a year and over 25% saying performance discussions happen quarterly or even more often.

Over two thirds of respondents ranked their PM process as only moderately effective and yet very few are planning to make substantial changes.

In the discussion that ensued, the group postulated that the aversion to further changing the PM process is that most companies find it too complex (and perhaps that it would take too long.) They also agreed that, too often, what the process requires administratively interferes with the larger aims of performance management.

The group discussed several open issues:

• How do we drive feedback culture?
• How to drive the PM behaviors in the org?
• Balance: what does the organization need vs. what do individuals need?
• Should PM focus more on teams? (What has your team accomplished… and what has your contribution to the team been?)

Tom Stone suggested that we might want to recirculate the key findings from our performance culture study.  And, despite the open issues, the group indicated that they were not interested in further discussion of PM at this time, preferring to focus on career mobility, succession, and other related topics.

Current and Future Research

Tom Stone led a brief discussion of current and future research. That was followed by a related discussion of planned and possible Board agendas for the coming year.  This is the list shared of recent publications and those in the field:

• 2023 Priorities & Predictions – published
• Culture Fitness Study – published
  • Manager Accountability toolkit – publishes in Q1
  • Employee Listening toolkit – in production
• Upskilling & Reskilling guidebook – published
• Onboarding Toolkit 2.0 – published
• Corporate Board & CHRO Alignment – published
• HRIS Satisfaction Study – assets just published!
• Productivity Reboot Study – survey went live March 9
• Engaging Older Workers Study – publishes in April
• Renovating HR Structures guidebook – publishes in Q1
• CHRO Transition guidebook – in production
• Layoff Trends Pulse Survey – analysis underway
• Global DE&I Custom Benchmarking Project – underway

And this is the current schedule of meetings and topics:

• MAY  10 - Virtual  Internal Mobility Guidebook/Upskilling Guidebook  Best Practice Sharing
• JUNE 14 - Virtual All Boards.  Topic TBD.
• JULY 19 – Virtual  First look at i4cp research:   AI, Productivity Reboot, Next Era Leadership. The critical role of the manager, new expectations, and newly important capabilities.
• SEPTEMBER 13,14 - IN PERSON BNSF- FT.  Worth: Round Table – Member Issues & Actions,  Best Practice Sharing: Leadership Development, succession, and careers / Creating a culture of learning.  i4cp HR technology research results.
• NOVEMBER 14 - Virtual    EVP, especially how companies are making data driven decisions, being intentional, measuring results.
• Special Virtual  For interested CLTO and Chief Diversity Officer Board members to discuss DEIB Acceleration.  Date and time coming soon.

The group suggested these additional research needs:

• Retaining mid-career employees / hires
• More on strategic workforce planning – (Perhaps even a guidebook that walks through 7-step process with WR material woven in?)
• Spans of control and manager layers -- what do HPOs look like?
• OD/OE
• AI guidebook or study? (Kevin Oakes indicated that this is very coming soon.)
• L&D modalities -- what are used most? Why?
• Trends in turnover, benchmarks

At the conclusion of the meeting, the group was asked for feedback.  They were very positive about the experience; but did offer some suggestions:

• Think seriously about not mixing virtual and in-person attendance.
• Perhaps more time in discussion of fewer agenda items.
• More time for small group report-backs.
• More member presentations.
• Consider bringing back the opening round table sharing session, where people share their current top priorities and challenges