There are new players at the directors' tables of many businesses. More companies are adding chief learning officers (CLOs) to the executive suite of CEO, CFO, CTO, COO and other top managers who determine company strategy.
Can one player make much of an impact? You bet.
 LEITA COWART/Special |
| Larry Mohl (from left), chief learning officer at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, talks with registered nurse Theresa McClure and chief nurse Joyce Ramsey-Coleman in the emergency department at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite. |
 LEITA COWART/Special |
| Bill Byron Concevitch, chief learning officer at Verint Systems Inc., says that continued learning for employees is important to make sure a company stays competitive. |
"Bringing learning to the table is one of the biggest strategic advantages a company can have today," said Bill Byron Concevitch, chief learning officer for Verint Systems Inc., a global leader in work force optimization, which provides software solutions to help businesses and government agencies make sense of data. "If learning isn't woven into the fabric of the culture, a business will struggle to be successful and might not even know why it's not."
Concevitch sees his job as "giving the right people the right skills, at the right time, [to prepare them for] where they need to be."
Learning efforts that are tied directly to a business's objectives and tailored to its needs are a far cry from the old model of training and development.
"Training managers used to measure their success by the number of programs and people who took them. That doesn't cut it today when products, customer demands and markets all change quickly," Concevitch said. "When I sit in on meetings with senior management, the CEO doesn't care about training events or number of classes. He wants to know how learning impacted revenue and profitability."
Concevitch retooled the way Witness Actionable Solutions, one of Verint's divisions, trained its sales force. Formerly, new hires were brought to the corporate office for two weeks of training. They left with a lot of product information but few ideas about how to work with customers in the field.
Concevitch put product and company information online. Once new hires completed the learning modules, he brought them to headquarters for three days to test-drive the learning.
"We presented them with real-life scenarios, with senior executives playing the role of customers. The salespeople had to come up with presentations that solved customers' problems and sold the product," Concevitch said.
The salespeople were better-equipped for the field, and the company cut the ramp-up time for sales training by 40 percent.
A good CLO has to have business acumen as well as training experience, and he or she has to be an evangelist about how learning supports the business, Concevitch said.
When he attends high-level meetings and hears the issues of the company, Concevitch tries to find learning solutions. A Smart Travel class for executives has helped curb travel expenses. A virtual leadership course teaches international team leaders how to be effective when they see their team members only once a year but must make progress on projects weekly.
He's working on delivering pinpointed technical and product information to employees by podcast so that they can review essential information before meeting clients.
Concevitch believes that learning must be provided in bite-sized pieces that can be used as needed.
"When learning opportunities are there, employees feel valued. They're more confident and successful," he said.
He considers that a huge return on investment and a strategic business advantage.
"Another company could copy our products or our processes with customers, but what they can't copy is our people," he said. "If we have people with better skills to do their jobs, customers will stay with us or come to us."
Employee retention
When Diana Oreck, vice president of global learning and the leadership center at the Ritz-Carlton (a title equivalent to CLO), wants to show senior managers how learning affects the business, she presents one PowerPoint slide: the one about employee retention.
"We know, and it's been statistically proven, that when we continuously provide learning opportunities to our employees, the retention figures are higher," she said. "In the hotel industry, the average employee turnover rate is 85 percent. Our rate runs in the low 20s. We're talking millions of dollars in savings."
The Ritz-Carlton was named the No. 1 company by Training magazine in its Training Top 125 2007 survey, which selects the best global companies for work force training and development.
Known for service, the hotelier last year implemented 12 service values in addition to its existing mission, philosophy and standards.
"We told our people that the outcome is a happy guest and that — as long as what they are doing is moral, legal and ethical — we don't care how they get there," Oreck said.
The 12 service values empower employees to improve on the Ritz-Carlton experience and to see how the employees contribute directly to the company's success.
"We select talented people, and then we trust them to 'keep their radar on and their antennae up.' It's easy to give service when asked for it; [it's] much harder to anticipate needs," Oreck said.
Launched in 2000, the Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center provides learning not only to all staff levels of the company but also to companies in other industries.
"We are extremely proud of our culture and happy to share the systems behind the smiles," Oreck said.
Shifting the company's customer-service training to a less scripted, more relaxed approach is part of Oreck's role.
"I set global learning strategy worldwide. It must translate across 44 nationalities and 17 languages," she said. Learning managers at the individual hotels design training activities to achieve the overall strategies.
Assessment of outcomes also comes with the job. "I have to look at our programs to see where the gaps are and where new learning is needed," she said.
For example, Oreck conducts pre-assessment and post-assessment tests on midlevel managers who take a financial acumen class.
"We run on data. Learning has to be linked to the strategic objectives of the business to be effective," Oreck said. "Corporate training has come light-years from when we were operating in a void, giving classes in back rooms. I think in the next five years, you'll see the CLO position really come into its own."
Putting learning to work
Larry Mohl saw the the role begin to emerge when he was working at Motorola University, the company's training arm. Founded by William Wiggenhorn in the early 1980s, it was a pioneer in corporate training and development.
"I don't think the CLO title even existed then, but Motorola understood that engineering knowledge was moving so fast that all of its engineers would be obsolete in three to five years, unless [the company] kept training them," said Mohl, CLO at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta.
Because that lesson applies to most employees in today's fast-moving, knowledge-based economy, more companies have hired chief learning officers.
Mohl's job is to identify and develop the talent needed for the organization. He enjoys the challenge of wearing many hats.
He must think as a visionary strategist when it comes to developing Children's Healthcare of Atlanta's current and future leaders.
The hospital system is expanding its facilities and increasing its staff from 5,600 to 8,000 employees in the next three years.
He's a tactician when he implements programs to support that growth.
"A good CLO is part rudder in a storm, part cheerleader, part psychologist and part businessperson. He's also a listening post, because his role touches all levels of the organization," Mohl said.
"A learning culture can mean a lot of things, and especially in a hospital system."
He has focused on three areas: leadership development; technology training, as the hospital transitions to an electronic medical-records system; and quality improvements in delivering patient care.
Mohl established a Children's Healthcare of Atlanta Center for Leadership, which brings together high-level managers from the system's nursing, administrative and physician sectors.
Over a year, chosen managers participate in workshops and share best practices and ideas from their departments' perspectives. They develop projects that address challenges at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. Participants form new relationships and gain new perspectives.
"What makes the [leadership] center such a powerful tool is that everyone is taking what they are learning and applying it to real issues that will make a real difference here in the short term and long term," Mohl said.
The leadership program has exceeded his expectations.
"People have told me that the class was transformational in how they now see themselves and what they can do. I know we're helping people and the organization," Mohl said.
He's proud that his learning team has moved from a "training mind-set to an impact mind-set" and that learning efforts have earned the respect of the organization's leaders.
"The value that a CLO can bring to a business is to provide structure where there was no structure before [and] to make sure that the training strategy is highly aligned with the corporate goals," Mohl said. "Leadership skills can be learned informally, but a structured program can provide learning that is repeatable and accelerated, while it transmits the culture of the organization."
Mohl expects the CLO role to continue growing in the workplace as companies seek ways to better manage their human capital.