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Supercharging Your Learning Agenda Through Purpose, Culture, and Brand

Andrew Kilshaw

As learning leaders and practitioners, we often focus first and foremost on what our employees need to learn to build organizational capability that will deliver future success. Some of this focus is on generally timeless capabilities, such as supporting managerial and leadership transitions by applying current management and leadership theory. Other areas may be influenced by external political, socioeconomic, or technological forces that seek to disrupt business models—for example, adopting agile practices or leveraging AI through the value chain. Alternatively, it could include socioeconomic trends such as how to manage multiple generations in the workplace, or the emergence of the gig economy.

However, in addition to what we provide the learner, I would assert that the effectiveness of a company’s learning agenda is equally influenced by how you design and deploy it.

Like any good company that competes for consumers’ share of wallet knows, having great products is not enough. Increasingly, consumers and employees must feel a personal connection with a brand’s or organization’s purpose. We have more companies than ever with which we can choose to have relationships, and less discretionary time to do so, given today’s fast-moving world.

A recent study by the Lovell Corporation (2017) of more than 2,000 respondents found that “for the first time, we see [Generation Z] prioritizing purpose in their work.” It lists the top five work value priorities as:

1. interesting work

2. organization you’re proud of

3. work you’re passionate about

4. having the information to do your job

5. continuous learning.

Similarly important to clarity of organizational purpose, learning leaders can provide great value and build strategic learning organizations by stating their learning purpose: why learning is important for your employees and your organization. This provides a guiding star to define two further important aspects of learning that need to be aligned to the unique nature of your company: your learning culture and your learning brand.

The Evolving Role of the CLO

In the world of management science, there is a sizable body of work that highlights the importance of aligning your corporate culture with your purpose-led brand. After all, it is employees who, regardless of their function, ultimately deliver value for your customers or consumers. If employees are aligned both on what needs to be delivered (purpose and brand) and how they act individually and collectively (culture) in service of customers’ needs, you have a positive recipe for a high-performing organization, especially in increasingly complex and evolving organizational structures.

Firstly, do you have a learning culture? Is your pedagogical philosophy tailored to the corporate culture and how people work? Secondly, do you have a learning brand that makes your learning portfolio accessible, consumable, and aligned with your company’s brand and purpose?

During my time at IMD, one of the world’s leading executive education providers, I was fortunate to deliver tailored executive education programs in partnership with several members of the Global Fortune 1000 list of companies. They spanned multiple industries, geographies, and corporate cultures, and I soon learned that each had uniquely tailored approaches to creating the best possible learning environment. The most effective companies focused on defining clear learning objectives, as you would expect. However, they equally ensured that pedagogy, learning branding, and accessibility worked best for their company’s unique environment, and even acted as a mechanism to reinforce the corporate culture they aspired to.

Subsequently, I was able to study this in depth during my time as chief learning officer at two distinctly different companies (BlackRock and Nike), which have little in common other than being leaders in their respective industries. My team and I focused equally on balancing both building organizational capabilities and tailoring our design and deployment approach to the company culture. It’s only when you do both well that you create what we all aspire to: a pull environment for employee development.

This approach is an evolution from the traditional view of a learning leader, who has a narrow but deep focus on employee development. It adds several dimensions that are more akin to the broader skill set of an enterprise general manager. Indeed, certain companies (such as Microsoft) have long adopted this thinking, referring to chief learning officers as GMs.

Through the rest of this chapter we will explore these concepts and their implications to ensure that purpose, culture, and brand are critical pillars of your organization’s strategic plan for learning.

Defining the Purpose of the Learning Organization

In a world of greater transparency, net promoter scores, and democratized digital access to information, consumers and employees increasingly care deeply about a company’s purpose. People are now accustomed to ask: Does it align with my priorities, my aspirations, and my personal values? Why should I choose, in a world of increasingly abundant options, to spend my money, align my personal brand, and dedicate my time to a relationship with this company?

Compounding this aspect of company existence, we live in a workplace with increased complexity, speed, and communications channels (or distractions). This creates more competition for your employees’ “share of mind” and “share of calendar.” Busier than ever, they need to understand why learning is of benefit to them personally, and how it is supportive of the company’s success.

As Simon Sinek said in his TED talk, “Start with why.” Specifically, you should assess why learning is important for your employees, your customers, and ultimately the company’s success? By creating a learning purpose statement for your organization, you answer these questions and provide clear direction and parameters for your learning efforts, and subsequently how investments of both time and money are made.

A learning purpose statement might match a company’s goals—for example, how a learner mindset versus a know-it-all mindset can help the radical transformation of companies facing disruption. Alternatively, you can take a very different angle. For example, at NikeU (Nike’s corporate university) the U stood not for university but “Unleashing your potential,” providing a distinctly personal and aspirational take on why learning is important within a competitive environment.

This elevator pitch also provides guidance to executives and the learning organization on why you exist, and importantly what is not your purpose. Such statements may be value-creating in nature, outlining the focus of future capabilities that will be developed to allow individuals and the company to grow. Purpose statements also may focus on reducing learning friction for the organization—NikeU was billed as “Nike’s single destination for learning”—by making it easier for learners to find, access, and engage in employee development through personalized offerings.

Ultimately, organizations are made up of people, so learning leaders need to appeal to the “What’s in it for me?” for employees on a personal level. This is especially important in a talent-constrained world with more career options and lower company tenure than ever. Employee development has long been a leading driver of engagement and retention, and it is more critical than ever—recent Gallup research (Rigoni and Nelson 2016) states that only 29 percent of Millennials are engaged with their jobs. Additionally, only 27 percent believe in their companies’ values.

Creating a learning purpose statement engages employees and aligns and educates them on the personal and organizational benefits of being a continuous learner and the outcomes they should expect as a result. Executing this purpose in a manner that intentionally reinforces your culture, in practice and by example, should help increase both engagement and belief in a company’s value.

What Is Organizational Culture?

The concept of what defines, and how to describe, organizational culture is its own voluminous body of work. For the purposes of this chapter I will define organizational culture as the total sum of the values, customs, traditions, and meanings that make an organization unique.

Often, a starting place to look for cultural descriptors is a company’s set of values. This only gives a starting point however, as the following should also be considered:

»  Do the organization’s values, as stated, truly reflect the real customs and traditions that manifest day to day? Do they accurately describe the behavior of the vast majority of employees, or are they more aspirational? Enron’s 2000 annual report listed communication, respect, integrity, and excellence. However, the company was regarded as a competitive, talent-focused culture where “stars” were lavishly rewarded, often without supervision.

»  Are the corporate values uniform across the organization, or do they vary (significantly) by function or business unit? This can be tested by looking at the operational interdependence within the organization. Generally, more centralized organizations will exhibit more cultural homogeneity, versus more decentralized portfolio companies.

»  For global organizations, to what extent does national culture outweigh corporate culture? For companies that have organically expanded geographically from a country headquarters, the prevailing culture may well be defined by that of the company’s home nation. In companies formed from cross-border acquisitions, there may be more cultural dissonance reflecting the diversity of the merged organizations’ native countries.

In addition to an organization’s values, there are often other stated cultural artifacts, such as leadership principles, or expected behaviors that may be part of the “how” component of performance assessments.

How one measures culture may even be aligned with the culture itself. For example, Google, whose mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” is culturally highly data-driven. Google inherently takes a quantitative and empirical approach to defining an organization’s characteristics as exemplified by Project Oxygen (“what makes a great manager?”) and Project Aristotle (“what makes a team effective?”).

On the other hand, Nike is well recognized for its storytelling, both as a brand to consumers and internally as a way of communicating purpose and behavior. In this instance, one might more effectively define culture by interviewing a representative cross-section of employees to solicit stories of how things get done. Alternatively, you could use metaphor, for example by asking, “If Nike were a person, how would you describe it?”

For your organization’s culture, you might consider the Hagberg Consulting Group’s five questions that get at the essence of a company’s real culture (Inc. Staff n.d.):

»  What 10 words would you use to describe your company?

»  Around here, what’s really important?

»  Around here, who gets promoted?

»  Around here, what behaviors get rewarded?

»  Around here, who fits in and who doesn’t?

To scale the qualitative collection process there are a large number of ever-changing tools that you can leverage (try googling “audience response software”). Many offer the ability to identify and distill trends, which can be presented through visuals such as word clouds.

Ultimately, a whole-brain approach that builds on and tests stated artifacts, through quantitative and qualitative engagement of employees, will give your team the most accurate description. Once you have an accurate understanding of your culture—in its current and potentially aspirational state (if different)—you can begin assessing the implications for your learning culture.

Creating a Supporting Learning Culture

Once you’ve developed a comprehensive understanding of your corporate culture, you can translate this to several aspects of your learning strategy.

This has two benefits. Firstly, you are making learning more consumable for employees, by making the act of learning in your company an aligned extension of “how we do things here.” Secondly, it becomes a reinforcing mechanism of how workers are expected to behave, individually and collectively, whether it’s “this is how we manage or lead here,” or “this is how we work as Agile teams here.” The required organizational capabilities may evolve, but there will be familiarity and reinforcement in the how.

For the sake of simplification, we will look at pedagogy through the lens of the 70-20-10 framework, which still underpins much learning design and is based on ongoing research at the Center for Creative Leadership, building on their original Lessons of Experience study (McCall, Lombardo, and Morrison 1988).

Applying Culture to Learning Through Experience (70 Percent)

The leading driver of leadership development is cited as providing challenging assignments through on-the-job experiences and challenges. Increasingly, this is true also for developing all employees, and is as much about macro experiences as it is about microlearning in the flow of work.

As organizational leaders and managers create intentional learning experiences for employees, they should consider cultural guideposts. Table 3-1 looks at contrasting dimensions of culture and how that might influence learning experience design.

Applying Culture to Learning From Others (20 Percent)

Developmental relationships play a key part in developing an organization’s employees, particularly its leaders, with key relationships being with managers, between peers, and formal mentors and coaches. Cultural preferences may steer your focus on which relationships are most successful. Table 3-2 presents the spectrum of cultural influence in learning from others.

Applying Culture to Formal Learning (10 Percent)

While formal learning from courses forms the smallest component of a blended learning approach, it is still an important part of knowledge transfer, which can then be applied through practice and feedback from others. Given the proliferation of learning technologies, there are a multitude of modes of formal learning that can be tailored according to the organization’s predominant culture (Table 3-3).

As we consider learning cultures, which are collective in nature, we should make sure we do not confuse this with learning styles, which are more individualistic. Learning styles are competing theories that propose differing preferences in consumption of learning.

One popular theory, known as the VARK model, was developed by Neil Fleming after his observations of classroom effectiveness while working as a school inspector in New Zealand. Fleming proposed that learners have preferred learning experiences. VARK stands for Visual, Auditory, Reading, and Kinesthetic learning styles, and Fleming devised a questionnaire to help individuals identify their personal preferences. It should be noted that multiple studies have debunked the correlation between learning styles and effectiveness. In the same manner, it should be noted that while organizational cultures are collectively predominant but do not make us clones on an individual level, the same can be said around learning culture.

This thinking equally applies to organizational learning. While there may be predominant types of learning programs that work more effectively across the preceding categories, strategic learning organizations should provide enough options and flexibility so learners can customize most effectively to their learning preferences.

Building a Learning Brand

Once you have defined your learning purpose and culture, you can then build out an aligned curriculum and set of learning assets using learning techniques that reinforce “how we do things here.”

However, we know that companies cannot rely only on a great consumer-centered product portfolio alone. It takes clear brand messaging that resonates with consumers, and a go-to-market distribution strategy that gets great products in their hands to fully execute a strategy. This is no different for a learning function that is vying against the multiple competing priorities of employees.

During my transition from BlackRock to Nike in 2010, I moved between two very different industries, business models, and brands. As an avid consumer of Nike, who was very aware of their storytelling success, that wasn’t a surprise to me. What was a surprise, however, was the extent to which leaders similarly used the power of storytelling, visual aesthetic, and a message of unlimited potential with employees.

Within the first three months of being at Nike, as someone with limited prior marketing exposure, I realized I was out of my depth. Fortunately, to quote one of Nike’s founders, Bill Bowerman, “Everything you need is already inside.” In this case, we had access to some of the best marketing talent in the world, and we invited a marketing executive to address the leadership team on how to build a brand for our learning organization. That began a journey, which saw us partner with an external brand agency to define how we wanted to show up, what language we would use, and how we’d communicate our purpose to executives and, most importantly, to employees.

What was born was NikeU, an aspirational learning brand. It was the basis for how we talked about learning. At BlackRock, the U would have indeed stood for university, given the high number of academics with post-graduate degrees. At Nike it stood for Us, YoU, Unleashing our collective potential, Unlimited opportunities, Unconventional success.

Knowing that visual aesthetic was important, we developed the visual brand to serve as the basis for all our materials. That included a custom-built LMS, using Moodle and Drupal, the only platforms at the time that would support the design aesthetic and media capability we needed to distribute learning globally. You can see the trailer for NikeU on YouTube.

Combining Your Brand With a Go-to-Market Strategy

Both a great product set and a brand need one final step to reach the consumer: a comprehensive and tailored go-to-market strategy.

This is not a typical capability within a learning function. At Nike we believed this to be a highly important one, so we created a role whose sole purpose was about go-to-market—creating channels to get learning in the hands of employees.

Using a well-known sales and marketing approach—the AIDAR model (Figure 3-1)—we mapped activities that we could take to drive learner engagement using a branded approach that would communicate well with a Nike employee. Table 3-4 summarizes some of these activities.

Leveraging Other Marketing Best Practices

Lastly, when you empathize with the learner and design for service on their terms, you realize there are two key innovations that make their lives easier and remove friction from the learning process: personalization and feedback.

Personalization

Great learning organizations are strategic and purposeful in creation of content, but in my opinion they should be agnostic on distribution of content. In today’s world, it can be even easier to learn on-demand from Google, Wikipedia, podcasts, and TED talks than it is to access internally created content.

One key way of removing friction for the consumer is to be a master aggregator—or what we at Nike called “being the Amazon.com of learning.” This means that from the perspective of the learner, you are agnostic on the origins of content. You just need to believe it’s reputable, credible, and relevant to the skills gap you’re trying to close. We sought to harvest and merchandize learning content into three buckets:

»  Must-own content: This is the content we believed important to own the design, development, and delivery of. For Amazon, that’s Alexa devices or the Kindle. Those are critical to their operations. At Nike that was management and leadership development and onboarding; these aren’t things that necessarily should be decentralized, as they affect to the business at its core, and align to principles and competencies that HR generally owns.

»  Functional content: This is content where we bring our expertise in instructional design and apply it to functional experts’ knowledge (and budget). For Amazon, this is where they apply their online e-commerce expertise to electronics, books, and other categories. They aren’t writing or publishing books, but they are expert retailers of these products. The learning team at Nike wasn’t full of experts in merchandising or sales, but we knew how to create great learning programs on that content.

»  Commodity content: This is typically off-the-shelf, plug-and-play content, such as Excel training, or a quick course on how to use the expense system. For Amazon, it’s their marketplace, where they provide a platform for third-party resellers to reach consumers.

Ultimately, we wanted to be the one-stop shop for learning at Nike, irrespective of the origin of the content. As Amazon knows, consumers don’t care—they just want to find what they need and get it easily. Employees want the same frictionless experience in accessing learning, and creating sortable databases that filter via tagged content (such as location, topic, learning level, and so on) is a smart way of doing this.

With the addition of machine learning and AI, it’s getting easier to do this. High-growth learning providers, such as Degreed and OpenSesame, are creating a new category in learning content aggregation: delivering learner-right assortments of content that are personalized to you, how you need it, when you need it. Learn to curate content as well as create.

Feedback

In times of increased transparency and first-party generated public feedback, I believe the same should apply to learning. For example, when booking accommodation, you know what people thought of an Airbnb by the reviews prior guests have left. You know what your Uber driver is known for before you get in their car.

Gone are the days of feedback paper questionnaires at the end of a class session. The learner journey with any interaction with a learning product should end in open, public, and frank feedback that other learners can take into account when choosing their learning.

At Nike, we observed three benefits of this approach.

»  Learners are more credible than the learning function when talking to their peers about the applicability of the development experience. They can convey the value of the learning in language that better resonates with their colleagues, helping learners choose the right content.

»  It creates a sense of trust with employees, in both the transparency of the learning function and its desire to learn from feedback and strive for improved quality of content and delivery.

»  It creates true accountability to act on behalf of the learning team. As an Airbnb host, I want as many five-star reviews as possible, and I listen closely to feedback to ensure I am giving a service that our guests want. The same is true for those who own the design and delivery of learning solutions for employees. While the transition to this level of transparency can be hard and at times painful if feedback isn’t complimentary, it clears the path between instructor and learner to truly listen, learn, and respond to the needs of employees.

This feedback process creates sources of fantastic data that allow you to evolve learning portfolios, pedagogical approaches, and even logistical improvements. It creates an opportunity for greater learner empathy, by which you can improve your offerings.

Closing Advice

In opening this chapter, I suggested that the modern role of the CLO and their team is less that of solely being a learning function expert, and more akin to being an enterprise general manager. In addition to focusing on the what of learning, learning leaders need to pay attention to the how—defining the purpose of learning, creating a learning culture, and building a learning brand.

The good news, as evidenced by some of my examples, is it’s increasingly possible for learning leaders to master the primary skill sets they need to be learning GMs, whether it’s looking to those who’ve mastered technology in creating personalized assortments of products, such as Amazon or Degreed, or leveraging your relationship with your CMO. In the words of Interbrand, “There has never been a better opportunity for HR and marketing to become the best of friends.”

Lastly, by learning and mastering a broader set of skills, it allows us to have greater appreciation of, and increased credibility with those we all seek to serve: the organization’s employee population.