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Shaping the Future: Why Start a Talent Development Program?

 

In This Chapter

• The relationship between a learning culture and talent development

• How a talent development program affects an organization and employees

• Examples of the value of a talent development program and a learning culture

• Ideas to get a head start on implementing a talent development program

Talent development efforts are valuable to every organization. Continuous development brings benefits to employees and the organization. Employees are more successful with new responsibilities and have an increase in job satisfaction. Organizations may experience increased safety, reduced turnover, and increased productivity. Starting a talent development program takes a great deal of work, but the payoff is monumental. Talent development needs to be a priority.

The Rationale to Initiate a Talent Development Effort

We are living in times that are both stimulating and scary. It’s still the same story: global expansion, lightning-fast technology changes, disruptive competition, unengaged employees, artificial intelligence. How can a talent development program create more excitement and less fear?

Certainly, you’ve heard it all many times. The world is changing rapidly, often described as being volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). This has a huge impact on your organization, but you can help to manage that with a well-designed talent development program.

Benefits to Your Organization

First and foremost, implementing a talent development program benefits your organization by:

• helping it reach its goals

• developing employees who are more productive and help to improve the bottom line

• increasing retention and reducing attrition

• enhancing learning agility to more swiftly respond to market demands

• heightening the ability to anticipate and respond effectively to change

• increasing innovation

• increasing customer satisfaction

• decreasing costs, rework, and time to market

• increasing market share

• keeping talent development aligned to organizational strategies.

Companies that invest in talent development experience numerous improvements, such as improved retention and communication (Joo 2010), and as unlikely as it may seem, investing in developing employees and working toward a learning culture can even enhance organizational innovation (Mallon 2010).

Benefits to Employees

Equally important is that implementing a talent development program benefits employees by:

• creating informed employees who are more aware of recent organizational changes and what is happening in the world

• enhancing employee knowledge and skills

• driving job satisfaction

• leading to a learning culture where all employees are motivated to acquire skills and knowledge

• improving the match between an employee and a job

• increasing morale, commitment, and engagement.

Notice that some benefits, such as improving the match of an employee and a job, may actually aid both the organization and employees. Great! Think of it as a double bonus. But can training really affect results? Ralph Alvarez, former president and chief operating officer for McDonald’s Corporation, had this to say during an ATD interview:

Helping employees shape the future direction of their careers is one of the most important managerial roles, yet this valuable task is often ignored or handled inconsistently or as an afterthought.

You’ve likely heard reports that Millennials move from one job to another more often than other generations. A 2016 Gallup report, How Millennials Want to Work and Live, revealed that 21 percent of Millennials changed jobs within the past year—more than three times the number of non-Millennials who did the same. Gallup estimates that Millennial turnover costs the U.S. economy $30.5 billion annually. Why do they leave? The Gallup report makes two critical points:

• “Opportunities to learn and grow at work are highly important to Millennials when seeking out new jobs or deciding to stay in current ones.”

• “Millennials don’t want bosses—they want coaches…. Millennials care about having managers who can coach them, who value them as both people and employees, and who help them understand and build their strengths.”

These are clearly related to ensuring the existence of a meaningful talent development program. Managers who take a personal interest in employees and their development build loyalty, and loyalty increases productivity. Talented employees want to be appreciated, advance, and gain skills to be more valuable to their organizations. Coaching, training, mentoring, and all their variations are paths to skill development. But it starts with the organization and its managers.

Why Advocate a Learning Culture?

Let’s expand on the impact of learning cultures and explore why an organization would implement a talent development program. We can add to that by asking why an organization would also focus on becoming a learning culture—or moving on to the next level—why it would strive to have a high-impact learning culture?

Learning cultures and talent development fit together. A practical reason for advocating a learning culture is that it increases efficiency, productivity, and profit. It also seems to improve the employee mindset by helping employees develop a sense of ownership and accountability, which increases employee satisfaction and decreases turnover. Organizations with a learning culture are even more successful at implementing change and understanding how employees adapt to change.

Do data exist to support a strong learning culture? Studies by Bersin and associates demonstrate that organizations with a strong learning foundation in place tend to significantly outperform their peers in several areas. Based on the research, there are many financial, operational, and employee-satisfaction reasons why aiming to have a high-impact learning culture may be valuable to your organization. By strengthening its learning culture, an organization can compete more effectively and boost employee engagement; for example, high-impact learning cultures:

• are 32 percent more likely to be the first to market

• have 37 percent greater employee productivity

• have a 34 percent better response to customer needs

• have a 26 percent greater ability to deliver quality products

• are 58 percent more likely to have skills to meet future demands

• are 17 percent more likely to be a market-share leader

• are seven times more likely to manage performance problems

• are 10 times more likely to identify and develop leaders

• are two times more likely to meet or exceed financial targets (Mallon 2010; Garr and Atamanik 2015).

A 2014 whitepaper published by Oracle describes seven steps you can take to implement a high-impact learning culture:

1. Integrate learning with talent management in support of capability development.

2. Encourage leaders and management to take ownership of the learning culture.

3. Make learning worthwhile and interesting. Prove its value.

4. Encourage employees to take personal responsibility for learning. Demonstrate the organization’s commitment to development, starting during the onboarding process.

5. Embed learning to maximize experiential and reflective learning, as people work on real business problems.

6. Institutionalize collaboration, communication, and knowledge sharing by incorporating incentives and opportunities into every learning and performance process.

7. Drive development through redesigned and effective performance management systems, ensuring that performance is discussed on a regular basis throughout the year.

A high-impact learning culture would seem to be the ideal—difficult to achieve, but certainly worthy of the effort. A stellar talent development program can help organizations reach their strategic imperative.

Why Isn’t Talent Development Always a Top Priority?

If developing employees is so important, why do organizations put off establishing a talent development program? If neglecting top-notch development efforts leads to turnover, why do organizations avoid revamping their old training departments and incorporating new developments? If limited employee development causes the loss of top talent, why do managers avoid their role to develop employees? Why is employee development a chronic problem, yet often ignored? Reasons often reside in three areas: lack of time, training perception, and lack of measurable return on investment. When these persist, talent development becomes an expense, instead of an investment.

Lack of Time

Probably the biggest reason talent development programs aren’t created is that there isn’t enough time. Organizations exist in turbulent times with competition coming from many directions. Even something as important as a dedicated talent development plan is often pushed to second place again and again. When Harvard Business Review asked Walmart CEO Doug McMillon about the pace of change, he explained, “Once upon a time, a company like ours might have made big strategic choices on an annual or quarterly cycle. Today strategy is daily…. As a CEO, you need to have a framework in your mind, but strategic thinking is much more fluid” (Ignatius 2017). We all tend to focus on the most recent, essential day-to-day requirement. If you’ve been asked to start a talent development program for your organization (or revamp a training department that no longer meets employees’ needs), you are in a unique place.

Training Perception

Perhaps an even greater factor is that the value of developing employees is still driven by past beliefs that employee development is grounded in a school-based approach. If you are starting a talent development program from scratch, you can create a corporate learning concept that has little to do with the traditional notion of education, schools, and teachers.

Lack of Measurable Return on Investment

Stop for a minute to take in the opening of this Harvard Business Review article:

Gosh! With an announcement like that, who wants to go any further? Fear not; there is a solution, and that’s what we will be offering as an implementation plan.

From their research, Beer and his associates uncovered six managerial and organizational barriers that prevent employees from applying what they’ve learned—no matter how motivated they are:

• unclear direction on strategy and values

• senior executives who don’t work as a team and haven’t committed to change

• top-down or laissez-faire leader styles preventing honest conversation

• lack of coordination across functions

• inadequate leader time and attention given to talent issues

• employees’ fear of informing leaders about obstacles to the organization’s effectiveness.

Each barrier is based on the organizational design or lack of senior leader involvement. You will want to take each one into consideration as you start your talent development program.

Financing a talent development program can be a challenge, and management’s attitude toward your effort is crucial. Practitioners often get pushback when they want to try something new. This is especially true if the method requires a large layout of cash that does not seem to have a clear return on investment. Let’s look at the story of Dare2Share, which should be encouraging to all of us.

Dare2Share was an innovative initiative conducted at British Telecom (BT) with the support of Accenture. The goals were to move to more informal learning, with networking and collaboration as the focus, and embed learning into the work employees do to close the gap between the two.

Employees were given flip cameras and taught how to create videos about tasks that they do on the job. They were then asked to post their videos onto a BT platform, which was similar to YouTube. No one was concerned about formality or much preparation or practice. The goal was simply to share what employees knew with one another.

Before the program was implemented, it typically took a department weeks to write a manual for how to address a new tool or process, and then employees were expected to find time to read the manual. Dare2Share eliminated the need for a manual (which was replaced with a couple short podcasts), shortened the design time (no manual to write), decreased the amount of time employees needed to learn the process, and presented an easier-to-understand method with actual visuals. Additional time was saved because no one had to deliver the same training message multiple times. Time saved is money saved, and BT made that work for them.

BT took the program one step further by allowing people to text or email the creator while watching the podcast if they had any questions or concerns. This led to more cross-functional collaboration and communication. BT certainly found a way to inculcate in the company the value of informal learning, collaboration and sharing, helping others, and how employees can contribute to the bottom line. Lack of proof of financial gain does not need to be a problem when planned well.

Get a Head Start

Are there things you can do before rolling out the talent development program that will positively influence success—sort of the “pre” roll out? Yes! Before you start designing and implementing your talent development program, instill the importance of lifelong learning, pinpoint the organizational values, and prepare for roadblocks and barriers.

Instill the Importance of Lifelong Learning

We’ve discussed creating a learning culture, but it takes three (some say seven) years to make changes in a culture permanent. Because a learning culture—or any culture—exists because of the shared values, assumptions, and beliefs of the employees, it makes sense that to change a culture, you will need to somehow change the beliefs of the people who make up that culture. A learning culture is to an organization as lifelong learning is to individuals. Even if implementing the talent development program is still a ways off, you can still begin to help individuals focus on their own lifelong learning. Help employees see that when they improve, they grow, and foster the organization’s growth too. Try these techniques:

• Talk lifelong learning. If this is a new concept, start talking about it. Write a blog post or feature someone in a newsletter who models lifelong learning. Tweet about it. Share articles that further your rationale.

• Offer opportunities. There are many ways to present learning opportunities. Get others to host a lunch and learn about their favorite topic, match employees to volunteer opportunities, start a business book club, or coordinate a self-directed learning cohort around a specific topic or work challenge.

• Support managers. Begin encouraging managers to focus on their most important job: developing their employees. Support them by sharing a career development discussion template.

• Make it a game. What elements of games and fun can you initiate? Can you assign goals? Can you create challenges and prizes? How can you get senior leaders involved? It’s not enough to communicate that lifelong learning is important. You need to embed it into the work employees do.

• Establish an intermediary mentoring program. Make it easy for everyone to have a mentor by creating an easy way for mentors and protégés to connect with one another. Provide some general guidance for the relationships—perhaps just a few rules and what mentoring looks like when done well. You may want to brush up on your mentoring skills by reading one of many great books available.

• Improve supervisors’ coaching skills. Make supervisors understand how important learning discussions and feedback are to employee growth and development. If supervisors know what skills employees want to improve and what goals they have, the supervisors will be more informed about future plans and how employees can contribute to organizational goals. If you coach supervisors who need to enhance their skills, you will be modeling how you want them to coach, while you are coaching—a metacoaching session!

• Encourage learning events. It is important that employees have time to learn on the job, but also encourage them to learn outside the organization. This includes professional conferences, association chapter meetings, virtual learning offerings, or even volunteer opportunities. Find ways to network within and outside the organization.

Pinpoint Organizational Values

You can also get a head start by determining what learning means to your organization so that you can customize your approach. What does your company value? This may include idea generation, technology, privileges, relationships, formality, what is rewarded, what is punished, having fun, leadership style, how problems are addressed, and others. Tailor your approach to the desired outcomes, based on the organizational values. If, for example, your organization values collaboration and teamwork, consider focusing on how employees can learn together. If you have independent, high-level individuals, consider a focus on self-organized learning.

Remember that one approach will not meet everyone’s needs. Create opportunities that will appeal to all styles—not just what they learn, but also various ways they can learn.

Prepare for Roadblocks and Barriers

Finally, getting a head start means preparing for what could go wrong. No matter how much you think you’ve prepared the organization, you will still run into roadblocks. Perhaps a department is experiencing cuts to its budget; facing a decrease in market share for their products or services and possible extinction; or experiencing staggering growth and can’t hire qualified employees fast enough. Layer over this the fact that you have employees from various generations who all like different learning modes. And virtual settings, which many organizations operate in today, often make instilling a learning culture even harder.

Mindsets governed by ego, fear, or complacency may be your greatest barriers. Edward Hess (2014), a professor at the University of Virginia, states that these mindsets can prevent employees from reaching their full potential. How is that possible?

• Ego is present because we all want to be perceived favorably and don’t want to lose face or look uninformed. As a result, we deny or deflect new content. Defending ourselves prevents us from being open to new information.

• Fear prevents us from learning because we want to avoid the embarrassment of failure.

• Complacency occurs because we may take the easy way out, resisting new challenges and ideas (Hess 2014).

Recognizing these mindset barriers helps us understand our learners and plan how we can address them.

Other organizational aspects may hinder your plans to implement a learning culture. The best way I’ve found to identify and plan for potential roadblocks is to form a team, identify a list of possibilities, and brainstorm ways to address them, should they become an issue.

Early Efforts to Ensure a Successful Impact

The better prepared you are before you “go live,” the stronger the impact your talent development program will have. It is important that you open the lines of communication with senior leaders and managers, as well as prepare your talent development staff for what is coming.

Communicate With Leaders and Managers

Begin communicating with managers early—especially if you are starting a talent development program from nothing. You’ll need their support—both in time and budget—and the best way to achieve that is to involve them early, attain buy-in, and address any goals they have for the program. Be sure to tell them about the need for supervisors to develop their people and how the talent development program will support that.

Avoid waiting until you have all the answers. Find out what managers need and begin thinking about how you can translate their needs into your talent development efforts. What changes do they want to make, and how can those changes be measured? To ensure that leaders and managers help build a productive learning program, you need to begin the discussion about how you will evaluate the results. It is far easier to sustain a measured, successful effort than one that is successful but has no data to support the success.

Prepare Talent Development Professionals

Successful talent development programs are not based on last century’s training model. You need to prepare your staff for the changes ahead. Share with them that everyone’s role is changing and that they will begin providing more services than in the past. They will do as much coaching as training, and will need to be more focused on business needs, leading the development strategy, and shoring up their performance consulting skills. Staying current with today’s trends and determining how those trends will affect the organizational strategy is crucial. They need to be fluent in 70-20-10, with an expanded role in the first 90 percent. In short, trainers are no longer order-takers, but development leaders in a consultative role.

Stay Current With Talent Development Trends

Identify talent development trends by first examining workplace trends. For example, a 2014 CEB survey of almost 34,000 employees at all levels reported nearly 40 percent of total work time was spent learning (2014). Forty-one percent of today’s U.S. workforce are contingent and not actual employees—but still require knowledge as if they are employees (Schwartz et al. 2017). Advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning are creating a new age of automation as machines begin to match or outperform human performance, including cognitive performance. Some estimate that half of all current jobs could be automated by 2055 (Bughin, Manyika, and Woetzel 2017).

There is also a greater reliance on supervisors to develop their employees. However, even when this actually occurs, only 33 percent of employees agree or strongly agree that the available learning options meet their development needs (CEB 2014). Today’s workers are overwhelmed, distracted, and impatient. They expect to learn ondemand and collaboratively, requiring the flexibility to learn when and where they need it.

What does this suggest for the talent development profession? We need to focus on the 70 percent (on-the-job learning) and the 20 percent (learning that comes from others). We need to be prepared to offer learning that:

• is short, targeted, and relevant

• can be used in the continuous work and learn cycle

• can be acquired anywhere

• is available ondemand and continuously

• is curated

• can be used at the learner’s pace

• learners can self-organize

• is useful in a collaborative setting

• is experiential in nature, no matter what the methodology

• increases employees’ awareness of how to learn, not just what to learn.

Stay current by subscribing to professional journals, attending industry conferences, networking with other professionals, following blogs, and keeping your personal IDP up-to-date.

Ready to Move Forward?

Remember, your talent development program doesn’t have to be elaborate. But it does have to be the best it can be for your employees and your organization. It has to be clear, and it has to have support—but it needs more than support. A talent development program needs to have the dedicated advocacy of the organization and its managers. When managers champion employee development and take the time to guide their employees to gain new skills and knowledge, the payoff will be substantial.

Chapter 3 provides a road map for how to start your talent development program—a plan for how to link development to the organization’s strategic outcomes and begin thinking about the design.

Questions to Explore

• How well does your organization support a learning culture?

• What’s the best approach to explain the benefits of talent development to anyone in your organization?

• What’s the strongest argument for encouraging your organization to develop a high-impact learning culture?

• What are the biggest barriers to talent development in your organization? What can you do about it?

• What role do you see the talent development program taking in helping employees shape the future of their careers?

• Since employees are already overwhelmed, should you start to limit learning opportunities to those that are most relevant?

• How can you encourage employees to take ownership of their own learning?

• How can you get a head start in your organization’s talent development efforts? What will ensure success?

• What does your organization expect of you?

• What’s the most out-of-the-box idea you can think of that you would like to include in your talent development program?

 

Tools for Support

What’s in the Way of Your Learning Culture?

Use this tool to consider why your organization may have a difficult time developing a learning culture. Encourage your team to determine what you can do to overcome current barriers.

Lack of Leadership Support

  Our leaders don’t know the advantages of a learning culture

  Our leaders are passive or controlling

  Investment in learning isn’t valued by managers

  The organization resists change and growth

  Leaders do not want to hear about mistakes or problems

Lack of Team Environment

  Personal accomplishment is rewarded over team accomplishment

  Individual expertise is valued more than teamwork

  Teamwork is viewed as a means to an end—not something to be valued

  We use a blame, not gain vocabulary

  We lack a knowledge-sharing method

Lack of Growth Motivation

  “That’s not my job” deflects growth opportunities

  Mentors and coaches are not valued

  Learners are often prevented from transferring learning

  Employees are not given time to learn

  Engagement is low, and empowerment is rare

Short-Term Focus

  Putting out fires is valued over a future strategy

  We do not have a clear vision

  Problem employees are sent to HR for training

  Learning on the job is discouraged

  IDPs are not used

Opportunities to Improve:

Suggested Actions:

Career Development Discussion Guide

Share this tool with your organization’s supervisors to help them talk with their employees. The discussions will help supervisors learn more about what each employee wants to do, what excites each of them, and what each employee wants to do in the future.

Current Goals

• What is your greatest strength?

• What do you like best about your job?

• What skill would you like to improve?

• How do you learn best

Future Goals

• Where do you see yourself in three years? Ten years?

• What part of your job would you like to do less of in the future?

• What job or role most excites you?

• What is your ultimate career goal?

Support

• How can I help you in your current job?

• How can I help you achieve your career goals?

• What development do you think would help you achieve your goals?

• Who else can help you achieve your goals?

References and Additional Resources

ATD (Association for Talent Development). 2016. Building a Culture of Learning: The Foundation of a Successful Organization. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

Beer, M., M. Finnström, and D. Schrader. 2016. “Why Leadership Training Fails—and What to Do About It.” Harvard Business Review, October.

Bingham, T., and P. Galagan. 2007. A View From the Top: How CEOs Link Learning to Corporate Strategy. (From the At C Level series.) Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.

Bughin, J., J. Manyika, and J. Woetzel. 2017. “A Future That Works: Automation, Employment, and Productivity.” Brussels: McKinsey Global Institute.

CEB Research. 2014. “Building a Productive Learning Culture.” Arlington, VA: CEB Learning and Development.

Fortune. 2015. “100 Best Companies to Work For.” Fortune, March, 149.

Gallup. 2016. “How Millennials Want to Work and Live.” Washington, DC: Gallup.

Garr, S., and C. Atamanik. 2015. High-Impact Talent Management: The New Talent Management Maturity Model. Oakland, CA: Bersin by Deloitte.

Guerra-López, I., and K. Hicks. 2015. “Turning Trainers Into Strategic Business Partners.” TD at Work. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

Hess, E. 2014. Learn or Die: Using Science to Build a Leading-Edge Learning Organization. New York: Columbia Business School Publishing.

Hosmer, D. 2015. “The Manager’s Guide to Employee Development.” TD at Work. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

Ignatius, A. 2017. “We Need People to Lean Into the Future.” Harvard Business Review, March-April.

Joo, B.K. 2010. “Organizational Commitment for Knowledge Workers: The Roles of Perceived Organizational Learning Culture, Leader-Member Exchange Quality, and Turnover Intention.” Human Resource Development Quarterly 21(1): 69-85.

Labin, J. 2017. Mentoring Programs That Work. Alexandria, VA: ATD Press.

Mallon, D. 2010. High-Impact Learning Culture: The 40 Best Practices for Creating an Empowered Enterprise. Oakland, CA: Bersin & Associates.

Oracle. 2014. “Seven Steps to Building a High-Impact Learning Culture.” Oracle: Human Capital Management. www.oracle.com/us/chro-docs/june-2013-chro-deck4-1961622.pdf.

Schwartz, J., L. Collins, H. Stockton, D. Wagner, B. Walsh. 2017. Rewriting the Rules for the Digital Age: 2017 Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends. Westlake, TX: Deloitte University Press.

Scott, B., and B.K. Barnes. 2011. Consulting on the Inside: A Practical Guide for Internal Consultants. Alexandria, VA: ASTD Press.