Onboarding

Onboarding is close to the typical “learning event,” with the caveat that this role always takes place with your newest employees — the ones who need to have a good first impression of the organization.

How your organization welcomes new employees creates this important “first impression.” This is the time to ensure that your company puts its best foot forward. Long-term employee engagement is based on the right fit, starting with your onboarding process. Organizations need talented people who know how to build engagement. Is it any wonder why this role now falls to you? You understand that it takes these actions to draw people in, create involvement, engage employees, and provide an active learning experience:

• Involve supervisors to ensure that new employees receive the information they need to help them integrate into the workforce
• Ensure that new employees know how their role fits in the organization
• Build new employees’ self-esteem by recognizing the value they bring
• Introduce new employees to other employees, including management and their department co-workers
• Ensure that new employees feel welcome and part of the team, and that they know they made the right decision

Onboarding is not an event; it’s a process. It isn’t completed after the original event. Assign a “buddy” or “coach” to help new employees find answers and feel welcome. This important new role uses your skills to lead to a higher level of employee engagement right from the start.

Leading change

Your organization needs talented change experts. Because organizations are going through massive change, you can expect to be drawn into the process. You have the kind of skills required for success: knowing about effective communication, understanding motivation, respecting the value of teams, formulating goals and objectives, designing and implementing plans, defining performance standards, and dozens of other skills. You also know the importance of active, involved participation and how to obtain that involvement — which is why your role is critical to helping lead change in your organization.

Ensure that your organization is using a process to guide the change. The key to successfully managing change is strong, effective communication. As your organization moves through a change-management effort, you’ll find that many of your skills are critical to its success.

Coaching managers

Have you ever had managers tell you that it was your job to develop their people? They are only half right. Developing people, closing the skill gaps in the workforce, and increasing knowledge must be a partnership between you and managers. Managers may not have thought about employee development this way in the past, and you’ll most likely need to develop and coach them along the way as well. You’ll need to clarify their role as a developmental manager and show them how to embed development into the work the employees are doing. You will be “coaching the coaches.”

You may also be asked to coach managers to make better decisions, improve their communication skills, provide targeted, timely, and actionable feedback, and employ all the other skills that define excellent leaders. As a TD professional, you know how to do all those things. Piece of cake! Now you know why this is one of your new roles.

Coordinating mentoring opportunities

A mentor is a trusted counselor or guide, and mentoring is not limited to those in a formal program. In our highly connected world of social networking, new mentoring relationships are emerging as a result of savvy employees (and their employers) making connections and joining groups that give them access to potential mentoring matches. Eager learners and seasoned veterans who are willing to be mentors can easily connect and begin a mutually beneficial mentoring relationship. As a TD professional, developing employees through mentoring is another role you may be expected to complete. In this role, you may

• Create a process to locate and match mentor/protégé partnerships
• Design readiness surveys for mentors and protégés
• Design and conduct a mentoring training program
• Determine how to create mentoring opportunities for employees around the globe
• Identify ways to use social media tools to facilitate mentoring matches
• Create an evaluation plan to measure the success of the program
• Determine a balanced diversity approach for the program

Once again, you can see how the skills you honed as a trainer provide a practical basis for this role.

Internal consulting

Internal consulting is a unique training and development role. Internal consultants are called upon to facilitate high-level meetings, master mind-change efforts, take a systems approach for future projects, and execute other exciting, high-level projects.

Beverly Scott and Kim Barnes see new internal consulting roles emerging, including performance consultant and trusted advisor. They define them in their book Consulting on the Inside: An Internal Consultant’s Guide to Living and Working Inside Organizations, 2nd Edition (ATD, 2011).

What does it take to be a successful internal consultant? First and foremost, it requires that you gain the trust and credibility of everyone in the organization: leaders and employees. You must be a generalist, competent in a broad range of applications, but you must also be seen as an expert in several areas to ensure credibility. Again, you’ve been in training for this role!

Building teams

Human beings make up organizations, create the culture, and determine the total effectiveness of their organizations. This effectiveness depends on how well they work together as a group. Indeed, human beings do almost everything in groups. Working as a team is how we get things done, and teams are most effective when they communicate well and function as a cohesive unit. Unfortunately, employees may cognitively “know” the importance of teamwork but may not practice what they know.

Teams rarely start off great; they learn to be great, and team building can help them do that. You can easily “teach team skills,” but often a team doesn’t request training until it’s nearly dysfunctional. At that point, your role changes from facilitating team skills training to facilitating a team-building intervention. You may need to work with teams that are less productive and efficient than they should be to create a functioning team.

In the team-building role, you gather information and design an intervention that is customized and unique for every team. The effects of the pandemic and the VUCA world (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity) require trainers in their new roles as TD professionals to embrace expanded roles with a broader definition of what trainers do. Working under the banner of Talent Development helps to ensure that you work hand in hand with management to add value to your organization. Change may be huge for some trainers; it is less so for others.

Seeing how talent development is important to organizations

Organizations are changing rapidly, and with the change comes a need to develop employees at an even faster rate. Sometimes organizations can’t completely define the skills they’ll require for the future, so part of talent development is preparing for an uncertain future. Organizations encourage employees to participate in continuous employee development opportunities. Talent is critical to organizations to ensure that they’re able to stay ahead of their competition. Trainers know about WIIFM, or “what’s in it for me.” As a TD professional, however, you would be wise to begin thinking about WIIFO, or “what’s in it for organizations,” as Jonathan Halls discusses in the sidebar “The WIIFO mindset.”

Knowledge about how your training supports your organization is one of the most important things you can do for your organization and your own career aspirations.

Confirming that talent development is important to employees

Employees who are interested in career development take skill-enhancement, training, coaching, or mentoring opportunities seriously. Employees want to build skills and acquire knowledge, involving themselves in development opportunities to stay up-to-date about the most recent industry innovations. Skill and knowledge improvements are essential to maintaining expertise that matches changing times. Talent development prepares employees to become reliable resources that benefit the organization.

Talent development is a joint effort between employees and the employer to upgrade existing skills and knowledge in expectation of future requirements. Employees gain skills professionally (acquire job-required skills) and personally (improve communication), so employees benefit both on the job and in other places in their lives. Talent development efforts enhance employees’ knowledge and increase the productivity of organizations.

Upskilling (learning to be more proficient in a current job area) and reskilling (learning skills that prepare for a different career path) are key to understanding what’s happening in your organization.

Supporting the C-Suite

Your organization needs your support in this ever-changing world, so it’s natural to assume that you will be a partner with your senior leaders. The greatest skill you’ll most likely need to develop is the ability to talk C-suite-ese: to articulate how your achievements impact the organization, state how you’ve affected profitability, and express your vision for the future. What’s needed to communicate with the C-suite?

Take it from Dianna Booher, author of Communicate Like a Leader (Berrett-Koehler, 2018), who writes, “The first thing you need to do is to understand how members of the C-suite think. Plan your message in advance. Make it concise and to the point. Executives are an impatient lot. They want to know the message first and are happy to fill in with the details later.”

Make your message strategic. Strategic ideas get approved and funded. Support the strategy with just enough detail to demonstrate that your plan is sound. Ask provocative questions. Your message should not just “tell” but also invite thinking from your leaders. Booher says that stimulating questions generate more support. What questions can you ask to pique interest from your audience, and can you weave them into a story?

The next time you’re invited to the C-suite to present plans for the following year or to justify your approach to hybrid learning, use Diana’s ideas condensed in the following checklist as a reminder of the strategies for success:

• Open with the big-picture message statement.
• Select critical-information nuggets for a concise message.
• Deliver a strategic message supported by details that sell the idea.
• Define several provocative questions.
• Take a stand on the issue.
• Create a memorable story.

Determining an organization’s talent development readiness

Various organizations use many “key descriptors” to determine their talent development readiness. For this book’s purposes, I consider eight areas to determine readiness. Your organization may be ready in some of these areas and not in others:

• Learning culture: Think about your learning culture. How would you describe it? Is learning valued, and are employees given the time to learn?
• Organizational capacity: Does your organization manage the talent development effort like a business? Do the mission, vision, and guiding principles reflect a commitment to employee development?
• Infrastructure: Do your IT and facilities departments have the equipment, systems, and software required for learning? Do they have an LMS in place? Is a platform available for social learning?
• Organizational climate: Determine what the organization’s climate tells you. Can you describe it as a learning culture? How is failure treated?
• Senior leaders: How do you rate your leaders regarding talent development? Do they consider talent development to be a necessary strategy and believe that it should be aligned with organizational goals?
• Employee perspective: Do employees view continuous professional growth and development as positive? How much accountability have your employees accepted for their own development?

• Implementation plan: Do you have an implementation team, and does it represent multiple areas of the organization? Does it guide decisions, run interference, provide advice, and help with political issues?

  After the talent development program has been established, you need a way to monitor and evaluate it. Plan for how you’ll evaluate your efforts.

• Pre-implementation execution: Begin to review your organization’s readiness. This sounds like a plan to create a plan, and to some extent it is. It’s a list of everything you need to do before delivery of services.

Where do you go from here? You can find an Organizational Readiness Checklist at the end of this chapter to help you identify the strengths of your organization and the pitfalls that may hinder success.

Describing the TD foundation

Successful efforts don’t just start with “doing”; they have a solid foundation or key underpinnings in place from which they start to build. The foundation for your talent development effort is on solid ground when it’s doing the following:

• Constantly working toward developing a learning culture
• Ensuring that managers accept the responsibility to develop employees
• Encouraging employees to value life-long learning
• Inspiring a positive attitude and growth mindset, starting at the top
• Developing and exploring learning-to-learn skills
• Enabling organizational and team learning

Meet with your supervisor to discuss the six foundational items of a talent development effort. How does your organization address each?

Summarizing your TD responsibilities

As a TD professional, your key role — to prepare employees with the knowledge and skills to succeed on the job and support the organization’s goals — hasn’t changed, but how you perform it has. Your work is the same, but talent development’s purpose and your responsibilities have expanded. You need to

• Lead, not just deliver. Be a trend watcher to keep leaders informed about developments that may affect your organization.
• Know the business aspects of your organization. How does it make a profit and achieve its mission? Who is the competition and what threats do they pose?
• Recruit, retain, engage, and transition employees — in addition to your role to develop them.
• Know about hybrid learning, mobile learning, micro-learning, blended learning, personalized learning, social learning, and gamification.

Your learners have changed also. They have high expectations. They can pull up information instantly, wherever and whenever they need it. You know that your learners are distracted, impatient, and overwhelmed. They want to learn from and share information with others. On the downside, they experience busy, demanding, and overwhelmed lives in an always-connected 24/7 world of work. Most executives believe that the “overwhelmed employee” is an “important issue”, but few believe they are ready to address it.

Helping your organization and all employees address the issue of employee burnout and feeling overwhelmed should be one of your key focuses.

Your organization is involved in a battle for acquiring and engaging employees. Talent retention has become a critical factor in the performance and success of your organization.

Your organization is likely using design thinking for processes such as learning to make the overall employee experience better. It has lofty expectations that talent development will be tightly aligned to equip employees to contribute to the organization’s mission and goals. Learn all that you can about the employee experience, and design learning to help your organization.

Exploring the TD organizational readiness checklist

The Organizational Readiness Checklist in Table 13-1 will help you determine the degree to which your organization is ready to implement a talent development program. You can use the tool to determine areas of strength and weakness for your organization. You can also use it as a basis for a facilitated discussion with senior leaders. Lead discussion around questions such as these: “What are our strengths? Weaknesses? How can we use our strengths to shore up our weaknesses? What areas may hinder implementing our talent development program? How can you help to make improvements?” Use the information to improve the readiness level as well as confirm buy-in from leadership. Score the checklist using this scale: Not Even Close = 0 points; A Good Start = 1 point; Almost There = 3 points; and We’re There = 5 points. Total the scores for each of the eight areas of your organization’s talent development readiness to determine your areas of strength and weaknesses.