New Age Chief Learning Officers: How they are doing it?

Strategy and culture are two levers of an organization. While strategy is generally outlined by those at the top, culture is a more elusive lever anchored in unspoken behavior and norms.

The Chief Learning Officers (CLOs) are the senior-level executives in a unique position to connect these two. If done right, they have the power to keep individual employees and the system as a whole, thriving.

As a learning professional, you may have focused on training and building capability by managing learning; but times have changed and so is what is demanded of your roles.

Changing priorities of CLOs

From Facebook’s Global head of learning and development, Amy Hayes, who trains over 9,500 employees to PwC’s CLO, Tom Evans, handing learning of 39,000+ employees; businesses are repositioning how they view CLOs in organization.

Chief Learning Officers are increasingly occupying boardroom conversations to get the pulse of the organization. Conventionally they were seen as training directors, but now their roles are transforming into strategic leaders.

• New CLOs are strategically connecting organizational learning with organization’s goals and objectives. For instance, if in a slow economy, the company decides that instead of jettisoning employees, they can be upgraded to boost the business in new verticals. CLOs are not only supposed to evaluate if it’s possible, but be an equal partner to the CEOs and measure if it will be profitable and come up with a plan.
• Chief Learning Officers are also participating in employee retention alongside their development. Most of the workforce today are millennials who are tough to retain. They have to be kept motivated. CLOs are for instance suggesting businesses not only on how but when to rotate employees into various roles.
• Further, data is taking priority over how the decisions are taken. CLOs are expected to align their strategies with numbers by leveraging technologies.

How New age Chief Learning Officers are doing it?

CLOs are people with years of corporate experience and business acumen.  They plan learning activities in a way as to link them directly to the business outcomes.

To pull it off, CLOs are building a talent ecosystem and their activities around three main components—Assess, Develop and Reward.

Assess: Data-Driven

Frequent surveys are being used to correctly assess the culture of the organization. For this, CLOs are not just sending cliched annual employee satisfaction surveys in huge numbers, but customizing it for different departments and seniority levels. This is helping them truly understand what people feel and more importantly, understand about company.

Why CLOs are concerning themselves with these tasks? Due to their changed priorities. Chief Learning Officers are realigning themselves from trainers to strategic partners to the CEOs. Assessments give clarity around vision to them about employees and can lead to surprising insights.

Develop: Finding Common Ground

The next logical step after the assessment is development. It entails finding common grounds between employee satisfaction and the organization’s goals. Chief Learning Officers are informing their development and training strategies from assessments. The goals of development strategies are multi-pronged, employee training, retention, generating engagement while ensuring company’s growth. To do this, say games can be leveraged. It can make the learning interesting and in-turn generate data about the pace of progress for further assessment.

Rewards: It’s not all about money

All hard work would go vain without putting this cog in its right place. CLOs are realizing that rewards are must to keep employees engaged and motivated. Often so it happens that when rewards are talked about, management views it as money. But rewards don’t always have to constitute money. Encouragement Cards, Certificates, Vouchers and many other easy rewarding practices can be used to reinforce a learning behavior in the organization.

Learning officers are going beyond learning roles, and impacting core business decisions. Have you got what it takes to become a new age CLO? Share your problems, challenges and insights.