Читать книгу Be More Strategic in Business - Diana Thomas - Страница 12

When we first met each other, back in 2010, we had no idea that the needs driving our initial meeting would eventually turn into a process for you, our leader-reader, to cultivate your own strategic leadership capabilities and then apply that skill set throughout your organization. No, we got together under the premise that one of us had a missing piece and the other knew how to fill in the gap but lacked a platform for sharing her knowledge. Our relationship grew over the years as we helped each other in many ways, and eventually we realized that putting our skill sets together created a combination that is desperately needed in the business world.

We want you to know where we come from because our individual stories are the genesis of our model. Most of the book contains our collective wisdom, but occasionally we’ll share specific insights that come from one of us. We want to give you our wins, lessons learned, mistakes, and occasional embarrassments so you can turn them into your opportunity to excel.

Stacey

Ouch.

That was my initial reaction to my first performance review in my first professional job after earning my PhD at the age of twenty-nine. I was used to being the sharp and successful girl in academia, so it was pretty shocking to find out that I was too detail-oriented and that people didn’t like meeting with me, among other things. Where was this feedback coming from, and what the heck could I do to change it?

It took several years, many interactions with seasoned leaders, and an intense amount of work in the field for me to get to the bottom of what my bosses were telling me—that I needed to be more strategic. That’s a phrase that’s thrown around in a lot of employee review meetings and frequently goes unexplained. The recipient walks away with a vague feeling of something to work on but without a practical plan for acquiring a so-called strategic skill set. I loved research, digging into numbers, creating spreadsheets, and mastering the details of everything I worked on. I couldn’t understand how “too detail-oriented” had suddenly become a bad thing!

I watched my Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) colleagues gain promotions while I was passed over. I was told to be more strategic, but I really had no idea what that meant, what I was doing wrong, or where to go to learn how to become a strategic contributor. Frankly, my bosses weren’t equipped to help me. I was firing off spreadsheets full of complex calculations while they were asking for straightforward answers to their questions. Right out of academia, I didn’t yet understand how to distill my research findings into meaningful answers to management’s strategic questions. In the high-pressure environment of Andersen, where everybody was smart, successful, and competitive, I really couldn’t afford to flounder.

After a couple of years, I moved on and directed my career more specifically into the corporate training field. During this time, I realized that I loved the consulting model. It gave me the ability to dig into the details that energized my work, but at the same time I was able to be out in the world, working with dynamic individuals and tackling new problems in a variety of industries. Human capital analytics became my niche. The problem was, in the early 2000s, no one in the market knew what that was, and no one in the nascent field had figured out how to package it in a way that was mainstream and palatable to the potential customers who stood to benefit.

In the fall of 2005, I arrived late to a Chief Learning Officer conference. I rushed into a ballroom and stood at the back, only to find that the keynote speaker had already begun her talk. It so happened that this was Diana’s first keynote; she had been invited to speak at a time when McDonald’s was transforming from a struggling fast-food restaurant chain to a thriving corporation. I wasn’t sure who Diana was, but I was quickly captivated by the talk and said to myself, I want to work with this woman! I could see that Diana had the vision and drive to run a successful learning department. Diana seemed to realize something many learning leaders at the time didn’t grasp: that she needed to communicate with her stakeholders (in this case, executive leaders and franchisees) in a way that spoke to their business needs. However, when I saw the results she presented, I realized just how much McDonald’s could benefit from being able to show a true link between investments on the learning side and results in the restaurants.

After the talk, Diana was mobbed with people wanting to meet her, and I hung back. I knew I could help Diana, but I also knew that my ideas would be well over her head at this point in time. No one in the learning space was making meaningful connections between their learning data and business data. If these kinds of results were shared at all, they were loose correlations. Diana had shown how HR investments had seemed to lead to a rise in sales in the restaurants, but she couldn’t get specific about what training had done to drive those results.

About five years later, I joined Chief Learning Officer Magazine (CLO), the organizer of the conference where I had seen Diana’s presentation. My role at CLO was to create an awards program for enterprise-class learning programs. Applications evaluating nearly every aspect of a learning leader’s function were judged by leading practitioners in the learning and development industry. Winners were ranked in an annual list known as the LearningElite. The program quickly grew in popularity, and soon Diana’s team at McDonald’s applied. Nearly all of the learning departments at this time were doing little to evaluate the effectiveness of training, and those who were evaluating were making workforce learning and development decisions based on departmental data and learner surveys. No one was exploring predictive or causal models (that is, what could happen as a result of a key decision). A subset of those departments were estimating a financial return on learning investments.

At this time, the winds of change were beginning to blow ever harder in the learning industry. With the rising popularity and affordability of technology, as well as the 2008/2009 recession, corporate learning and development had gone from delivering classroom training and paper manuals to e-learning and on-demand content. The next iteration of that change was a growing attempt to become more precise in showing how learning impacted the business in meaningful ways. The term predictive analytics was gaining traction in other disciplines (marketing, supply chain analysis, etc.), and there was a small-but-growing faction of thought leaders who were finding ways to apply predictive analytics to employee development investments. It was expensive, took a long time, and was confusing to the majority of the industry. But it was creeping into the lexicon. Software vendors were organizing and pitching new platforms to simplify people data.

Against that landscape, I began to think about ways to push the industry toward showing more business-oriented results on their LearningElite applications. I wanted to see a learning function showing data-driven links between dollars invested in learning and results that were important to the business. Gradually, companies like Accenture, Lowe’s, and the U.S. government reported that they were using quantitative and qualitative data to go beyond reporting on training’s status. These organizations were assessing training’s impact on the bottom line and employing predictive analytics to make strategic decisions. Even smaller businesses were starting to leverage data and use advanced analytics to make organizational decisions. At CLO, we began offering consulting packages to entrants. We would take an award application, and then put together some recommendations based on the organization’s current state benchmarked against other similar organizations and feedback from LearningElite judges to propose a consulting engagement with the company. Remembering Diana’s 2005 presentation, I made a pitch to McDonald’s and received a first meeting with Diana. At the time, Diana had a vision for what measurement could do for Hamburger University, but she didn’t know how to bring it to life. She had brought in consultants and software vendors, but the market for learning evaluation was so immature at the time that she hadn’t been able to achieve her vision of showing the business how learning investments drove sales in the restaurants. She and I began to collaborate, and the rest, well, you’ll learn in this book!

Today, I run my own consulting firm. I help other organizations harness their people data and make smarter decisions. My firm also has a strong presence in the not-for-profit arena, showing how investments in communities foster long-term growth and success.

Diana

I launched my career with McDonald’s Corporation as a sixteen-year-old crew member in a Maryland restaurant. My job there was hostess, which meant I was supposed to greet customers and interact with them while they were in the restaurant. Initially intimidated, I soon learned how to talk to customers. Little did I know how important this would be throughout my career, as meeting the needs of customers became a critical touchstone at every major point of decision. As I entered college, I began climbing through the ranks at my restaurant. Shortly before I graduated from college, I completed a career assessment, which told me I was well suited for human resources. I inquired about opportunities with McDonald’s and was granted an internship in Washington, D.C., that led to a long-term role recruiting crew and managers, as well as partnering with colleges on career programs.

Although I was one of the younger leaders working in that D.C. regional office, I was rarely intimidated. I’d been blessed with tremendously supportive parents who had raised me to believe I could do anything I set my mind to, and also that you can’t get something if you’re afraid to ask for it. I was working under successful leaders and on the lookout for ways to learn from them (and actually learning even more from a few weaker leaders). I had a chance to attend a series of talks by motivational speakers with our leadership team. Two that have stood out in my mind over the years were those by Zig Ziglar and Joel Barker. I felt so inspired by their presence and the messages they delivered, and I was motivated to do whatever I needed to do to become the type of leader who could make people feel that way. In fact, my own leadership platform came from something Joel Barker said in one of these sessions: “An effective leader is someone who you will choose to follow to a place you would not go by yourself.” I began to think more critically about my own personality and skills and how I could channel those into becoming the type of leader people would want to follow.

My next promotion landed me in the training department at McDonald’s, and I quickly fell in love with my new career direction. Growing up, I had always wanted to be a teacher, so training felt like a natural fit. I started working toward my master’s degree, which culminated in a thesis on leadership. Truth be told, I had a long-standing fascination with the topic. In 2002, I was named dean of Illinois-based Hamburger University and also began studying for my MBA. Personality-wise, I knew that I tended toward big-picture thinking. I was never too detail-oriented and didn’t enjoy working with data and analytics. I began learning how to channel my big-picture thinking into a strategic focus, and I also found a niche helping others around me grow from individual contributor to strategic leader. During this time, we began applying for the LearningElite, even though I felt pretty strongly that we weren’t at the level of the winning organizations. I knew that showing proof of impact was a big gap. Our first entry earned us rank #42, and I looked at that benchmarking process as a chance to grow and improve.

In 2004, I completed my MBA, and shortly before that became vice president of training, learning, and development for McDonald’s U.S. Around this time, feeling quite proud of all I had accomplished, I hosted a networking session at Hamburger University. Bill Wiggenhorn, then chief learning officer at Motorola, was one of the attendees, and it was the first time we met. We got into a conversation about growing and learning as a person, and what was on my mind was all that I had done to get to this point. Bill asked me how I was planning on staying current and abreast of the never-ending changes that would continue to impact learning organizations around the world. I was taken aback as he bluntly told me I would be dated within five years if I couldn’t keep up—and he couldn’t have been more right! Up to this point, I had succeeded largely though formal education and job training. Now that I was on the executive team, I needed to take my development into my own hands. Bill later became a long-term mentor for me, and I also added the role of learner to my own weekly compass. Bill helped me to see that it was essential to nurture my longtime love of learning by continuing to make it an essential, ongoing part of my work and life.

I first met Stacey via networking, as I was a member of the CLO editorial review board. When she came to McDonald’s to talk to me about how we could improve on the weaknesses in our LearningElite application, I began to fully appreciate her combination of deep, analytical knowledge and the ability to highlight what was important from a strategic perspective. Stacey knew how to paint a picture of what data and analytics could do for McDonald’s. I had been sharing business results with our franchisees, but I couldn’t directly link those results to training. No one was asking me to do it, but I knew that day was coming and understood the importance of being able to back up my assertions with facts. Stacey helped to fill in the missing pieces and got us started on a journey at McDonald’s. We began showing concrete results from training, taking baby steps at first (and a few wrong turns!), and it caught on like wildfire. Our stakeholders loved knowing that when they sent their people away for training, they could expect business results.

I retired from McDonald’s in 2015. I’ve realized my lifelong dream of running my own business. Today I’m an executive coach, working with blossoming leaders to help them improve the things that are important to them, as well as helping them to find a healthy balance between their careers and their personal lives.

Our shared experience

One of the benefits of having grown up in the learning industry, and now through our own business pursuits, is that we have worked with leaders in almost every discipline and sector imaginable—from huge public companies, to smaller private organizations, nonprofits, schools, and government. In addition to our work with learning industry leaders, we’ve consulted with and coached leaders in human resources, IT, sales, marketing, new product development, federal agencies, and school district administrations.

And this is the beauty of the model we’ve created: no matter what field you’re in, what type of organization you work for, there is a need for strategic leadership. You need to show your business how its investments are driving performance in the areas that matter. You need to be able to do that in a way that’s enticing to other leadership. You need to unite your team around a motivating vision and help them understand how everything they do impacts the business in some way. You need to pull back from a reactive habit of spending your days putting out fires. You need a way to win people over to your cause. Whether the leaders you’re working alongside are investors in your small, one-person shop; shareholders in a huge, multinational corporation; board members of a nonprofit organization; or the other leaders at the executive table—they are looking to you for strategic leadership, and this book is your guide to delivering on that need.