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The Emperor’s New Clothes
by Joel Gendelman

Let’s say you’ve finally arrived in the C-suite as a chief learning officer or
vice president. Now you are sitting at the big table, and your fellow
organizational leaders will take you seriously. You are officially a part of the
heart and soul of your corporation.

Not so fast. To be viewed as an effective business partner, here are a few
things that you may wish to avoid:

1. Relying on the fear factor: “If you think training is expensive, try not
training.”

2. Justifying projects with possibly irrelevant data: “Our competition provides
40 hours of training for all new hires.”

3. Counting on management’s benevolence: “Employees rate professional
development as a key indicator of job satisfaction.”

4. Employing tired phrases to provide you with the allure of being a critical
business function: These include “stakeholders,” “organizational alignment,”
“process development” and “dialoguing.” You also should limit use of HR terms
such as “human capital” and “talent management” unless you plan to explain them
thoroughly.

5. Taking the technical route and reciting the specifics of LMS data-warehousing
capabilities, learning portals, knowledge-sharing systems, podcasts, wikis,
blended learning and Web 2.0.

6. Peppering your conversation with overly “impactful” terms, such as “in a big
way,” “skyrocket” and “amazing.”

You did not spend all this time climbing the ladder of success just to stand
naked in the town square. Now that you have arrived, you should start asking
hard questions about the learning function and the business it resides in. Here
are a few:

1. What does the corporation value? How is that measured?

2. How will you know that you have been successful? What yardstick will
executives employ to measure your success?

3. What are your corporate goals and the roadblocks to achieving those goals?

4. What strategies will the corporation use to cope in difficult economic times?
Do they expect to get along with less, or are they looking to do something
different (e.g., expand higher-margin products and services)?

5. In 30 words or less, what is the corporate strategy or “big idea?” What can
learning do specifically to move it forward?

6. Where does the company’s leadership expect learning to be in six months, one
year and three years? What will you need to get there?

Also, to win friends and influence people, you’ll need to develop and refine a
new set of skills. Below is a partial list:

a) Don’t oversell or overpromote yourself or the learning function: People in
the C-suite know the difference between sizzle and steak, and they have little
time to waste listening to you blow your own horn.

b) Continually practice and refine clear communication: Speak their language -
that is, the language of business and finance. Senior executives typically are
not interested in the technologies you use to do what you do. They simply want
to make sure it gets done.

c) Know their world: Learning is what you do best, so immerse yourself in your
fellow executives’ thoughts, ideas, values and approaches. Morph yourself into
one of them.

To operate as an effective CLO, you’ll also need to shift your attitude in
several areas, including the following:

a) Adjust your focus: Now that you are in the C-suite, your focus should be
squarely on the business, not learning.

b) Know your boss better than your resources: Since you have risen to the rank
of CLO, you must have done a great job being intimately aware of the courses
your department offers, as well as the tasks, resources and tools necessary to
create and deliver those courses. Now is the time to leave that to someone else
and spend more time and energy understanding and interacting with the other
members of the C-suite than with your own people.

c) Never confuse selling with installing: This is a tough one. It means you need
to pledge to do what needs to be done without knowing the details of how you are
going to do it. You will need to commit in order to maintain your seat at the
big table. It is a leap of faith you simply must take. Don’t worry, they invited
you to the table because they knew you could do the job – and you can. One way
or another.

[About the Author: Joel Gendelman is president and chief learning officer of
Future Technologies. He has more than 25 years of experience in performance
improvement and training and is a consultant to Fortune 500 companies.]

Regards,
Harvinder

http://harvinderjit.multiply.com