Mirroring Learning Culture in L&D

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by Deanna Foster | March 5, 2019

When you hold a mirror up to your organization’s learning culture, do you like what you see? And if not, how do you change the image? It’s a daunting thought. Culture is shaped by values, norms, and behaviors that become entrenched over time, and by written processes and unwritten rules that govern how work gets done. As talent development professionals, we have a unique responsibility to shape our organization’s learning culture, but we didn’t create it on our own, and we can’t change it by ourselves. Shifting the way an organization values and accomplishes learning requires a collaborative effort among […]

Making Organizations Human Again Through Learning

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by Larry Clark | February 22, 2019

After many years in the business world, I’ve grown very accustomed to—maybe too accustomed to—the extraordinarily artificial world of The Organization. Constructs like reporting relationships, span-of-control analyses, performance reviews, or rightsizing initiatives simply don’t exist outside the firewalls and badge-access doors of the places we go for a paycheck. In the world of The Organization, there are good reasons for these constructs. They enable tens of thousands of people to work in a coordinated fashion toward a common goal like creating software, building a new model automobile, or sending satellites into space. But while these organizational constructs are built to […]

Navigating Complexity: Football, Floor Space, and the Art of the Experiment

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by Larry Clark | January 14, 2019

This is the third and final post in a series on how leaders can effectively navigate the complexity of today’s business world for their organizations. Read the previous post here. In my first post on complexity, I referenced the Cynefin Framework and how it distinguishes between complicated situations (like launching a rocket into space) and complex situations (like raising my teenage daughter). And my second post just scratched the surface of polarities and paradox. A key concept of complexity that underpins both posts is the idea of emergence—an impressive word for “we don’t really know what’s going to happen until […]

Talent Metrics ARE Business Metrics

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by Larry Clark | January 4, 2019

The first three quarters of 2018 were the busiest for mergers and acquisitions since record-keeping began on M&A activity – over $3 trillion for those nine months alone. In the many costly transactions that occurred, few of these were expected to produce immediate financial gains for the parties involved. In fact, most businesses took a hit on their financials in the near-term because a merger is usually part of a longer-term strategy, with the benefits sometimes several quarters (or even years) in the making. I use this data to underscore a critical point about measuring the impact of learning: Organizations […]

Kindness Counts in Leadership

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by Mary Anne Amato | January 3, 2019

At our recent holiday celebration, our CEO, David Wan, shared a story of a teacher who made a tremendous difference in his life. Many of us listening also had been the recipient of a stellar teacher who went out of their way to make a difference in our lives. But this story was a bit different: It was told through the lens of kindness. At the end of his remarks, David challenged us – people who design and develop leaders for a living – to help build kinder leaders because the world really needs them right now. I’ve been pondering […]