Be More Strategic in Business. Diana Thomas

      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.