Chief Learning Officer Michael Molinaro is ensuring New York Life employees have easy access to intuitive learning options. Leadership isn't a role you inhabit—it's a set of actions. That principle has been a driving force behind the work of Michael Molinaro, chief learning officer for New York Life, the largest mutual life insurance company in the United States, according to Fortune. "People are leaders when they act in a leaderly way," says Molinaro. "We've worked to define the leadership actions that most embody who we are and what we want to be at New York...

Liz Janssen is focused on ensuring ICF employees have the skills and mentoring to support the company's innovation and growth. In 1969, a former Tuskegee Airman and three U.S. Department of Defense analysts founded the Inner City Fund to finance minority-owned businesses in Washington, D.C. Fifty years later, ICF has become a billion-dollar global consulting and digital services firm focused on solving complex problems for their clients in various industries such as energy, environment, public health, economic development, and more. With client partners and...

Learn to purposefully guide your company’s culture. “Culture is everything,” the CEO said during our first interview. “Our company has something special—figure out what it is, cultivate it, transform it, but don’t screw it up.” No pressure at all, right? I accepted the job. What is this culture thing we all hear about and speak of? I have many peers who will tell you that it’s a fluffy buzzword, haphazardly thrown around in intellectual conversations about strategic growth and business continuity—an undefinable intangible that makes for great debate. There are...

Director of Talent Management Mary McNevin helps U.S. Venture prepare future leaders while broadening its talent acquisition scope. Talent development skills are portable across industries—and Mary McNevin’s career is a testament to this. She’s developed talent for a healthcare company, a food manufacturer, and now U.S. Venture, an energy, automotive, and lubricant products company. The learners in her current universe range from CEOs to barge captains, forklift drivers, and oil traders. As director of talent management, McNevin oversees talent acquisition,...

American Express has entered a new season—one of fresh leadership and growth. With that comes new talent development needs. Known for a long history of strong performance, outstanding customer service, and elite rewards, American Express—under the guidance of former Chairman and CEO Ken Chenault—became a leading credit card issuer in the United States. After 17 years at the helm, he retired in early 2018, and Stephen Squeri, the company's then vice chairman, took over. Just six months before this major leadership change, Samantha Hammock stepped into the role of...

Chief Talent Officer Michael Arena is helping build adaptability into General Motors' workforce. After more than 100 years as a tra- ditional automotive manufacturer,General Motors began to realize that it needed to make changes to remain a competitive force in the industry. Once the largest automotive manufacturer in the world, it was no longer making a profit as of 2005. And the 2008 global financial crisis—when car sales plunged—only increased its losses. With liabilities twice its assets in 2009, GM engaged in an ongoing process of improving the operating...

While looking forward, we can't lose sight of the fundamentals of learning. There is so much focus today on the pace of change, increasing demands on people, and technological advances. Are we forgetting—or at least not giving enough consideration to—the fundamental human processes associated with learning? I have growing concerns that, as talent development executives, we will lose sight of the process while focusing on the outcomes. Let's go back to the basics. Learning comprises a cycle with several key processes: acquiring new information, acting, reflecting,...

Your Talent Development Atlas. If you’ve been directing your organization’s talent development effort during the last few years, you might think you’re on a journey without a map. There are few published resources to guide you in a challenge that many experts promise will only become more urgent, and necessary, in the coming years.

Hilti stands on a leadership model of developing people and achieving outstanding results. Eivind Slaaen has an unusual commute to work—a 20—minute drive from a small village in the mountains of Maienfeld, Switzerland, to his office in neighboring Lichtenstein. He is the head of people and culture development for Hilti, a multinational company that develops, manufactures, and markets products, systems, software, and services that serve the construction and energy sectors. Slaaen, who has been with Hilti for almost 30 years in a variety of different roles, is...

A large public accounting, consulting and technology firm is teaming up with employees to give to local communities. To celebrate its 75th anniversary year, Crowe Horwath CEO Jim Powers challenged personnel to volunteer 75,000 hours in the communities where they live and work. Three-quarters of the way through, Crowe personnel have already volunteered more than 60,000 hours. That's just one example of the many ways Crowe, one of the largest U.S. public accounting, consulting, and technology firms, supports the community. It's because of efforts like this that...

Cynthiann King leads the design, development, implementation, management, and maintenance of company-wide employee training initiatives and programs for Toll Brothers, a national, luxury homebuilder firm with more than 5,000 associates. We don't have a formal definition of talent development, but we have a mission statement for HR and learning and development, which we developed as a team: "Mirroring the high standard of luxury embraced by our company, we seek to hire, engage, train, and retain the best employees, providing them with luxury services through a...

Optimizely gives its employees numerous opportunities to participate in volunteer and charitable efforts. Employees want to work for companies that care. A corporate culture that prioritizes giving back signals a value system that extends to the health of the entire company. As leading companies know, alignment between an employee's personal values and the employer's mission and values is a major factor in determining where a person chooses to work or whether he stays with his current employer. Organizations that crave a community that comes with an aspirational...

An integrated approach to improving the employee experience is needed. Several years ago, Gallup released a bombshell: Only one-third of American employees are engaged in their work and workplace. In response, organizations polled and prodded employees to pinpoint the key factors affecting engagement and rolled out numerous culture change initiatives to their front lines. But this firestorm did little to rally employee engagement. In the Winter 2016 issue of CTDO, we introduced the concept of employee experience. Since then, more research has emerged on the topic...

Rob Lauber is chief learning officer at McDonald's, where he oversees a staff of 250 people across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Under his purview are the L&D Center of Excellence and seven Hamburger Universities around the world, as well as education and accreditation programs. In all, L&D's audience is about 1.9 million McDonald's employees. How do you define talent development at McDonald's? We don't really have a definition of talent development. Our aspiration at McDonald's is for us to deliver a better experience for our employees so that...

Never stop learning.  What will it take to make work better? A significant upgrade to everyone’s ability to learn. That’s the ticket to a successful and fulfilling life.  Visionary teacher and lifelong learner Pat McLagan views learning ability as software for processing daily life. And like all software, learning software require upgrades—and regular reboots!   In Unstoppable You: Adopt the New Learning 4.0 Mindset and Change Your Life, McLagan shares her method for keeping learning powers sharp, ensuring that we can continuously advance and adapt in a nonstop...

Deloitte University (DU) has become the cultural, learning, and engagement hub of Deloitte. In fact, the sheer magnitude of its creation forced the organization to examine and refine every detail of its talent development strategy.Join ATD for an in-depth look at talent development at Deloitte. This full-length case study— Deloitte: Where Learning, Culture, and Engagement Meet—features interviews, photos, and detailed program descriptions to help you gain more insights into how learning is defined at Deloitte today:

Tamar Elkeles presented her session "Secrets to Building an Award-Winning Learning Organization," on May 22, 2016, at ATD 2016. In this segment, she discusses linking measurement to business goals and company culture.

Research from the Association for Talent Development (ATD) and the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) reveals that robust cultures of learning are distinct hallmarks of organizations that consistently produce the best business results—companies that lead the world’s markets in revenue growth, profitability, market share, and customer satisfaction. Through the lens of high performance, ATD and i4cp explore the practices learning and development leaders are applying to drive vibrant learning cultures.

Figure out what your company wants and needs to be, and then envision the culture that will create the conditions for success. High employee engagement has been the "holy grail" for talent development during the past few decades. Getting employee engagement right translates to higher productivity, employee retention, and many other intangibles for an organization. Get it wrong, and it becomes more difficult to hire the right people, keep them happy, and move the needle on the strategic imperatives for a company. However, with the rise of such companies as Google...