Taking shortcuts will lead to unproductive and likely costly outcomes. When you cheat, you know better. When I was a talent development manager at a public accounting firm, I administered the most disastrous learning event of my career. If I’m truly honest, it was because I cheated. What’s worse, I blamed my supervisor, and she took the hit. What happened in that two-hour session awoke both my integrity and my commitment to the talent development discipline. I was preparing for the annual weeklong audit managers’ continuing education program. One of the new...

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...

Follow these seven steps to effect change. My mandate was to build a leadership pipeline. While I was already familiar with leadership competencies when I joined TELUS International, I didn't know much about the company or why it needed a pipeline and didn't already have one. What were its business objectives and goals? How does it make money? How was the organization structured? How would L&D help the firm achieve its business objectives? What impact would multiple cultures have on a global learning strategy? How would we measure success? I took two years to...

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...

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,...

In some organizations, it is becoming tougher to manage people—regardless of whether they are employees or contract workers. As more and more high-level, independent workers are staffed on projects, hiring managers are learning that they must follow new rules to manage these gig workers, rules that may not seem intuitive and may even seem harsh. Consider the recent kerfuffle at Google. In December 2018, The Guardian published the rules Google had adopted for managing its “two-tiered” workforce. The exposé cited in detail the specific practices this large, global...

Peruse articles about talent development and you'll find that many focus on the war for talent, engagement drivers, and the future of work. Talent development is often thought of as a strategic function, but serving whom? Given today's workforce and challenges, the time to advance our leadership and make a greater impact is now. The days of talent development professionals being asked to exclusively focus on talent development is coming to an end, and it's something to be celebrated. For many companies, the boundary separating talent development and HR leaders in...

Succession planning is essential for ensuring business continuity and operations, but research shows that not many organizations actually have formal succession plans in place. In fact, the Association for Talent Development's latest research, Succession Planning: Ensuring Continued Excellence, found that just 35 percent of organizations have a formalized succession planning process. In April 2018, ATD Research surveyed 585 talent development professionals about their organizations' succession planning efforts—or lack thereof. This research served to identify...

Get employees technologically up to speed through hiring, upskilling, and reskilling. Your organization's engineers and developers are certainly familiar with the latest technologies. But is the rest of your organization? Do your employees know how these tools relate to your organization's success? In today's digital economy, everyone must all be well versed in the technologies that are permeating every aspect of our work and personal lives. If digital collaboration isn't something you're required to do on a day-to-day basis, chances are it's heading your way...

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...

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...

Dave DeFilippo is fighting the war for talent in the construction industry. Dave DeFilippo had the perfect glide path to his job as chief people and learning officer at Suffolk: He began his career in talent development as a high school teacher and track coach. That was 25 years ago, but his passion for helping people improve their performance never waned. "If you can confidently run a six-minute mile, but you want to run a five-minute mile, how do you do that?" he likes to ask. His let's-make-a-good-thing-better approach fits well into the Suffolk culture of...

"In our culture, we don't pass along problems to someone else; we try to help however we can." Chief People and Learning Officer Suffolk As the chief people and learning officer at Suffolk, Dave DeFilippo leads all aspects of the construction management firm's human resource, talent, leadership, and organizational development strategy. We have a People and Culture approach, which is our human capital practice, to talent development that includes strategy, structure, systems and processes, and outcome. Our strategy is to enable Suffolk's growth and performance by...

Don't fear lost knowledge through employee departures—build a foundation of knowledge management to realize business goals. It's inevitable. People will leave an organization. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Sometimes they will take with them that thing that is so precious and hard to replace: the deep knowledge they have gained about how to create the results the company requires. And even though it has happened before, companies are afraid. Where is the root of this fear? Is it the notion that the knowledge is irreplaceable? Is it the sense...

Judy Jackson is creating a culture of conversation built around people. To understand Judy Jackson's job as global chief talent officer at the global digital agency Wunderman, you have to start with her boss, Mark Read. He was appointed CEO in 2015 after more than 20 years with Wunderman's parent company, the U.K. advertising and public relations giant, WPP Group. "I came back because of our global CEO, Mark Read," says Jackson, who was with Wunderman 15 years earlier as the HR leader for the New York office. "Mark is known for turning companies around. He came...

Video gaming and talent development take off in tandem. Long tenure at one company is not common in the video game industry. But the very things that make the industry volatile—changing tastes among gamers and markets that shift because of new technology—have kept Humera Malik at Electronic Arts (EA) for 13 years. Today, as vice president of learning, engagement, and performance for the global video game company, Malik oversees a broad cluster of learning and development roles, from talent development to diversity and inclusion. It wasn't always that way. When...

Use the Greiner Curve to assess and anticipate business needs and create a talent development strategy to address them. As a senior talent professional, you're in the business of cultivating the potential of your organization and its people. Organizations grow and change in predictable ways, moving through six stages of development. Each shift requires new skills for the organization's leaders and employees and can predict attrition in key groups. Knowing how to identify where your organization is, and more importantly, the next stage it is growing into, will...

Before Boomer employees retire, capture the valuable knowledge they possess. Every day, 10,000 Baby Boomers retire from the workforce. And for too many businesses, when those employees walk out the door, they take with them a career's worth of institutional knowledge. The value of that knowledge is hard to overstate. When a veteran sales rep exits, how do you measure the value he provided customers through a deep understanding of each account's history and issues? When a long-time manager leaves, how do you quantify the loss of her insights into her business,...

The argument: The talent development department should be a stand-alone function separate from HR. Talent development doesn’t belong under the HR umbrella. Or does it? Org charts worldwide differ regarding whether talent development is a separate entity from HR, reporting directly to the CEO, or falls under HR, reporting to a CHRO. Although it’s clear that talent development and HR must work collaboratively, which structure is best? Stephen W. Oliver Director, HRCVision Talent development should be moved out of the HR department to function as a fully...

Homebuilding isn't done how it used to be; neither is training at Toll Brothers, led by VP of L&D Cynthiann King. Inspired by their homebuilder father in 1967, Bob and Bruce Toll built two colonial-style homes in rural Pennsylvania. Fifty years later, Toll Brothers is a Fortune 500 company building luxury homes, urban condos, golf resorts, and active adult communities throughout the United States. Toll Brothers is a public company traded on the New York Stock Exchange. In 2016, the company had revenue of $5.2 billion. Even with that track record, the firm is...