Sandi Maxey

**Senior Vice President of Learning and Professional Development

Sandy Spring Banks**

How do you blend executive leadership’s need to set a company’s culture with the learning organization’s need to develop and train employees? Sandi Maxey, senior vice president of learning and professional development took on this task at the 46-branch offices of Sandy Spring Banks in Maryland and Northern Virginia. 

Q: Who is responsible for defining and setting a company culture where learning is a priority? 

Defining a company’s learning culture is the result of a partnership between executives and the learning leadership within the organization. Learning strategy must connect to business strategy and objectives. Learning leadership can provide the how, but executive leadership has to set the direction and vision. It is the learning organization’s role to support this vision. 

I’ve found that getting buy-in from the executive leadership for learning initiatives is like selling anything. As a bank, we sell financial services, and we train our employees how to be effective salespeople through selling “value.” We support many business objectives and strategies through learning and development. These initiatives add value to the business, which comes back to that connection between what our business is trying to achieve and how learning can support that. 

Q: Who is responsible for reinforcing a company’s culture and supporting learning? What role does a manager play in reinforcing this culture? 

Managers at every level play a critical role in reinforcing culture and supporting learning. They have to lead by example. They have to integrate the learning culture into every aspect of performance management, including reward and recognition, by setting goals and expectations, encouraging career development, and mentoring. 

A good example for us would be our client experience strategy. Even though we are a for-profit banking institution, and we do sell financial services, we don’t espouse product-pushing. We want our clients to experience remarkable service in the act of selling, not a hard sell. Within our branch environment, we expect a manager to coach his employees to be very good at relationship-building; to know how to ask good questions rather than be a product-pushing salesperson trying to meet a number. 

Q: You have said, “Employees will only treat their clients as well as they are treated.” Why do you think this is so and how can learning executives make sure this happens? 

It comes down to employee engagement. I read once that people do things for their own reasons, not for yours. As managers, we have to connect to people’s intrinsic motivations, to their own passions and reasons for wanting to do certain things. 

We can achieve short-term compliance with performance expectations. Companies do it all the time with carrots and sticks. For example, we tell employees, “We’ll give you an incentive if you sell X or Y.” Conversely, “If you don’t do this, you know your job is in danger.” 

Those things work in the short term, but if you want to sustain a certain culture, as we do, we believe our employees need to have mindset for providing the client experience that our clients expect, and that they’re choosing to do it for their own reasons. 

Q: How do you determine what motivates your employees? 

We try to have employees connect their story with our company’s story. We’ve had every employee go through training sessions where we talk about why they want to be financial service professionals. We wanted to know what makes them want to come to work every day and what gets them excited about doing their jobs. 

Then, we did an exercise where we taught them the Sandy Spring Bank story and asked them to include their own story within that story. It’s about connecting the company’s mission, vision, and values to their own in a way they can articulate. 

Q: In your experience, how did you “sell” the need for a coaching program by making it relevant to business results and obtaining an executive sponsor? 

We have a client experience strategy, and our employees are at the heart of that strategy. They have to deliver a consistently remarkable client experience. On a day-to-day basis, our employees deliver that experience through their behaviors. 

We believe the direct supervisor is in the best position to effectively reinforce those behaviors. He is with that employee day in and day out. He engages that employee in the coaching process, and uses the coaching opportunity not only to provide developmental feedback, but also to reward and recognize. 

Q: You have written, “Because we were operating under the fundamental belief that an employee’s manager has the greatest influence on his engagement and performance, we realized we needed to change the individual behaviors of every manager who went through the program.” How did you do this? 

We started out by tying our program learning objectives to the leadership and client experience competencies we had already defined for the organization. These were already in place and our leaders and managers were familiar with them. We tied our coaching behaviors directly to these competencies. 

We also included the objective of changing mindsets about what coaching is. We define coaching as a process to improve performance. It’s not for corrective actions; it’s not the same as career mentoring; it’s a process to engage employees in performance improvement. 

Our coaching certification program is based on a simple learning model: to learn, to apply, and to reinforce. In this program, the participants go through seven instructor-led courses. In the time between courses, they have an application exercise that gives them the opportunity to take what they have learned in the classroom from a conceptual state into a real-life application. Then that learning is reinforced through a debriefing session with their managers.

Q: Explain the importance of the learning contract that you use at Sandy Spring Bank. 

The learning contract is a mechanism to reinforce a commitment between a participant and his manager. The contract is symbolic; its whole intent is to deliver the emotional experience of signing your name to something. In banking, a signature is a promise. The learning contract symbolizes a promise from the participant that he or she will complete the program to the best of his ability and that his manager will provide support. 

People seem to embrace the contract, which is signed by both manager and participant. It sets the tone from the beginning that the program is a commitment. By signing the contract, the participant has an obligation to get the most out of the program and to complete it. 

I think it has done its job. Everyone who has come through the program has completed it, and I haven’t had a manager who wasn’t engaged. 

Q: How important are the debriefing sessions after classes? How can the manager gain the competence to conduct such conversations? 

Debriefing sessions are important because they are the last step of our learning model—the reinforcement of the learning by the participant’s manager. The managers attend an orientation before the certification program starts. We go through each part of the program, talk through the learning objectives, give the manager samples of the coaching models and assignments, and talk about different activities the participants will be doing. 

After each instructor-led class, I send a manager-debriefing sheet to each participant’s manager. It consists of a simple list of learning objectives, what the different parts of the class have included, and specific open-ended questions to help explore how the participants might apply certain concepts. 

For example, we do a session on the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and the debriefing sheet suggests questions such as: “How do you think your type preferences impact you as a manager?” and “How do you see these preferences impacting your behavior?” We try to tie the debriefing and application exercises directly to what was taught in the classroom. 

Q: Talk about how you structured application assignments that followed instructor-led classes. Why do you think that part of the program was important? 

At the end of every instructor-led class, I give participants their assignments, and we take some aspect of the course and ask them to implement it. For example, we teach a coaching methodology for a monthly one-on-one manager-employee meeting. After the session, the participants begin one-on-ones using the model. 

In another session, we teach an observation-coaching model. The application assignment is to complete an employee observation and to come to the next class prepared to discuss the experience. We discuss how they prepared the employee to be observed, what they learned during the observations, and how they and the employee felt about the experience. 

In addition to applying what they learn in class, participants keep a journal of their reflections about the classroom learning and the application exercises. During the instructor-led courses, I’ll give participants five minutes to reflect and write about how to apply what they’ve learned and what it means to them. Part of every application exercise includes a journaling activity to record what went well in the exercise and what could be done differently. 

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add? 

I expected many of the outcomes from the program. I expected people to embrace coaching. I expected to measure skill improvements from pre- and post- coaching skills assessments. The thing I didn’t anticipate was that this experience would be transformational for many participants. Many managers found a new energy in being a manager. 

Coaching adds a different element to the employee relationship in which the managers no longer feel like their role is simply to enforce rules and expectations. They realized there is a partnership, they can engage their employees, and they’re all working toward the same goals. It’s been very gratifying.