Learning experts Michael Bland and Damon Hearne of Bank of America share a common passion--developing people. In this interview, Bland and Hearne draw from several decades of experience to examine the critical issues involved in managing a training function in a Fortune 100 company, including

• learning as a business

• structure, consistency, and discipline

• teamwork

• creativity

• emerging trends.

George Hall (GH): You have commented in the past that learning is a business. What do you mean by this?

Michael Bland (MB): A learning organization exists to improve business results, bottom line. We have three messages that reinforce this vision for our department. Our first is: Run your department as if it were a business. Like a business, you need to know your customers and your competition. You also need to understand and manage your costs--act as if you are spending your own money. To prove value, it is critical to identify and market your key value propositions, then measure and report on your results. This perspective makes the learning professional accountable for their contributions. When training staff act like training order-takers, they don't use critical thinking, make proactive decisions to improve a process, or take control of their own destiny. We all need to think like leaders and contribute to the next generation of the organization.

Another message is: Make it clear why our business partners should use us instead of someone else. We need to understand the business we support and continuously demonstrate our value to ensure that we are seen not as an expense but as an indispensable part of their success. We don't want our business partners to ever say, "Do we need this group?" We want them to be thinking, "What would I do without this group? How can I further leverage my learning investment to drive even greater results?"

Finally, our most critical message: The agenda of learning is the agenda of the business. The driver of everything we do is improving the performance and results of the businesses we support. Meaning, the business sets our agenda based on their strategic plans, identified gaps, performance improvement opportunities. Learning should never drive the agenda or priorities. Often, we don't even create the most whiz-bang solution we're capable of producing because that's not what the business need dictates. I often think of a conversation I had with one of my business partners in my first year with the bank. He said "Mike, your team creates great stuff, real top-notch learning. It's greatbut sometimes we don't need the Cadillac, sometimes we just need something fast, that will stop the bleeding." Our designers struggle with that reality sometimes because they want to build the very best, but I have to say, we've come a long way in optimizing the balance between our capability and the business drivers in the last couple years.

GH: In a recent interview, you said, "Structure, consistency, and discipline are fundamental to our management of the training function at Bank of America." How so?

Damon Hearne (DH): In a business environment that changes as rapidly as banking, we could not respond in a consistent and predictable manner for our business partners without structure and discipline. We learned a long time ago that when business partners experience a different process or flow each time they work with us, it confuses them and slows the process down. We're a Six Sigma organization, and to use a Six Sigma phrase, variation is the enemy. Our controlled process brings order to roles and responsibilities. Everyone knows what their roles are and when certain actions are going to happen in the process. When you enter into our world, you are going to have the same kind of experience time and again. Naturally, we encourage our staff to use their creativity; we don't boilerplate everything. However, what we can make repeatable or consistent, we do.

MB: Damon makes a great point. and I'd just like to add a little about accountability, creativity, and teamwork. While we continually coach and reinforce the importance of role clarity, following process, and staying "in standard," we also make sure our staff knows that everybody is accountable for looking out for project pitfalls and opportunities for improvement. If a team member sees a risk in a part of the process outside their formal responsibility, they still have a responsibility to address the issue. Our motto is "Team of Leaders." We all need to think and behave like leaders. Management doesn't always have all the best or brightest ideas. Rather, the "best ideas" are within each one of us, so we all need to contribute.

GH: What trends do you feel will most shape the field in the next five years?

MB: The issues that will likely dominate our thought over the next few years are further enabling and enhancing informal learning; measuring impact value; and deepening the connections between performance management, talent management, and learning. First, although we're making steady advances as a profession--I don't want to short sell what some great businesses and individuals are doing--learning still looks a lot like learning did ten years ago. We still take too long to create bloated courses that are out of date in six months. We need to get away from the traditional "I teach, you learn" methods. In contrast, we should explore prescriptive learning to target and reduce the amount of training our learners need to sit through. And let's get serious about small sharable content objects and lean course content up by better leveraging performance support and informal learning mechanisms.

In terms of measurement, I think training organizations need to get a lot better at measuring their impact to the whole business. I am not talking in terms of \[ROI experts Donald L.\] Kirkpatrick or \[Jack J.\] Phillips or \[Robert O.\] Brinkerhoff--I am not necessarily in any of those camps. I want to develop measures that the business cares about. Yes, I want to measure that performance changed due to the learning intervention, but I don't care so much about isolating the learning impact. That is where we get hung up. It's very difficult to isolate, since learning is typically only one of a suite of interventions leveraged against any opportunity. We need to measure our progress and impact through the eyes of the business, and what business leaders care about is "Did performance, and ultimately, our results, improve?" Consequently, measurements should be simple, practical, and use the data that the business tracks and has available.

Finally, I feel that the connections between performance management, talent management, and learning are under appreciated. Practitioners should cultivate a holistic viewpoint that integrates not just their own function but also the employee's lifecycle--from hiring through retirement. To do this, we ask, "How can learning more closely tie into performance management systems? How can we in learning provide feedback to human resources to help them recruit higher quality candidates?" As labor pools tighten and the pace of change continues to accelerate, talent is and will continue to be one of the biggest challenges our executives face. With these challenges, the learning organization has the opportunity now more than ever to evolve from being a training provider to becoming a strategic business partner--from being viewed as a "necessary expense" to a "strategic investment."

2007 ASTD, Alexandria, VA. All rights reserved.