One of PayPal’s key leadership principles is called Win Together, which encourages employees to work as one to deliver great end-to-end results.

Kendra Proctor Goldbas, head of global L&D for PayPal, believes instilling a culture of a learning and growth mindset is how the enterprise L&D team can create wins. “We want to bring a sense of curiosity and a desire for growth to every employee that walks through the organization’s doors,” she says.

Working together

PayPal employs more than 25,000 colleagues across 27 countries who work together to empower consumers and businesses to join and thrive in the global economy. Through the company’s suite of products and services, it powers payments and transactions around the world. Employee roles and areas of responsibility range from engineering to design to product management.

When when Goldbas joined PayPal in 2021, learning programs followed a decentralized model spread across functions and locations. In Goldbas’s effort to transform the enterprise L&D function and ensure that programs were relevant for all employees, her team of talent development specialists located around the world nurtured partnerships throughout the organization to uncover tactical and technical skills needs and performance gaps.

“We spend a lot of time listening to leaders within the organization. We seek to understand what problems they’re trying to solve, where their pain points are, and where talent fits into their future plans,” she explains. “Whether it’s new technology or enhancing existing skills in a coding language, we need precise insights. Often, leaders are trying to get ahead of something innovative within the business or they need to adapt to something happening in the external environment.”

Ideating together

Developing a community of practice with functional learning teams across the company is another strategy the L&D team leverages to better understand the types of learning experiences and tools employees want and need.

“The middle of the organization is a voice that we need [to] always be listening to, so we assembled an advisory committee that cuts across the business to create a community of practice. These are folks who make up the inner workings of our company,” notes Goldbas.

Every quarter, the L&D function collaborates with the community of practice to shape career and leadership content. “We make sure that they understand thematically what we plan to focus on based on what we have seen in terms of engagement and feedback. We let them know how content and programs tie to the strategy of the business,” she states.

Goldbas adds that her team also consults with the community to get their buy-in. “We ask whether they think we are focusing on the right skills and behaviors.” Questions also include: Are L&D programs valuable to just one particular set of jobs or roles or something that is prioritized across the business? Are content and programs rolled out at the right time? Are courses the right size for the employees?

One insight from the community of practice is that, for learning to be in the flow of work, L&D could not always rely on three-hour formal training sessions. Instead, the team needed to build more immersive and bite-size learning options as well as create more access points to learning.

Learning together

Partnering with areas of the business is not the only way Goldbas taps into the concept of community. She believes that cultivating employee relationships can help enhance skills development and performance.

For example, the L&D team learned that many new managers lacked key people leadership skills. “They weren’t prepared for the role. They may have the necessary technical and hard skills but not the people skills. We also learned this caused many well-intentioned new leaders to be stretched too thin. They had to be responsible for hybrid teams without really knowing how to lead inclusively,” she shares.

In response, the team built a practical program to address universal pain points such as how to deliver feedback and a primer on PayPal-specific processes and policies. After launching the initiative, L&D realized that in addition to training, people leaders needed a community of other people leaders.

“Management can be a challenging place, especially for those who are elevating within the organization. One day, everyone is your peer, and the next day you are the leader. Many new managers were not sure where to go for answers,” Goldbas says.

A missing piece was finding a way to facilitate a sense of community by creating learning cohorts that stayed together through the program’s various experiences and courseware. As an added boost, each cohort has a dean (a fellow people leader with more leadership experience than other participants) assisting the entire learning experience. The deans facilitate discussions, present their own leadership experiences, and offer mentorship around what it means to be a leader at the company.

Finding ways to get employees to learn together as a community does not have to be as complex as coordinating and managing learning cohorts. Goldbas shares that launching the Career Learn-A-Thon has proven to be a simple yet effective strategy for getting employees worldwide to think about learning both as individuals and as part of a community.

Twice per year, the L&D function offers learning experiences over a continuous 36-hour period that starts in Singapore and ends in San Jose, California, where the corporate headquarters is located. Learning can occur asynchronously or in person; an offering can be a 20-minute webinar, a bite-size video, or a full-length course.

“It’s an organization-wide experience that celebrates learning all around PayPal,” Goldbas asserts. “We want to showcase how learning can be a part of your employee journey—wherever you are and whatever you do.”

Goldbas concludes, “This is how we win together—by creating a truly collaborative environment where our people can learn together and grow.”

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