Development and Learning in Organizations

Emerald Article: Interview with Charles Jennings Interview by William Strange

Article information:
To cite this document: Interview by William Strange, (2012),"Interview with Charles Jennings", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 26 Iss: 2 pp. 34 - 37 Permanent link to this document: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14777281211201240 Downloaded on: 10-10-2012 To copy this document: permissions@emeraldinsight.com This document has been downloaded 293 times since 2012. *

Users who downloaded this Article also downloaded: *

Sheila Corrall, James O'Brien, (2011),"Developing the legal information professional: A study of competency, education and training needs", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 63 Iss: 2 pp. 295 - 320 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00012531111135718 Milton Mayfield, Jacqueline Mayfield, (2011),"Effective performance feedback for learning in organizations and organizational learning", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 26 Iss: 1 pp. 15 - 18 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/14777281211189128 Hui Chen, Miguel Baptista Nunes, Lihong Zhou, Guo Chao Peng, (2011),"Expanding the concept of requirements traceability: The role of electronic records management in gathering evidence of crucial communications and negotiations", Aslib Proceedings, Vol. 63 Iss: 2 pp. 168 - 187 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/00012531111135646

Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by For Authors: If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service. Information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com With over forty years' experience, Emerald Group Publishing is a leading independent publisher of global research with impact in business, society, public policy and education. In total, Emerald publishes over 275 journals and more than 130 book series, as well as an extensive range of online products and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 3 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.
*Related content and download information correct at time of download.

Leading edge
Interview with Charles Jennings
Interview by William Strange
harles is the director of Duntroon Associates, a leading learning and performance consultancy practice focused on helping organisations build their ability to deliver maximum business benet from their workforce. He is also a Principal of The Internet Time Alliance, a think-tank of leading learning and business performance practitioners helping organisations exploit emerging practice and informal and social learning to work smarter. From 2001 until the end of 2008 he was the Chief Learning Ofcer for Reuters and Thomson Reuters.

Charles Jennings

Would you be able to tell us a little about your professional background and what led you to become involved with corporate governance?
I was an academic and professor at Southampton Business School and ran the national centre for network-based learning for several years. Even when working as an academic I was managing a lot of projects and running what we call near market research with large corporations, helping them to integrate new ways of people development using smart approaches and technology. I guess where I really saw the importance of learning governance was on leaving academia in 1995 to work for Dow Jones Markets then part of the big American Dow Jones Company. I had previously seen, working both as a consultant and also from my academic experience, that one of the key elements to engendering change and transforming the way in which organizations supported learning was to have a really robust and structured governance process and structure, particularly in times of change and we are living in times of change all the time now. It still surprises me that around 50 percent of organizations do not have an explicit governance structure and approach for how they support people in the workplace a crime! What became apparent to me really early on when I rst started a big learning transformation at Reuters was that a good governance structure and a set of governance processes were probably the simplest way in which to align strategy right through the organization and make sure that what the learning and development function was doing was aligned with the business requirements and those of the executive level. It seemed to me a no-brainer really. Everything tumbles out of a good governance structure:
B B

our agreed priorities; the ability to change priorities to ensure we are responding to changes in the organization; and the systems, structures, practices and processes to embed in all our undertakings.

There are many different models of corporate governance around the world. In your opinion, what is governance?
I often refer to governance as being the way we do stuff around here. It has to be very practical. If you can ensure that everything is coherent and that there is absolute clarity around accountability and responsibility in other words what needs to get done and where the accountability lies, and whos responsible for the actions then the learning and development function can operate in an effective and efcient way. For me this is

PAGE 34

DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING IN ORGANIZATIONS

VOL. 26 NO. 2 2012, pp. 34-37, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1477-7282

DOI 10.1108/14777281211201240

what governance is about. How you structure and how you run learning and development to make it efcient and effective. In the context of learning, governance is therefore understanding and dening the structures, the systems, the practices and the processes that underpin strategy, effectiveness and accountability.

From an La&D perspective, how important is it for learning professionals to be involved in sculpting company strategy and at what level should this take place?
I see two elements here. One is that senior learning leaders need to be involved in company strategy, full stop. This is because company strategy is dened and evolves the learning leaders have a responsibility for ensuring that the workforce is going to be able to execute that strategy. Unless learning leaders are intimately involved as this strategy is dened and developed, then they will be at arms length and will not have the clarity needed in order to deliver on the demands the organization makes on them. If you look at a balanced score card approach, which lots of organizations use, where they have nancial, customer, business and people lines and the learning and development organisation is put at arms length from organizational strategy you are essentially saying that the leadership will dene the strategy and simply pass down its needs and requirements to L&D. It is the same as not involving the CFO in the nancial dimension, and instead we will simply tell the CFO what we need to do. Clearly this never happens! The same is true of the head of customer service, sales or any other senior or critical role in terms of business execution. I think one of the challenges we have to address is that in many organizations learning and development is seen as an arm of HR and often L&D is represented at that level by an HR director. The HR director is representing a lot of things on this people dimension and, I think, cannot really represent the learning side effectively.

In many organizations the line between L&D and HR can appear quite blurred. At what point do the roles of L&D and HR professional part ways but also, how do they best work together?
That is a good point. I have always seen HR as being the umbrella organization and within HR you have a set of professional groups. Now, some organizations split L&D so that part of that maybe the functional development ts within the line and the responsibility of that line of business. The more strategic elements in terms of dening the strategy, the senior leadership, management and new development in all done in the centre. Some organizations have a hybrid model; other organizations drive it all out of HR. There is certainly a very tight link between the other HR people functions and L&D. However I have seen real challenges particularly where you have an HR business partner model in which the HR business partner sees themselves as the key link, the only link, between the line of business need and HR functions. I think is a real challenge because L&D is a very specialist area. I always argue that to be a good learning professional you need to have a number of core skills: you need to understand adult learning, the business, balance sheets etc, and key stakeholders. You also need to have an understanding of technologies. So my view about that linkage: I think there needs to be a close linkage between the overall people strategy and the L&D strategy in an organization, but I do not think the answer is to have HR generalists or business partners acting as agents for L&D. Where I have seen this work best is where you have HR business partners who, on discovering a problem that has to do with competency, skills and knowledge of employees, bring in their specialists. This a little bit like going to your GP who has a wide spectrum of knowledge on a lot of things and so will identify if there is a particular problem and send you to a specialist. The GP will not intermediate your relationship with the specialist, rather they hand the problem over. HR businesses partners holding L&D people at arms length and not allowing them to work directly with the stakeholder causes all sorts of problems. It slows the process down, it does not allow L&D people to understand the real business problems, it does not allow them to build relationships and almost inevitably leads to a below par solution.

VOL. 26 NO. 2 2012 DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING IN ORGANIZATIONS PAGE 35

What should L&D professionals bear in mind when dening their own departmental strategies to align with that of the business?
There is a need to understand how the governance ts into the operating model of the business, this is absolutely clear. However with every development strategy I think it comes down to how you organise. Industrialisation led to specialisation, however specialisation without the whole overview lads to chaos. There is no doubt that L&D people need to be specialists as one learning professional can no longer cover all bases. L&D people need core skills, but also specialist skills. I have often been asked in my consultancy work whether it is a good idea to have L&D teams who are just concentrated on designing, developing and delivering formal classroom based learning and others who are concentrating on technology based learning, and then yet another group who will look at how we support people in the workplace. I do not think this works because if you re going to be an effective L&D professional in the twenty-rst century you need to have an understanding of where technology ts, and how learning occurs in the workplace, as well as knowing the principles of good formal learning design. Every L&D professional needs to have a good understanding of workplace learning, performance support, and informal learning as well as a whole range of other experiences and skills. You cannot simply stick your head in the sand and say well my job is to design, develop and deliver courses! Equally you need to have a really good understanding of to the best approaches to identify performance problems with your stakeholders and engage with your stakeholders accordingly. This requires consultancy skills. Without these you cannot understand their business problem or have adult, grown-up conversations. around what the best possible solutions can be brought to bear, and you end up simply order-taking. I think one of the major challenges we have is that people, and often L&D people, see themselves as being able to solve any problem where underperformance is involved for example if customer service satisfaction levels are down and the feedback tells us our experiences with your customer-facing people are not good there is often a knee-jerk reaction we need to train our people. There has been a lot of research carried out that shows about 80% of underperformance has nothing whatsoever to do with lack of knowledge or skill, rather it is due to motivation or inadequate processes. Formal training, or any type of training will have little, if any, impact on these. Solutions to these problems often lie with leadership and management actions. L&D professionals need to understand this fact. This is why I do not like the training needs analysis approach as this assumes that training is the answer when we know that in 80 percent of cases training is not the answer. For me, performance analysis is the key and this is where the consulting skills come in.

How would an L&D professional go about quantifying the business contribution of training to an organizations board?
I get asked this on an almost daily basis! I think that you need to take a step back and take a broader view of evaluation and measurement. For me the answer is this: the only valid evaluation is determining the impact of learning on outputs in terms of performance and productivity in the wider sense (such as increasing customer satisfaction, reducing rst-time error rate, increasing employee engagement etc.) Measuring learning in terms of assessments may have some use but is not what I would call strategic value-adding. The next question is how do you quantify L&Ds contribution to those outputs. IBM and the ASTD did a very interesting study back in 2005 where they interviewed a large number of C-level managers and chief learning ofcers. What came out of this study really clearly was that senior managers are actually not obsessed by data. They want to understand what L&D is doing and need to gain the impression that L&D is contributing and pulling the same direction as their managers and adding to their efforts. But they are not going to be convinced by masses of L&D-generated data if they do not feel in their gut that a strategic contribution has been made. What the study found was that a lot of L&D departments spend a huge amount of time almost trying to justify their existence with overly-complex ROI and measurement approaches.

PAGE 36 DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING IN ORGANIZATIONS VOL. 26 NO. 2 2012

If I am advising organizations I always say that the key ways in which you can ensure that L&D value is being recognized and that you are getting a reasonably accurate view of your value is to build solid relationships with managers in order to have open and honest discussions about your contribution to the overall outputs. Once you do this you will nd that managers are actually very open to saying well this has been a success, our customer satisfaction levels have gone up 4 percent and we acknowledge that what the L&D department did with our people contributed to that success. Trying to measure actual percentages and details can, I think, often end up and be seen as L&D leaders trying to justify their existence. To paraphrase the outcome of the IBM study if your senior leaders and managers think you are doing a good job then you are doing a good a good job. If they think you are not doing a good job then you are not doing a good job. Relationships are key. It is a bit like train travel. Train companies can tell us that they are providing a fantastic service and can show us all the data to back this. Frankly, they can do whatever they like. If, as a passenger, my fellow passengers and I think we are getting a rubbish service, we are getting a rubbish service. No amount of data will convince us otherwise if this conicts with our experience!

VOL. 26 NO. 2 2012 DEVELOPMENT AND LEARNING IN ORGANIZATIONS PAGE 37