Training the Leaders of Tomorrow? Best to Start Early

BY Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 31, 2021

Training leaders is not just about moving employees up your ladder. Effective leadership education can build culture, foster diversity and inclusion, and even influence company reputation.

The far-reaching potential of such training is what five panelists discussed during From Day One’s conference last week exploring the role of HR in building authentic leaders.

Belinda Grant-Anderson, VP of talent development at AT&T, said leadership training programs can reinforce the behaviors that companies want at the center of company culture, and for her team, diversity and inclusion is central.

Internal leadership training can also have effects outside a company’s doors, said Cheryl Smith, who leads talent development at Xerox, where she trains leaders who will shape the company’s reputation. “We wanted to show that we’re committed to early-career folks. You know, Xerox isn’t just your father’s company,” Smith said. “One of the things that I did was to create an early-career, leadership-development program to win the hearts and minds of those who are earlier in the workforce, and turn them into internal ambassadors for the company’s future.”

In fact, leadership development can start even earlier, before a young person enters corporate life. For Melissa Kilby, executive director of United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up, whose programs have involved 75,000 young women in 125 countries, leadership training is about equipping young women with a strong identity they can take into the workforce. “We are striving for equality, and I know many of the young women I work with want to see that in their workforces, but we also know that they may have challenges along the way, so how can we prepare them for that?”

The panelists agreed that to build effective training programs, organizations must first identify their goals. And for most, success is evaluated against specific metrics. Grace Berman, the senior director of learning and development at DaVita, the global kidney-care company, said identifying business metrics is the first step in her program design.

Leadership-training experts in conversation, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Melissa Kilby of Girl Up, and Laurie Rebholz of Citigroup. Bottow row, from left: Grace Berman of DaVita, Belinda Anderson of AT&T, and Cheryl Smith of Xerox (Image by From Day One)

What kind of metrics? For Laurie Rebholz, the head of global leadership and performance solutions at Citigroup, one quantitative goal is to increase representation of marginalized groups at all levels of the company. “If you think about how women and minorities are moving up the pipeline more slowly, that also means we’re reaching them from a development perspective more slowly,” she said. “We rebuilt the entire ecosystem in the lens of democratization.”

AT&T’s Grant-Anderson said strategic business goals are front and center, along with key qualitative outcomes, like the culture-creating behaviors they want to encourage. To support women of color and Black and Latinx leaders, her team trains managers to mitigate and confront biases. “We made sure that our supervisors are actually educated around those cultural issues, those corporate issues, so that they understand the gaps and that they’re undergoing some learning along with that individual.” Once leaders understand how to work toward a trust-based relationship, she said, they can move from mentor to advocate to sponsor.

Before bringing participants into leadership programs, managers should get a baseline assessment of their competencies, the panelists said, in order to measure how much progress they’ve made after the programs wrap up. That will help determine whether the company’s business goals have been met, but leadership-training programs must also serve participants’ needs and their professional goals.

AT&T asks participants what they want to gain from the programs, and Citigroup gives learners as much control as possible over how they engage with programs of their choosing. At Xerox, Smith said her program aims to expand participants’ overall career potential, even if it’s not with Xerox. “We want these chosen leaders to have broader careers than they would otherwise have if you were just sitting in your department,” Smith said. “So the design that I selected has a lot of executive visibility. It’s intense, but very purposeful.”

The mode of delivery also matters. Some panelists said their organizations have moved from in-person to virtual classrooms so workers can still benefit from leadership education during the pandemic, but Grant-Anderson’s team strived to give the virtual training a community flavor. In-person training had become cost-prohibitive for AT&T before the pandemic, so the organization had long been delivering leadership training online. “But what we found during Covid is that people needed people,” she said, “and they needed that connection and they needed to be able to speak with each other.” So to better serve their workforce’s needs, her team transitioned from delivering entirely self-directed study to educating small online cohorts of about 20 people each.

Rebholz and Kilby say they have successfully used blended delivery structures, including live virtual classrooms, self-directed study, and social-learning platforms. Multi-format delivery makes it easy for global organizations like Girl Up and Citigroup to deliver interactive experiences across time zones.

The age of future leaders should also be taken into account, the group said. DaVita’s self-directed leadership training, which includes a leadership podcast and their self-directed SPARK program, has been especially embraced by early-career employees.

Kilby said Berman’s team is ahead of the curve, that social-learning platforms in particular are effective and even preferred by young, digitally native professionals who enter the workforce looking for an employer that is invested in their future.

The panelists recommended using post-training measurement to evaluate the success of leadership education. Smith’s team tracks employee achievements, like new roles and stretch assignments, and Rebholz and Berman recommended surveying both participants and their managers to quantify the effects.

“Three months after the program, for some select core programs,” Berman said, “we will send out a survey to the participant as well as their manager and ask them similar impact questions to determine if they actually applied what they learned, if their skill has increased, and to what degree was the learning intervention responsible for that increase.”

But just like program goals, success evaluation must have a softer side. Learner experience must also be considered—do participants actually believe there is value in the program? Grant-Anderson asks participants how willing they are to recommend the training course to their peers, and Kilby’s team directly involves future leaders in making improvements to the programming. She put it this way: “We build with our leaders so we’re building for them.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

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Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | April 10, 2024

Where to Start: Making the Workplace Inclusive of Neurodiversity

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A workplace that is psychologically safe is welcoming to all, neurodivergent or not.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the BBC, the Economist, the Washington Post, Quartz, Fast Company, and Digiday’s Worklife.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 29, 2024

How to Create and Sustain a Growth Mindset to Nurture Talent

When Dr. Mary Murphy was working on her PhD at Stanford, she was mentored by Carol S. Dweck, best-selling author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, a book that covers the potential of individuals. Now a social psychologist, Murphy has taken the mindset concept a step further and for over a decade has studied how the “fixed” or "growth” mindset affects not only individuals, but groups of people. Murphy discussed research from her book, Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations, and how it can help teams during a fireside chat at From Day One’s March Virtual Conference.Those with a fixed mindset, Murphy says, believe in being born with skills that can’t grow any further. While those with a growth mindset believe they can learn and grow into new abilities. When talking about teams, organizations, families—there is a similar mindset culture.In a fixed mindset culture, or a “culture of genius” as Murphy called it, the focus is on the star performers. The opposite is a “culture of growth” where there is a focus on continuous learning so anyone can grow and contribute. And it’s that culture of growth that organizations need.Idea SparkIn 2005 during her PhD program, Murphy clearly recalled when this group application of mindset sparked. She was at a grad student seminar supporting a friend, where a professor voiced his opinion about what the fatal flaw of this student’s work was. Another professor chimed in and disagreed, saying the fatal flaw was something else. In essence, it was a battle of which professor was right.“I saw what it was doing to my friend,” she said. “All of a sudden, he lost focus. 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On the other hand, the mentality of growth and how we can all contribute really turned things around for the better.Dr. Mary Murphy discussed her new book Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations in a fireside chat moderated by From Day One co-founder Steve Koepp (photo by From Day One)Murphy presented the idea to her new mentor, asking what if mindset is more than just internal? What if it’s baked into culture and influences the cultivation of talent? She blinked a few times and said, “No one's ever thought of mindset this way. But we should do it together. And that began 15 years of work on reconceptualizing the mindset, as not just in our head, but also as this cultural feature.”Time to StudyNow with 75 studies in her back pocket, Murphy has seen firsthand just how deep mindset goes. Murphy and Dweck looked at the mindset of teachers and faculty members in K-12 and college and how they practice that in the classroom.“We look at how that impacts student experience. We’ve created apps that actually measure student experience in the moment looking at their sense of belonging, whether they think their teacher has a growth mindset, belief for them or not, their sense of self efficacy, their trust of the teacher.”What they found was that even if a student has a growth mindset, when set into a fixed mindset culture, they won’t have the opportunity to benefit from their growth mindset. The group trumps and stilts their progress.  In the National Study of Learning Mindsets, a randomized control trial of more than 12,000 students around the country underwent a growth mindset program to see how it would impact their grades and if they’d be willing to take challenging courses. As expected, it had a positive effect. Their GPA was higher and more of them enrolled in the challenging courses than the control group. They also looked at where the program didn’t work.“The answer was two places,” Murphy said. “It was with teachers that had more fixed mindset beliefs or engaged in fixed mindset practices, then giving students that personal growth mindset. The effect was zero. It had no impact. It wasn't even a small impact – it had no impact.”The other place it didn’t work was when peers didn’t engage in challenge seeking, then students were less likely to want to work hard. But when there were teachers and peers who relished a challenge and supported each other, the growth mindset helped students flourish.Organizational CultureWorking with companies of all shapes and sizes, Murphy saw similar results. The mindset of a team at large has a huge impact on creativity, collaboration, and innovation. In one study in particular, they looked at the difference between a psychologically safe environment and a growth minded environment. They found that psychological safety is the baseline for any other growth to take place.“Psychological safety just means that you're willing to speak up when something’s gone wrong. But growth mindset culture really is being vigilant about how to improve what you’re doing, your interactions with others, the outcomes and the strategies that you’re trying. You’re proactively looking for improvement opportunities.”In fixed mindset cultures, they search for the narrow genius prototype to come up with all the answers. When in reality, a growth culture would open up the spectrum of recruiting, looking more at positive values. 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He read Dweck’s book and wanted to help Microsoft become the first growth minded culture and company. Kathleen Hogan, head of talent, asked how things needed to change so they could recruit and onboard people that would help shift the company’s culture. She implemented changes, but success didn’t come right away. Some bragged they had the biggest growth mindset in the room. “She had to really talk to people about what a growth mindset actually looks like. And to bake that in to some of the incentive systems and also some of the mentoring and sponsoring and support systems so that people could take on challenges could make mistakes, and actually get points for the learning and the growth from those mistakes and the communicating of those mistakes across the company, so that the whole company can learn at the same time more rapidly.” That’s when things picked up. Slowly but surely, the culture was changing. It became okay to make mistakes, but putting out ideas and taking risks and being open to failure became the norm. And that’s how they got cloud computing. Was the culture change worth it? No doubt about it.Carrie Snider is a Phoenix-based journalist and marketing copywriter.

Carrie Snider | March 28, 2024