How to Drive Organizational Change with Learning Programs

Featurted article By Mary Anne Amato and Eric Mankin, Harvard Business Publishing 

Here’s the problem—your organization needs to change. Even the most successful companies realize that “what got you here won’t get you where you want to be.” The challenge for most organizations today is one of transformation. They need new tools, new language, and new frameworks. And it all needs to happen fast.

Today’s interconnectedness requires skills beyond staying on the bleeding edge of technology trends. As an IT expert, you need to partner with a broad range of people outside of IT. Working successfully with these key groups requires learning how to become more customer-focused and more innovative, and enabling teams to work more collaboratively across disciplines, countries, languages, and time zones.

Organizations can drive the change they need through a new breed of corporate learning: large cohort development. Large cohorts apply a MOOC model – massive open online course – to a closed, single organization. Like a MOOC, large cohort learning delivers targeted content to many people at once – 500 learners or more. What sets an organizational large cohort program apart is that it sets the learning within a company’s specific context and objectives.

Consider these examples:

– A global technology consultancy needed to facilitate its change management efforts around organizational alignment. The large cohort program helped nearly 400 leaders across all businesses embrace a new strategic directive to redefine the customer experience.

– A large professional services firm wanted to give its partners new tools and approaches to enhance the conversations they have with clients. A large cohort initiative for 500 partners quickly established new methods that linked business practices with recent research, and enabled a live global discussion on real-world applications.

Both examples share the common goal of quickly enabling large groups within the organization to have a shared conversation, shared objectives, and shared learning. In both cases, they use learning as a means to a business end. They require acquisition and application of new frameworks to drive better business results—in the context of their specific businesses. And they do it at scale, reaching hundreds of participants at a time.

Learning for Impact

Since 1959, when Donald Kirkpatrick first published his seminal Four-Level Training Evaluation Model, the highest goal of corporate learning has always been impact—learning has little use to a company if it’s not applied.

Recent advances in technology, from YouTube to MOOCs, have increased the amount of content available to learners with a few clicks. But as the range of choice increases, so does the danger of fragmentation—companies need to be aligned in their vision and approach. To achieve organizational impact, learners need to have shared experiences, not individual learning moments.

Participant-centered learning – that is, the combination of case-method instruction, online discussion, off-line self-study, and team activities – achieves impact through content, exercises, tools, and thought leadership that give learners experiences.

When this approach is applied in a large cohort, the programs bring the specific context of that organization into the learning experience for greater relevance. The impact is the creation of shared experiences among a group of company leaders, which can pave the way for ongoing relationships and collaborations across global, functional, and divisional boundaries.

Whether the goal is corporate transformation or leadership training, learners need to be exposed to new leadership and management frameworks and concepts, they need to internalize them, and they need to practice their application. Thanks to new technologies and approaches, large cohort programs can allow hundreds of people to share the same tailored experience; to reflect on it, drawing on key insights; and to apply it in their work. When the right elements are in place, large-scale programs allow companies to make dramatic changes at high speed.

Mary Anne Amato – Senior Learning Solutions Manager, Harvard Business Publishing

At Harvard Business Publishing, MaryAnne architects world-class leadership development programs in partnership with clients. She drives organizational impact by aligning participant-centered learning to key business strategies, with a focus on measurement. Mary Anne was previously the managing director of Research for Strategic Management (RSM), where for 12 years she led numerous Fortune 100 engagements focused on talent management in all its forms, including management development, leadership development, performance management, succession planning, assessment, and selection. Prior to RSM, MaryAnne headed the organization development efforts of TIAA-CREF, where she was key in the organization redesign of the marketing and shared services organizations toward a customer-centric philosophy. She began her career at MetLife, where she managed the employee engagement process. MaryAnne speaks frequently at industry conferences and contributes her writing to many publications.

Eric Mankin – Director, Global Delivery, Harvard Business Publishing

Eric Mankin is a director of global delivery in the Corporate Learning group at Harvard Business Publishing. He is responsible for the development and delivery of virtual executive education programs to executives and leaders worldwide. His work with clients has been recognized with several gold “Learning in Practice” awards given annually by CLO Magazine. Eric brings over 25 years of experience in professional services and entrepreneurship to his work at Harvard Business Publishing. Prior to joining, Eric was the executive director of the Innovation and Corporate Entrepreneurship Research Center at Babson College’s School of Executive Education. He also worked with the city of Boston to design and implement its innovative Hubway bikesharing program, which expanded to New York in 2013.