20 - L&D Buy-In for Talent Attraction and Retention, with John Morgan

Happy to be here, John. Thanks for having me. It is a pleasure to be with you.

That's very nice, thank you very much for the intro. Just really briefly, I've been in the human capital industry for my whole career—for just over 25 years. And I always like to think of myself as a blend of, you know, I run a large human capital business, but I'm also a psychologist in training. So I have a master's in organizational psychology and also an MBA. So I've just always been fascinated by human behavior at work, which is really why I do what I do. Happy to be on the show.

Absolutely. So at LHH, we really do quite a bit of research to help guide the work that we do. And the work that we do is really in three areas—I mean, if you really simplify it, we help our clients recruit talent, develop talent, and transition talent when they have to exit an organization. So this study really focuses on the middle pillar, which is developing talent—how we build leaders and how we help companies guide leadership development investment and programs. We felt that in the world we're living in right now—which is sort of the convergence of leadership skills changing amid AI, return-to-work programs formulating, Gen Z entering the workforce—it was just a really good time to take a step back and take a look at our customers and say, hey, what is working in leadership development. So that's really what the impetus was for the survey.

We did a survey of about 1,500 C-suite executives—these are C-suite leaders who were actually responsible for the purse strings of leadership development investments in their companies, and they were all large companies. It was across not only the US but also the UK, Canada, and Australia—so sort of all of our biggest English-speaking markets—just to get a sense for what was really working in the area of leadership development and also what were some of the challenges. So a couple of insights that we got out of this that we can dive into more: one, we really saw major challenges associated with change management and being agile—that was probably the development competency that rose to the top—but also how L&D programs really impact recruitment and retention. Some geographic differences, of course, in terms of what people are doing across the different markets, and then how do you build an L&D culture and what really works. So those are the areas that we really probed into.

Yeah, there were—obviously customs and work styles across those countries are a little bit different—but there were really two major significant differences that jumped out of the data when we looked at it. The first one was in North America—so in the US and Canada—the composition of leadership programs had a big focus on not just leadership but DEI. For sure, when you compared that to the UK and Australia and some of the other markets, we had almost 100% of leadership development programs at least having a component that was really strongly focused on DEI. We didn't see as many programs that had that focus in the non-North American markets, so that was one thing that really jumped out.

And I think the second one was that there's this success factor that leadership development programs are really only successful when they're linked with business objectives. I mean, we all kind of know this—it's a little bit of motherhood and apple pie, right? Leadership has to drive the business strategy. We found in North America, a majority—80%—felt that the linkage was pretty clear, that their programs were clearly linked to the business strategy. Outside of North America, we actually found that result to be much less—it was less than 50% affirmed that opinion that their programs were connected to their leadership strategies. So those were the kind of the two major geo differences that were actually called out statistically in the study that we did.

It wasn't a huge surprise to see the DEI component obviously come up, because I think companies that are based in North America are a little bit behind in that area, right? And I think the focus on that is actually encouraging to see—that lots of companies, you know, despite some of the recent government rulings, by the way, which some of these programs with DEI question—what we're seeing in the research and anecdotally with our customers is that almost all of our clients are really focused on building out this agenda, at least as a component of what effective leadership looks like. And that's really nice to see.

Great question, and maybe I'll start with just some of the challenges that emerged in the report. We actually talked about this question a lot. The interesting thing was that we saw several challenges emerging—getting that buy-in or even participation, whatever you want to call it, in the program that they were actually building and trying to fund. The five challenges that we saw that rose to the top: one was really what they categorized as a lack of interest in the program overall. Second was lack of awareness. Third was a perception that the resources in the program were not adequate. The fourth was that piece around lack of clarity around connection to the actual business. Last was perceived lack of measurability. So all the things that a CEO is going to ask, right? I think what's really great is what are the solutions to those that we found in the report.

So let's start with the impact of measurability. This has been the holy grail for any program that you're going to do for a long time. How do you demonstrate to the CEO of the company who's going to ultimately fund this, or the CFO, that you're getting value from leadership development in a quantifiable manner? We've made tremendous gains in the way we design programs now, because of the fact that we have the benefit of AI, big data, and lots of different digital tools that we can actually quantify things that we couldn't quantify in the past. So I'll give you the example of—most coaching programs, most leadership programs have a coaching component. It's always been really hard to quantify the impact of coaching, but any practitioner knows that it's the single best development tool on the planet. But how do you quantify it?

Well, now in 2023, every leadership development program has a one-on-one coaching component, and we're actually using digital platforms to measure that. So you can, in a real-time way, see what the person is working on and what is the connection to the behavioral competency that they're trying to gain improvement on, to the actual business. And we're able to do surveys to quantify the impact of the business on dollars. And when you're able to do that at scale in a company, you get reams and reams of data—you're not just talking about 20 people going through a program—you're talking about coaching being democratized to thousands of people in a company. So you can really then come with data that's measurable and says, here's the X to Y, here's the impact that we've made these volumes, and getting C-suites to invest more in leadership development.

And the other challenge is really—I think how do you overcome this is you need real executive sponsorship to create a culture for leadership development. I'm not talking about doing a video and saying, hey, atta-boy guys. I'm talking about the CEO or the executive sponsor of a leadership program personally talking about how leadership development impacted them and got them to the role that they're in, and telling their story and being vulnerable. Companies that do it this way really drive then a culture of commitment to development. And that's what I think, you know, ultimately—you ask me, like, what's the impact on attraction and retention? The research is clear. People want to go to companies where development is a priority. It's the number one reason why people join, it's the number one reason why people leave. So if you get executive sponsorship at the top that's real and authentic, then you can start building a culture where feedback is accepted, where vulnerability is accepted, and where actually it's an honor to go to a development program and not a chore.

Exactly, yeah.

Yeah, well, I think it goes by not only, as we said, being a visible advocate—not just once but continuously—but also, I think the investment talks at the end of the day. So I mean, you know, not just making sure that a leadership program is not for C-minus-one and C-minus-two only. If you're really trying to build a leadership development culture, you have to offer real development to every stage of the company. So our best clients that do this really well are really segmenting their employee population. When they're visibly putting investment into saying, hey, the competencies that you need for leadership at an early stage, a mid-stage, and a more seasoned executive stage are different, and we're going to develop different learning journeys and different experiences based on those competencies—so that from the moment you start here or the moment that you enter here, you're clear on what your actual leadership development path looks like.

And I think that's the other big reason why people leave a company—is career path becomes unclear. When career path is not clear or development isn't valued, that doesn't keep people in a company, even if you throw money at them often. So I think leadership support at the top—again, like we said, it's not just about turning up on the video, it's not just about making a speech once. It's money talks, and putting the investment into the program at all levels. And I love what a lot of our clients have done—they've, I use the example of coaching a lot because it's one of the most visible investments that you can give to everybody. Like, you can actually democratize coaching and make it available to everybody in the organization. And that's how you build a culture of development. I think the best way that an executive can prove that he or she believes in something is just to make it available—make it available and encourage people to use it. And again, make it a normal part of your cadence. You're getting up in your town hall, highlight the people that have been promoted, that have gotten out of these programs—really just make it an honor at all levels, not just the top.

Exactly right. And you know what's funny about that is—I've seen that a lot as well. We are starting to see it a little bit less, because there is definitely more of a shift to what we call internal career mobility, but it's really employment, right? Because there are so many open jobs that companies actually can't fill. It's a really interesting labor market that we're dealing with right now where you have, on one hand, a lot of large publicized tech downsizings, and on the other hand you have 3.5% unemployment in the US. There's people looking for jobs and there's jobs looking for people, as what I always say. And so companies are starting to realize that comment about, like, hey, we don't really have anything for you anymore—it's a really costly problem. It's a really costly problem to have to keep hiring and releasing, hiring and releasing. It's much cheaper to invest some money in people, help them grow in their career, and actually help them understand: here are your top five skills today, and here are your skill adjacencies that you can actually develop, because these are the new jobs that we are trying to fill, and we'd rather fill them with you than have to go outside. More and more companies are actually doing that. So my hope is that that problem that you just described starts to get solved, at least a little bit, because there's nothing worse than having a career conversation and you're like, yeah, well, your track here is over. You want people to be leaving as friends—you don't want people to leave that way.

Yeah, it's actually—the culture of leadership development is a key method to help solve, I think, the sort of issue that we have with return to work right now in the US particularly, because it's not much of an issue—that's one thing in the study—not as much of an issue outside of the US. You probably have seen this in your research as well, where in Continental Europe, everybody's in the office pretty much every day. So when you think about in the US, where we were headed even before the pandemic to a bit more of a hybrid model anyway, and it was exacerbated. Our research is really interesting. What we found is that right now, people just don't like extremes. So on the one hand, this is well documented—the mandate, especially in financial services right now, to be in the office five days a week. That's not going over very well, and my prediction is pretty clear: if it continues to go down that route, there'll be some retention issues, there's no doubt about it, because the labor market is still really strong.

On the other hand, on the other end of the spectrum, the idea that you can work every day in a virtual environment and be connected to the culture of a company is also not realistic. Here's what also doesn't work and what people don't like—and I always say this to our customers—it's like, work happens in between meetings. Work doesn't happen in the meeting. Work happens after the meeting—that's when actually people get things done. So the idea that you're going to have a virtual environment where you encourage people to come in just for a team meeting once a month or twice a month—that's not really building culture, building communication, collaboration. That's just getting people to see each other and then go back to their homes. So I don't think that works either.

I read the other day about a customer that we work with—J.M. Smucker, they do the jam and peanut butter—and they have a really novel concept that I could actually see taking off. They have this idea in their headquarters where they have basically this core-week concept, where you have 22 weeks out of the year, I think it was, in the office in their core weeks—they're basically every other week for the most part, except for the summer—and they're finding 80% of the people are going into the office, because they've got the flexibility. So it's not like two days a week or three days a week—it's this sort of core week, and you manage your work in that cycle. And it seems to be really taking off pretty well, actually.

So I think the research is pretty clear—hybrid is what people want. They don't want extremes, they want hybrid. Coming up with the structure for hybrid is really where the challenge is. And I think leadership culture is actually a really key part of it, because I think the way to get people back into the office is to say, listen—if you want to grow and develop as a leader in this company, you need to build the relationships, you need to collaborate with people, and as great as the tech tools are, we're humans, and that kind of has to happen in an office setting at some level. So I think designing our programs where at least a component of it is in person—and then what follows is facilitated by a lot of great technology tools, whether it's self-directed learning, whether it's virtual coaching, virtual peer circles—but when you're learning as a cohort, spend some time together in the office, because leadership development should mirror work at the end of the day, and that's how work actually happens.

Absolutely right.

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll give us the final word on the topic, and then I'll leave you with how to connect with me. I think the one thing that really rose to the top of the study also is this notion of change and agility, and how people need to develop leadership skills to manage change and agility. We found that really rising to the top—over 90% supported agility and responding to organizational shifts as a leadership development challenge. So I really encourage all the listeners—if you're building leadership development programs and you're really trying to figure out what the competencies are, make sure that you're addressing that, whatever way makes sense in your organization, because it's a really key leadership development component right now. You can reach me at [email protected]. Happy to reach out to any of your listeners and viewers to talk about leadership development or to talk more about LHH and the work that we do and the research that we do. Our website is lhh.com. And just thrilled, John, that you had me, and I'm happy to come back and talk about any of the work that we do at LHH in the future. So thanks again.