Chief Learning Officers
A Chief Learning Officer (CLO) is a senior executive responsible for overseeing effective training and personnel development within an organization. The CLO plays a crucial role in ensuring that a company's workforce is well-equipped to meet operational goals through continuous learning and engagement. This position emerged prominently in the 1990s and has become vital for businesses aiming to adapt and evolve in a competitive landscape. The CLO combines expertise in business operations with knowledge of educational theory, psychology, and technology to foster a culture of learning and improvement among employees.
Key responsibilities of a CLO include developing training programs, engaging employees in their professional growth, and serving as a liaison between the workforce and upper management. By directly interacting with employees, the CLO helps identify areas for improvement and implements strategies to enhance overall productivity and morale. This role is essential in fostering an agile workplace that can respond to challenges effectively. However, CLOs may face resistance from both employees and management, particularly in organizations with entrenched practices or institutional inertia. Ultimately, the CLO's mission is to align training and development with the company's goals, ensuring sustainable growth and a well-prepared workforce.
Chief Learning Officers
Abstract
The Chief Learning Officer (CLO) within a company oversees the direct implementation of effective and efficient information management and personnel development using both hands-on collaborative learning practices and cutting-edge technology. The CLO is essentially a company's director of training. As such, this senior-level executive brings together business expertise and technology know-how with advanced educational theories and motivational psychology to inspire, implement, direct, and optimize the evolution of a business.
Overview
Businesses, of course, need to evolve. Indeed, businesses spend billions each year in an effort to direct effective training protocols and to recognize and promote talent within the company. But a corporation, whether a neighborhood grocery store or a multinational conglomerate, is a massive and intricately organized network with a workforce that if not like-talented is at least designed to be like-minded in that the entire workforce is theoretically designed to create the opportunity to put into place the business's goals, both short- and long-term. Coordination and oversight of a company's varied and vast workforce was traditionally divided among multiple departments, as human resources, training management, and talent coordinators and developers; authority fell to a coterie of departmental and division level supervisors.
Each level of authority brought with it conflicting expectations. Difficulties arose when a company's workforce failed to cohere into a clear and organized system. Indeed, the larger the company, the more likely it was that basic information management and basic skills training would fail to find implementation in the workforce. A company then stagnated—the best and most optimistic visions of the executive administration levels could not find their way into real-time implementation. A company came to accept diminished expectations; the best talent often deserted the network for better opportunities at more organized companies; and the top echelon administration itself came to value its own power and entrenched position over any concerns about the company's growth.
A company must direct and develop its internal operations, regardless of the type of goods and/or services it provides. Distinct from product and service development and customer/client operations, however, is the company's direct control of its personnel from recruiting to onboarding, from training to promotion. Since the 1990s, the administration of those processes has been evolving into a major senior-level position in most Fortune 500 companies. Indeed, the evolution of the CLO has been one of the most important developments in business in the new millennium. Maverick business icon Jack Welch, the chief executive officer (CEO) of General Electric (GE), essentially created the position in 1990 when, recognizing that the company needed to direct its own personnel development, promoted Steven Kerr to a senior level position for which Welch actually had to coin a term. Over the next two decades, Kerr became recognized as one of business's most compelling figures, virtually singlehandedly creating the position of CLO under what became his operating maxim: "Education is a noun. Learning is a verb."
The position has become one of the most respected (and powerful) positions within any company that is genuinely committed to its own evolution. The position of CLO is now synonymous with a positive change and a company's need for continuous assessment. As Kelly Palmer, the current CLO for LinkedIn, says about her role, "It was exciting to think about learning as a blank canvas, to think about all the things we could do, how we could think about learning differently" (Whitney, 2016). The position has come to combine familiarity with a business's operations with a strong background in educational theory and in the core principles of motivation, management training, personnel management, and work psychology as well as competencies in the use of technology and social media.
How will a business best coach its own personnel? The CLO is first and foremost familiar with the business analytics of a specific company. Indeed, the CLO first studies the operations of a business and then diagnoses the areas where personnel are underused, or overworked, or ineffectively trained. The CLO directly engages with the workforce, motivates and inspires the workforce to resist complacency and to question the operational status quo, to constantly review and assess operations and procedures, to make learning itself a fundamental element of the day-to-day work experience. In doing so, the CLO essentially trains a workforce to be open and flexible to the potential challenge of responding in real-time to the boom and bust cycles that are typical of any major corporation.
The CLO not only trains but also manages the workforce. Unlike other senior-level executives in the so-called C Suite—CEO, chief financial officer (CFO), chief operating officer (COO), and the chief information officer (CIO)—the CLO engages the workforce directly. The CLO coaches, motivates, even mentors employees as a way to ensure the rapid and efficient evolution of a company along its determined goals. Thus, the CLO not only is directly responsible to the workforce and to the senior management team but also directly impacts the perception of the company and its potential for growth among the company's primary shareholders.
The CLO is expected to deliver measurable results, and success must be quantifiable within a specific period. "Identifying metrics and showing the bottom-line impact improves [the CLO's] standing as a trusted partner for the business and paves the way for investment in [the business's] leaders—and the organization's future" (Byham, 2017). CLOs, thus, do more than promote and inspire. Sales, productivity, and/or efficiency must improve; customer/client satisfaction must be provable through surveys or direct interaction and discussion. Profits need to spike. The CLO, thus, is the ultimate team player, the ultimate motivational guru, the ultimate teacher. In short, the CLO is the executive directly in charge of making sure the learning and training of a company matches its goals, its mission, and its short- and long-term projections for growth.
By 2000, post-graduate programs specifically geared to CLO training had been developed in many of the most prominent business schools, primarily on the East and West Coasts. In 2016 alone more than five hundred articles on the role of the CLO were published; in addition, numerous corporate weekend workshops and webinars were developed to explore the role of the CLO. In 2017, the average starting salary for a CLO topped $80,000.
Applications
Although the position of CLO is relatively new and is itself evolving as an ever-widening variety of businesses begin to implement the position as a way to oversee and motivate their own workforce for optimum results, the CLO is generally responsible for four areas of business operations: training development; workforce engagement; direct mentoring for specific-goal projects; and communication liaison with both upper management and employees concerning work place practices and day-to-day operations.
By far the primary area of responsibility for the CLO is training development. Indeed, it was a concern for GE's often scattershot approach to employee training that initially sparked Welch's decision to coordinate training into a single executive-level position. A company is never a stable environment; a company is always in process, hiring, training, evaluating, promoting, and terminating positions. The management of that process is critical to company success. It cannot be simply the responsibility of the human resource team. Nor can it be simply the responsibility of individual departmental and division supervisors, who lack a broad overview of the company's operations.
The CLO uses a variety of instructional approaches to ensure that the workforce is trained effectively and that over time each individual unit of human resource is managed, evaluated, and deployed to optimize their talents. That in turn directly impacts the customer/client experience. "In today's fast-paced business environment, continuous employee learning is imperative since the employee experience and customer service are invariably intertwined" (Hassell, 2017). In addition, the CLO observes areas of deficient operations and makes specific recommendations for changes in training practices as a way to solve these issues.
As such, the CLO can conduct or direct hands-on training initiatives that include classroom-style sessions, webinars, formal or informal group discussions, and/or written evaluations or surveys as a way to secure direct feedback from the workforce. Most prominently the CLO coordinates what are called onboarding practices, that is, the routine of training and educational sessions that a new hire engages as part of beginning a job. Those sessions are critical in establishing the company's expectations and, in turn, their respect for the talent they are hiring.
Indeed, the CLO is per force a people person, able to engage without patronizing, to direct without intimidating, to inspire without bullying. The goal of any CLO is to listen to the workforce, watch its operations first hand, and engage employees in ways that create a feeling of professionalism and respect. Knowledge of a company's protocols, its mission, its short-term goals, and its long-term ambitions is critical to a well-run organization. That knowledge, however, needs to be introduced, promoted, and disseminated within a network to ensure that network's coordinated efforts; that knowledge management is largely the job of the CLO.
More than broad operational direction, the CLO is responsible for day-to-day workforce engagement, that is, managing the workplace by ensuring that critical information finds its way to the appropriate offices and divisions; new policies and/or policy amendments are quickly and efficiently promulgated within a network; employee concerns are funneled and directed into the appropriate offices; and work place conflicts are addressed using the appropriate and approved network protocols. As such a CLO is a sort of confusion manager, working to minimize any feeling within a network that one department does not work with the same information with which others work, or that one supervisor or team or department is out of the loop.
Information is the vital lifeline of any network. By leading the assessment of ongoing operations, the CLO sustains the business's agility, that is, its ability to react in real-time to the unexpected. The CLO, therefore, must be agile, a nimble thinker, able to spot and assess problems in real time. "CLOs must be able to respond to changes quickly, reinventing business lines and ways of working" (Dutton, 2016).
The CLO is also a hands-on operations manager. A CLO directly mentors supervisory personnel and engages that administrative staff during specific projects ongoing within a network, projects that involve clear and specific operations and have pending, time-sensitive deadlines. As such, a CLO is involved in virtually all expressions of a network operation. Whatever the goods or services that the company produces or promotes, the CLO brings to its operations a background in psychology, an ability to take the measure of a person and to find the appropriate ways to spur optimum productivity and to ensure the success of projects that have been deemed crucial to company projections. "[CLOs] need to learn how to give real-time feedback that reframes their team members' mistakes as opportunities to learn and to keep getting better at what they do" (Johnson & Millard, 2017). The CLO thus is either directly involved with these projects or maintains a direct connection through avenues of digital communication and feedback. By assuming the responsibility of maintaining a project's viability and its operational integrity, the CLO maximizes the workforce's input into the process itself and helps recognize (and promote) promising talent with a network. "CLOs can help leaders become more agile in working with a broader talent portfolio and identify vital skills and the source of talent for those skills, whether full-time employees or contingent workers" (Horney, 2017).
Finally, the CLO directs information between the workforce of a company and its executive branch, a liaison position in which the CLO shapes and formulates concerns in ways that create a community feel within a network, that helps create a more personable and hands-on senior executive staff and a more alert and engaged workforce. The responsibility to create an engaged workforce falls to the CLO. "Employees must learn to become productive team members, be accountable for their work, assume responsibility for goals and routinely communicate with colleagues" (Phillips & Phillips, 2017). Critically, the CLO is directly involved in developing effective management training as part of a company's promotions. The CLO is thus responsible for ensuring a company's sustainability and viability by shaping the next generation of a company's management team's understanding of the wider and broader goals of the company. As such, a CLO is ultimately responsible for directing the evolution of both the workforce and the upper echelon senior staff.
Issues
As both the ultimate team player and the ultimate executive leader, the CLO is uniquely positioned to drive company goals and promote a company's collaborative efforts toward achievable goals. Thus, the position of CLO might seem good business planning. Theoretical assumptions and real-time operations, however, are not the same. Even during the brief period of time the position has been introduced into the corporate world, there have arisen two significant issues with the concept as it plays out in real-world application: institutional inertia and the politics of management.
Ideally, a company would be committed to empowering its own workforce to improve its operations and would welcome an executive specifically directed to evaluating that workforce, training its own people, and carefully assessing their performance for opportunities to better achieve its goals. The reality is that companies are often defined by what is termed institutional inertia, that is, the settled complacency that defines company operations as "the way we have always done things." Within that frame, of course, the CLO position would seem a bother, even a threat. Even when the CLO is a promotion from within the company rather than someone brought in to "fix" things, there can be resistance to the concept of "teaching" or, as is more often the case, reteaching the workforce the job it already performs. The workforce can resent such direct involvement in operations. Senior management is often characterized by its lack of such direct involvement. That resistance, of course, would significantly undermine the opportunity for the CLO to have a positive impact.
Resistance does not come only from the workforce. Over the last two decades the attitude of senior management itself has undergone study by business researchers. Theoretically, these management positions are driven by the shared commitment to company success. Management, however, is often a fiercely contested battleground for individuals interested in sustaining their own power positions. Far from team players, these administrative officers, most often mid-management positions, resent, even resist the idea of the CLO reviewing and directly realigning priorities, protocols, and operations. Indeed, because the CLO is often a younger executive (most often with technology skills and computer skills) and because the CLO is most often promoted because of their charisma and their ability to inspire confidence and in turn to promote specific and immediate change, the position can easily be seen as a threat to those already in management positions. The response to the opportunity for change can be viewed through the toxic prism of defensiveness, resentment, and the need to preserve individual job security.
Forward-looking companies have come to see the CLO position as an opportunity for a company to maintain its integrity. The senior level executive most directly involved in helping a company respond successfully to the challenges of an ever-changing work environment, the CLO ensures a trained and competent workforce with a clear and focused understanding of the company's immediate expectations and its long-term goals.
Terms & Concepts
Business Analytics: The continuous evaluation of a company's performance, operations, and protocols in an effort to find areas for targeted and specific improvement.
The C-Suite: The name given to the top echelon of management executives within a company who direct the broad goals of a company.
Institutional Inertia: The complacency that impacts a workforce in which conditions as they are and operations as they are executed come to be seen as inevitable and necessary.
Mentoring: A professional relationship in which one executive assumes responsibility for directing the performance and evolution of another executive.
Onboarding: The protocols a company uses to initiate new hires into a company's operations, which includes not only performance instruction but also the process of familiarizing new hires into company benefits, rules of performance, and promotion and termination policies.
Quantitative Success: A degree of achievement that is measurable through the acquisition of reliable data.
Bibliography
Byham, W. C. (2017). The business case for leadership development. Chief Learning Officer 16(7), 54–55. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=124733584&site=ehost-live
Dutton, G. (2016). Redesigning the CLO Role. Training 53(4), 30–33. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=120355672&site=ehost-live
Hassell, B. (2017) The learning side of Sears. Chief Learning Officer 16(2), 26–30. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=121231034&site=ehost-live
Horney, N. F. (2017). Is your learning organization agility fit? Chief Learning Officer 14(8), 1–6. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=125280069&site=ehost-live
Johnson, F., & Millard, J. (2017). Creating a can-do learning culture. Chief Learning Officer 16(4), 62. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=122669578&site=ehost-live
Phillips, J. J., & Phillips, P. P. (2017). Thinking beyond a seat at the table. Chief Learning Officer, 16(4), 48–51. Retrieved November 15, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=122669569&site=ehost-live
Whitney, K. (2016). Dreaming big to make learning happen. Chief Learning Officer, 15(3), 22–25. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=112962125&site=ehost-live
Suggested Reading
Burnside, R. M., Girrell, K., & Shatto, A. B. (2013). Partnering with the c-suite. Chief Learning Officer, 12(5), 42–45. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=87563043&site=ehost-live
Philips, J., & Elkeles, T. (2016). Chief talent officer: The evolving role of the CLO. New York, NY: Routledge.
Todd, R., Buckley, L., & Herring, S. (2014). The innovator chief learning officer. TD: Talent Development, 68(11), 36–41. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=99858432&site=ehost-live
Ward, D. (2017). Data-Driven HR: To help workers thrive, focus on the big (data) picture. HR Magazine, 62(9), 14–15. Retrieved December 12, 2017, from EBSCO Online Database Business Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bsu&AN=126152632&site=ehost-live
Wingard, J. (2016). Learning to succeed: Rethinking corporate education in a world of unrelenting change. New York, NY: AMACOM.