2020 has been a year marked by change, with the coronavirus pandemic disrupting both our personal and professional lives. To keep pace, organizations have had to shift many business operations on the fly, and learning leaders have proven paramount in helping them do so.
To learn more about learning and development (L&D)’s role in change management, we spoke with Loren Sanders, enterprise manager of L&D at CVS Health, and Scott Nutter, who retired last month after working with Delta Airlines for 22 years managing its pilot training programs, and who now owns Touch ‘n Go Solutions.
Listen now to learn:
- What it looks like when an organization can navigate change well.
- How L&D can leverage what it already does well to support change management.
- How to train successful change leaders.
Listen now:
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Additional Resources:
- “How L&D Leaders Can Drive Performance During Change Management,” by Loren Sanders
- Agile Certification for HR and L&D
- Training Industry Magazine: L&D’s Role in Change Management
The transcript for this episode follows:
Intro:
Welcome to The Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from Training Industry.
Sarah Gallo:
Hello and welcome to The Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo, an associate editor at Training Industry.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
And I’m Taryn Oesch DeLong, managing editor of digital content at Training Industry. This episode of The Business of Learning is sponsored by the Certified Professional and Training Management Program.
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Sarah Gallo:
It’s safe to say that 2020 has been a year marked by change, with the coronavirus pandemic disrupting both our personal and professional lives. Many organizations have had to shift many business operations on the fly and learning leaders have proved paramount in helping them do so. To learn more about L&D’s role in change management, we’re speaking with Loren Sanders, enterprise manager of L&D at CVS health and Scott Nutter who retired last month after working with Delta Airlines for 22 year, managing its pilot training programs, and who now owns Touch and Go Solutions, which offers consulting services in human performance and training. Loren, Scott, welcome to the podcast.
Scott:
Thank you.
Loren:
Great to be here.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
To kick things off, why don’t you each define what change management means to you. Loren, do you want to start?
Loren:
Sure. The way that I would define change management is thinking about it as an intentional way of approaching any changes in an organization and creating alignment across teams so, that there’s good risk mitigation to make sure that whatever the change is that it can be implemented successfully with minimal fallout.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
And Scott, what about you?
Scott:
To me change management is usually referred to in a very broad organizational change management sense. And I find that term a little bit almost too broad to work with. For me, it’s really simple. It’s going from one state to another. You are simply changing something and as the term implies, you can either manage that or you can react to it and let it just happen to you. So, it’s very similar to project management, you’re just trying to get something done and accomplished with project management, you can either do it in an organized managed fashion or not.
Sarah Gallo:
Great. Thanks for breaking that down for us. So, now that we know what change management is, what does it actually look like when organizations know how to effectively navigate and respond to change? Scott do want to start us off with this one?
Scott:
Sure. The words that came to mind were Agile, responsive, competent, successful, proactive and predictive. To me, what it looks like is you are engaged with the business; you understand their priorities and the environment that’s affecting the business, and you are able to move at the speed of business. So when a change takes place, for whatever reason, you’re able to move and accommodate at the speed of business.
Loren:
Scott and I are pretty well aligned here. I have very many similar words. I think that organizations that effectively navigate change are good at constant environmental scanning. I like that Scott brought up project management as part of his thought process around change management, because I also agree with that. But really being good at change management is about paying attention, analyzing successes, looking for gaps and looking for risks all the time. As we know, early risk is good, late risk is bad. And if you know there’s going to be some sort of challenge ahead, you can plan for mitigation and planning for change to be a part of the overall strategy for any business change at all.
Sarah Gallo:
Definitely. I think that’s a great point you made, Loren about recognizing risk, and I think also part of navigating change is being able to recognize risk. Do you have any tips for actually doing that when things are so up in the air, especially right now during the coronavirus pandemic?
Loren:
Yes. Part of recognizing risk is getting different people other than just yourself involved in change management. So, you want to get a good cross-section of the people who are involved in the change or will be involved in the change, create some really good diversity of thought and open communication and have everyone think about what the risks will be because different people will think about things as potential risks differently and we want to make sure. It’s great to identify as many risks as possible people always try to shy away from risk. We really want to know all of the potential things that could happen, because if we do, then what we’ve done is effectively mitigate all of them by planning for whatever could possibly happen.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
Thanks. That’s a great point. I think it’s important also to note that there’s many types of change organizations might go through, whether it’s a merger or acquisition or, as we’ve seen this year, a shift to remote work in a lot of organizations. What types of teams do you see L&D being particularly helpful in supporting organizations as they navigate and manage change?
Loren:
The things where I think L&D will be most successful is if we rely on what we already do well. So, we already know how to think through and plan for needs. We already know how to analyze approaches. If we’re doing our jobs well, there is no question about what modality should implemented for whatever the change is. And using that knowledge of learning and development or learning and performance can help us take the right approach for the right situation in the right moment when there’s going to be a change.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
Yeah. So, leveraging those strengths that L&D already has. That’s a great point, Scott, anything to add?
Scott:
Actually, I guess Loren and I do think alike. I was thinking very similarly. Honestly, I think sometimes L&D organizations can feel separate or apart or different from the business itself. And that depends on the business you’re talking about. But actually this is what we do really well. L&D organizations don’t sit there statically manufacturing the same part 27,000 times a day or performing the same customer service tasks repetitively through the day. As Loren mentioned, what we’re doing is we’re running a process of some sort in order to build training and change management, ISD processes, project management, they all share a lot of characteristics. So it’s actually something L&D is really good at.
Sarah Gallo:
Yeah, I think that’s really encouraging to hear. Okay. So we know that L&D can help organizations navigate various types of change. But of course, like you mentioned, as we record this episode, L&D leaders are heard at work helping organizations manage uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. So with that in mind, how can L&D effectively support their organization during times of immense change or uncertainty like we’re experiencing today?
Loren:
I’m going to just springboard on top of what Scott just said a moment ago, because again, we’re aligned. What I think it begins with is that it has to start well before a change actually happens. We have to build relationships with our stakeholders. We have to establish trust with them, working together to look at gaps, and we have to elevate our approach in doing this. If we’re doing our job well, we should be able to look at a potential change and predict the possible outcomes especially if we rely on our ability to measure things well. And I know not every L&D team is great at that, but if we are doing great relationship building and doing a great analysis on the front end of everything that we do, we will be a lot more successful and uncertainty won’t matter.
Sarah Gallo:
Great. Scott, you have anything to add?
Scott:
Yeah. So one way that I try to focus business leaders is, stop with the terms, training, development and learning. What we do is human performance. We help people do their jobs better. And so when you’re talking about times of uncertainty and change, well, then what we want those people to do is to perform their jobs better and adapt to that change. And like I said before, that’s exactly what L&D departments do. So, since people are involved in just about every facet of the business, we’re here to help with adoption of change by helping people perform better. It’s really not much more complicated than that.
Sarah Gallo:
Great point. Scott, I think the pandemic has definitely highlighted L&D’s role in helping everyone operate at the best of their ability. So, going off of that how have each of you specifically helped during or former organization adapt and respond?
Scott:
I’ll go ahead and jump on this one, I guess. So, I’ve got a good example from Delta. As the pandemic… Working for a major airline, we actually have it pegged to a date March 16, that’s where demand just about fell off the table. And we were flying about five percent of the people that we used to fly. And within two weeks into the month of March, the company decided that it was not safe to bring people in as a general officer when thousands of people working. And so what do we do? And they basically said, “If you think you can work from home, go work from home.” And it was just a very quick initial reaction. One of our L&D departments, it was actually the technical operations folks that train our mechanics had spent the last three years working on virtual instructor-led training (VILT). They had settled on zoom is the platform that they preferred, but they had tested in a very engineered process-oriented fashion with a lot of data, several of the platforms. And when the organization said, “How in the world are we going to meet, collaborate and coordinate across the business enterprise?” The technical operations learning and development space had a very mature understanding of what that looked like. And so we were able to share very quickly, all the lessons learned over three years worth of work. And as a result, many of the best practices that L&D and established became best practices across the company for working from home in general.
Loren:
I’m going to take a little bit of a different approach than Scott here, because change management is the reason that my job exists. We are always in constant change and my team is specifically responsible for helping develop best practices and opportunities for teams to work together, to create better ways to do what we do. So I’m going to talk about it in a little bit more global perspective. I’m a big fan of the Kotter Model, and if you don’t know much about that, I will talk about that in a second here, but I think it’s really important. And I’ve noticed this, and I’ve implemented it pretty much in every team that I’ve ever been through as a leader within any organization, is that you have to give your folks a moment to have a funeral for old processes and give them an ability and a timeline where they need to recognize that okay, it ends here, and it starts here. If they don’t have any specific idea of what that timeline is, it is way harder to implement a change. They need a moment. They need a funeral for the process. They need to process the change, and it helps them feel more okay about what’s happening. And if I want to put Kotter’s, all of his books together in sort of one little phrase here, or several sentences, it’s really creating a sense of urgency about the change. Why are we doing this? What is the future going to look like? Why are we excited about it? Why do we have to do it now? And how are we going to be more amazing and wonderful because of this change? Then we have to include people from all of the impacted areas because they will help drive every initiative forward. And they will also be your natural change champions. So they will help drive the change for you, and they will help press it through their piece of the organization. And then the leaders have to be positioned to remove barriers out of the way, or to help if there is a challenge or struggle that someone is having. And they also have to be very keen on celebrations. And every time that we win, no matter how small it is, we need a moment of hurrah or a virtual Zoom happy hour or a toast. My team actually just had its quarterly meeting and one of the things that we did, which I thought was rather innovative was a virtual toast. And we had 70 people, and each got 15 seconds to raise a glass and make a toast about something that we were excited about for our organization. And that created so much engagement that it helped a lot. The other thing we need to do is make change a part of the culture. So if you have a culture that accepts and embraces change, instead of freaks out every time there’s a change, you’ll get better and better. Every time a change comes. If we know that change is always coming, then we’re always going to be ready and we’re always going to be positioned. And we’re always going to be excited. But if we make change into something horrible, this behemoth monster that’s going to change the way we do everything and it’s going to be inconvenient, well, that’s going to be a different outcome.
Scott:
One thing I’d like to add to Loren’s comments is, she highlights a need for great communication. And if your communication channels, hopefully you have a multitude of them, are strong used by the employees, people trust what comes from those communication channels. Then you can do all of that stage setting that Loren described. And what I have found is that the companies that are navigating the current challenges, the best that I work with, they have strong from the top-down communication processes. And so individual contributors to do a great job collaborating with each other. And they’re hearing from the CEO three or four times a week and everything in between. And that’s certainly something that allows for all of those things that Loren mentioned with celebrations and funerals and letting people know what to expect.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
You both touched on this a little bit, that change is difficult for organizations but it’s also difficult at the individual level. How have you, as a learning leader, as a professional in your career, how to adapt and respond to change yourself? And what have you learned from those experiences?
Loren:
Again, I work in a company that is constantly transforming and innovating some changes and normality for me now. But what I have learned along the way is that no matter what you’re doing, don’t forget that at the end of the day there are people attached to those goals. Those people will make the work that you have to do easier, or they will make the work that you have to do harder. And the more you include them share the vision and the excitement, the more successful you’ll be. You have to understand that people connect with change at an emotional level. And if you’re not connecting at that level with them, that change is going to be a lot harder.
Scott:
You mentioned John Kotter. He’s great. Someone I’ve always enjoyed when I have a chance to engage with him around change is Peter De Jager. And he does a great opening bet when he does one of the conference plenaries or keynotes. And he basically talks about the fact that people are not afraid of change. Change is not bad. Change is not something that humanly causes great emotion. We make huge changes in our lives all the time. You choose to go to college, you choose to go to the military instead, you choose to go ahead and get married, you choose to go ahead and have children. You make enormous life-changing decisions pretty regularly. And so, it’s something we actually do. We don’t like having change done to us. And so, one of the things that I’ve done is broken this into two pieces which is, as a learning leader, when change is being done to me, it can be done well and the company could have given me plenty of heads up, we’ve got all the necessary communications and planning, and we can do what you do to lead a good change management initiative. And then we’ve also all experienced the phone call that something has to be policed in and out to people in 48 hours. And where I need to take a quick vacation is when I discover there is a change that’s been at work for six months, but I just learned about it 48 hours before my part of it was due. And so that sort of change being done to you, the lesson learned is simple. And I’ll piggyback again on Loren. Stay engaged with your leadership, make sure that you’re doing the best you can to cultivate those relationships in your stakeholders and your network. It is amazing where I find out about change that could potentially be coming down the pike for me in an informal fashion. But when it comes to change that my team is driving, that’s a completely different conversation. Now we’re the actual genesis of the change or a significant portion of the change. And I guess the lesson learned there is walk the walk, don’t just talk the talk, and to set a good example, try to model all those correct behaviors. And one of the things that I would say I’ve learned over time is, people when you talk about processes can get a little, this is going to be bureaucratic, cumbersome, difficult to do. You can show people that change management, project management, ISD does not have to be burdensome. It can move quickly. It can be very agile, but we’re going to trust the process and we are going to follow it in order to ensure a successful outcome. So that would be another take of that.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
Scott, you mentioned the importance of good communication skills starting at the top. So with that in mind, what tips do you have for how to include change management skills, including communication in leadership training programs?
Scott:
So, it is a skill like any other. Change management, there’s nothing inherently special or different about it. And so to me, it should be a core competency for initial management training, leadership training, ATD agrees with us as far as L&D goes, it’s in their competency model. ISP agrees with it, it’s in their human performance technology model. Personally, and this is just based on my experience, when you look at leadership development programs, especially from [inaudible 00:19:40] leader training, I see a lot of diving into coaching skills, which is great. Some of the managing people aspects, the emotional intelligence, the litany of topics that are at times not treated as seriously as they should be. Whether it’s compliance training or diversity and inclusion, you don’t find as much of the communication, project management, change management. That’s just typically not there in a very robust way. And while all of the stuff I mentioned is important. If you want to talk about those tactical skills that they’re going to use, when they go back after the leadership training and put into practice, if you’ve given them a handful of tools regarding, here’s how to look at change, here’s how to manage a change. Here’s the next time someone has a bright idea. That’s going to change the world. Here’s how you go ahead and take that and run it as a project. Those are skills that people can apply immediately and even better they will use them every day. So they’ll begin to become something that’s part of their core competency. I don’t think many of the leadership programs don’t anywhere near enough of that, and I find it puzzling because it’s the kind of skill that’s so applicable the day after class.
Loren:
Can I respond with ditto, ditto, ditto. I will say I am so aligned with Scott in terms of project management skills, especially in learning and development. We already come to the table with all the soft skills. We are empathetic. We are emotionally intelligent. We know how to talk to people. Our empathy can sometimes get us in trouble, even though it’s not a bad thing. And we’re getting better at being empathetic leaders. And we’re getting better at raising empathetic leaders within our organizations. But as far as change goes, somebody hears that word and it has a visceral reaction internally. One of the things that has worked really well on our team is we read the book switch by Chip and Dan Heath. I’m not sure if you guys are familiar with that book, but it talks about how managing change is like taking the rider of an elephant and trying to make the rider get the elephant to do something. And if the elephant doesn’t want to do it, well, the little bitty rider isn’t going to be that helpful. But if we’re always talking about change, the way that we manage change, the way that we manage projects, the way that we follow and track everything that we do, each time we’re going to be more successful and I can’t press enough into the importance of making, managing change a part of the culture so that we’re ready when change happens. It’s just a natural part of what we do as Scott has said, it becomes a competency it’s no big deal. People hear change they won’t freak out anymore and they’ll be much more successful. And in turn, their department will be more successful in ensuring your organization will be more successful. The other piece of that is communicating to your direct reports as a leader, that they can be leaders from any seat they seat at. They don’t have to wait for an opportunity to have direct reports to be a leader and creating opportunities for them to do that is going to help.
Scott:
I will piggyback on Loren a little bit with empowering your direct reports. We have a culture of all of the best ideas, 99% of them come from the frontline. They’re actually the ones that know how everything works and they know the work around so you’re successful. And so, what I do when I’m engaging with that group in a broad way is tell them, no one can drive a change that you think is important if you don’t hear about it, know about it, but once we understand it, why it’s a good idea, we absolutely know what to do with it there. So, I applaud Loren for her recognition of that. And I tease folks, Delta Airlines’ logo is the, trademark is the big triangle or the “widget” as we call it. Well, that’s the Greek symbol for change. So, Delta has never seen a day that we didn’t change something. And what we have done over the year so culturally is empowering the front line by giving them a lot of different channels to tell us how we can do things smarter. And if you are a learning and development group that sees a change that’s coming, hopefully you’re engaged early on. You’re going to help realize that really valid change become reality.
Sarah Gallo:
Those are some great tips from both of you. I especially liked what you mentioned Loren, about weaving change management into the fabric for organizations. I think that’s definitely one way we can start to normalize change within companies. Perfect, great. Well, to wrap things up today, do you have any tips you can share with us on how learning leaders can support change management?
Loren:
I’ll be glad to start. Remember that people are both rational and emotional and to change what’s in their heart, changes what’s in their head. If they know the why, they have an emotional attachment to the change, they’re less likely to be unwilling to move barriers. Include them, listen well, remember that we as learning and development people are always, at least I hope we’re always, thinking about the end user. We think about the student. We think about the impact and performance, and if we’re doing our job well, it’s easier for us to get stakeholders buy-in to any approach we suggest. We work together with organizational leaders. We are in lock step with them, which means we have to move with urgency and momentum and a lot of us find this very challenging. Our pace has to change. We need to find our people who are able to support the pace and then empower those people to act as leaders from any seat and expand whatever the learning is.
Scott:
I guess I would offer it up the L&D group has to stay plugged into the business, know where it’s headed, what its needs or what it might need soon, and then help the business re-skill. Whether it’s technical or soft, help them re-skill rapidly, in an agile format, don’t let perfection get in the way of done. When things are changing as quickly as they are these days, a great 80% win is huge. So that will show the business, the value of L&D including the change management component and something that I encourage learning and development to do, because I don’t see this very often in companies I work with. These are the times to be bold and courageous. You’ve got a great skillset. You’ve got a phenomenal set of competencies that will help the business. Don’t be afraid to speak up and use them. But in the end, like I’ve said in the beginning here, it’s never been about training or learning or development. It’s about helping people perform better. And that means at the speed of business and these days at the speed of life.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
Well, you both left us with a great call to action going into 2021. Thank you. Thank you both, Scott and Loren for speaking with us today on The Business of Learning.
Scott:
You’re welcome. It was a pleasure.
Loren:
Thank you.
Sarah Gallo:
To learn more about L&D’s role in change management, check out the show notes for this episode at trainingindustry.com/trainingindustrypodcast.
Taryn Oesch DeLong:
And if you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to rate and review us on your favorite podcast app.
Sarah Gallo:
Until next time.
Outro:
If you have feedback about this episode, or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us at info@trainingindustry.com or use the contact us page at trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to the Training Industry podcast.
