Nancy Nazer is the Director of Leadership Development at Bell Canada. The leadership portfolio includes all of the programs and courses they have for their managers - from frontline leaders to executives. Bell offers a suite of different programs, websites and resources to make them more effective and strengthen their capability.
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DC: Give us a sense of scale, how many leaders are you serving?
NN: We have over 10,000 leaders that potentially fall into some of these areas and primarily in the last year we have been concentrating on some of our high potentials to help fully accelerate their development and better prepare them for future roles.
DC: When you started what did you think your biggest challenge was?
NN: We have over 43,000 employees across Canada, coast to coast and over 28,000,000 customer connections. With the many advances in technology and with intense competition we knew we needed to change. A real challenge was that while we knew the importance of our leaders in helping us achieve cultural change, we didn’t know how to go about this change. So it was thinking about how, through growing our leaders and giving them the right experiences, we could achieve transformation in the company.
DC: What is the most challenging leadership development issue you face?
NN: Budget and time are the biggest factors. We are always trying to figure out how to execute faster with limited resources.
DC: Why don’t you start off discussing transforming Bell, so we understand what the driving business forces are?
NN: We had, like many organizations today, a lot of change happening in the competitive landscape and there have been significant advances in technology. We have been around for more than125 years so we were doing a lot of things well, but in the face of the current environment, it was rethinking how we could change and strengthen our leadership.
Initially, we were focusing on achieving transformation in our culture and in our leaders. We felt we needed to create the right programs and that once they had gone through these programs, the magic would happen and they would shift their mindset and support the transformation that needed to happen in the company.
After a lot of time and investment on creating the right solutions, we realized that while they were effective by most measures it was not sustainable. We would constantly go back and tweak something in the program or add another component. We brought in leaders to tell stories and then we would add action learning; later we removed action learning. We focused on getting masses of employees at different levels through these various courses. But what concerned us was that these courses started to be thought of as one-day events—which was not the sustained change we had in mind.
So where we started was creating these events that generated a positive attitude and engagement in our employees. But when followed up six months after the course, a lot of the times the learnings were shelved away. That for myself and my team became the point where we started to have some deep reflections to say, ‘What are we doing here and what can we do differently so that we can achieve this transformation?’
DC: You got buy in that leadership development was important, then you were able to build a very good suite of courses and then get quite a few people through those courses. That’s more than many companies achieve.
NN: To get that far we worked very closely with our business sponsors and ensured that we got engagement from our HR line operations partners to get them engaged because they were our biggest ambassadors. We applied a Kirkpatrick level 1 and level 2 to get evidence for how well we were doing and we were getting in high 80's and 90's in areas of satisfaction.
But we knew that people were not changing the way we were hoping after a one- or two-day event. In fact, people were having experiences and checking it off and asking us, ‘Now I have done this, what is next?’ It was a checklist mentality.
So we thought about developing something that is less about a one-day program but instead creates an on-going journey of personal development for our leaders.
DC: I think most people, if they were looking at those high evaluations and the fact that you had managed to build relationships with management, both upwards and laterally, would have been satisfied. How did you take it to the next level, given that you seemed to have done all the obvious things?
NN: I truly had to shut myself off to do this. I removed myself and thought about it. I remember the day I shared with the team that we needed a different approach to the program.
DC: And how did the team react when you came in and said, “We've got to look at things a different way?”
NN: I think they were ready for it. We had a meeting and I think they were all in a place where they needed a change. They were thinking, “Are we are going to do another program? Are we are going to tweak this one or add another communication program?” But they were also feeling that we needed to start rethinking this.
We had just launched the accelerated general management pipeline and that program became the catalyst to try things differently. We took from the Creative Leadership Institute the idea that 70% of development should be focused on experiences, 20% on relationships and 10% on training. So we thought about how to take this blended approach.
Audience Question: What are the foundational elements of the program?
NN: Our accelerated general management program was aimed at high potentials. We recognized that a lot of them did not have the broad business experience they needed to move up into the executive rank. We recognized that the solution was not just to offer more training. The need that we had was to provide general management experiences. The mindset was that we are not just going to move people around every couple of months because they are not going to be effective, but instead create experiences for them while they are still in their current roles to get exposure in other areas.
The program has four critical phases. It starts with identifying the right candidate and the candidates have to apply to be a part of this. Then they have to go through a series of assessments because we believe that we need self-awareness and a level of introspectiveness and desire as a leader to go through development.
They go through their personal growth planning, which is an exercise where they go through a menu of offerings and customize it to their individual needs as well as the business needs.
They work with an external coach as well as a mentor to put something concrete in place.
The last step is the execution. The program itself is 12 months and again, it is a program that focuses on accelerating development. There is no guarantee that people who are in this program will be promoted to the next level.
DC: Tell me more about identifying high potentials.
NN: We have biannual talent reviews where we identify our high potentials. We decide if they belong within the functional management stream or in the general management stream, and if they are in the general management stream, we invite them to this program.
When we initially launched this program we mandated that anyone who was identified as high potential within the general management stream would have to go through this program. In the next phase we just invited them and asked each of the participants to get sponsorship for the funding from their business units because we realized that we could not continue to fund this corporately, so we had to engage their business units. It made a huge difference in the level of engagement that we have had from our participants. It's a very exclusive program now and people want to be a part of it.
DC: One component of your program that I am not familiar with are the learning labs, what are they?
NN: The labs give our learners more opportunity to apply their learnings in real time and take real situations into the classroom. Participants identify the skills that they are interested in developing such as giving and receiving feedback, performance review, or communication. In the lab it's about 10% theory and the rest is applied learning where they take real situations and work on it in a small group setting that is facilitated.
We are in the process of designing more labs because we feel that there are so many situations that we just do not give our employees enough opportunity to practice their learnings.
DC: We have a comment from one of our listeners that when she was promoted to a management position she recognized there were new skills that she needed to master, but what you do about managers who do not see the value in learning new skills?
NN: There are certain things that we will still mandate that all of our employees will have to go through so that they have common learning. But when it comes to the leadership pathways the approach we have taken is to simply invite people and we have found that it creates a different level of engagement. We treat leadership development as something that is not going to come to an end. Once we stopped thinking about how do we create the right solution to transform our leaders, we started to think about how to give people a slight leadership edge and then layer and integrate these offerings over time.
So people feel they have accountability for their personal development. This creates a different culture because it creates a culture of engagement, of ‘I am accountable.’ You start to see the difference in people because in some the desire comes out.
DC: Your time frame has changed quite dramatically. Initially there was a one or two day time frame for a course and now suddenly you move to a time frame that is spanning years with no particular end point. You are providing all sorts of different ways to help leaders to develop over this long period of time in an incremental way where you are not expecting somebody to suddenly change from being one type of leader to being a different type of leader overnight.
NN: Exactly, and if you think about it, we haven’t redesigned our program. Yes we are putting new programs in place and we are in the process of getting more learning labs but when it fundamentally comes to the solution, it has not changed. It is really as practitioners we have changed the expectations for how leaders develop.
I opened a leadership program not too long ago and I asked the participants how many believed that at the end of two days they are going to become better leaders and almost the entire classroom had raised their hands.
DC: That sounds like the answer most trainers would want.
NN: Absolutely, and they really want to believe that they are going to transform as leaders but what then happens is they leave feeling that it was a great event, they met a lot of interesting people but after a couple of days they feel ‘I am doing the same old things.’
We want to change to more realistic expectations. We now say, “We are not here to transform you because transformation is not something that is attainable.” The idea instead is to reinforce learnings and get people to have a series of experiences that helps them build over time.
We get them to ‘pay it forward’; once they have learned something they pay it forward to another group. This reinforces the learning in them. We have some of them involved on community boards so it’s really taking a more holistic approach to developing leaders than these one-day events. For us it's become more formal, it's become progressive, it is structured because there are steps to the pathway.
The component of creating more experiences is another area that doesn’t really cost a lot. For example, we created in our accelerated general management pipeline a governance committee. We have one executive that represents each of the business units. We meet on a quarterly basis and these manage and govern the overall process of this program. They are the ones who create these experience opportunities for the participants and it’s really fantastic for us because the onus is not on HR, it’s on the leaders of the business to take responsibility, to create opportunities in the form of new roles.
DC: It strikes me that one of the underlying philosophical shifts is that instead of the onus being on HR to create leaders, HR merely creates a support structure so that businesses can develop their own leaders.
NN: For us it has been quite significant because when the business owns the learning opportunities, it creates a different reality for the participants. HR is not creating simulations for them, this is real. One thing that we have heard from testimonials from our participants is that the fact that the business is engaged in their development has given them a different sense of importance in how they are valued, so it becomes a major factor for retention.
Audience Question: What is your advice for a smaller organization, say less than a hundred people?
NN: Well, I think the approach we have taken is something that can be applied to a smaller organization. It probably would be easier to govern in a small organization. You may not have a lot of solutions in place, but it is about taking that approach, ‘How do I integrate the offerings we have so that it creates an experience for employees?’ If we have mentoring, for example, or a leadership program, how do you integrate those so that people don’t feel they have to do everything at once, that they have a suite of offerings? They can relate to how this is going to make them more effective in their leadership.
I think we all, as large or small organizations, have this in place; it’s just sometimes harder to have as many solutions as we do in a large corporation. But if you blend it and communicate it and make it something that is seen as an ongoing process rather than an event, you will see that people start seeing the benefit of such initiatives.
DC: Irrespective of the size of the organization one can have a clear philosophy of leadership and that may be the biggest lesson that we are getting out of your experience.
We ran a poll about funding and the one thing that is relatively encouraging is that most people have stable funding and we have almost 30% who have funding that is increasing, so only 10% of the people are suffering from funding that is trending downwards, that’s a good sign.
NN: For those of you who find that your funding is trending down, focus on creating a governance committee with leaders within your business units and get them to start thinking of different types of experience solutions. We have created these think tanks and book clubs and reverse job shadowing to bring our employees closer to the customer. These opportunities are low cost but still create development for employees. Development doesn’t always have to be in the form of training or creating websites and really, there are a lot of ways to make it effective just thinking outside of the box and trying to think of solutions. The business has a lot of opportunities, so take advantage of those opportunities for employees.
Audience Question: We are using a blended learning approach with a classroom component and an online component. How do you get participants to engage in the online component?
NN: We found with our over 400 e-learning courses that at the beginning there was a lot of excitement but the completion of these programs still remains low.
With our online courses, we put them on the Internet instead of the intranet so that employees could access it on their own time. In some areas where there are call centers there was dedicated time that employees would be given during business hours so that they could work. It was interesting because they had this yellow tape that was given to these call center employees and they would tape it around their work station and it said, “e-learning in progress, caution!” People would stay away and leave them alone. If you want this to happen and if this is an important investment in your organization then you need to allow time for it.
We went through the same situation with mentoring, is it during business hours or outside of business hours? We have a huge unionized employee base and we recognize that if we want people engaged and if this is important we have to also make sure that we give them time during business hours to do this.
