LEAD Awards 2018: Interview with Lynne Iati, CA Technologies

Helping Employees to Develop Themselves as Leaders

  Category: Best Global/ International Leadership Program -
  LEAD Rank: 3
 
  Category: Best Use of Simulations
  LEAD Rank: 2
 
  Organization: CA Technologies
  Program: Leadership Development Program at CA Technologies
  Program Director: Jennifer Budveit, Principal, Talent Development
  Email: jennifer.budveit@ca.com
  Visit: www.ca.com
 

 
Our editorial team interviewed Lynne Iati, Senior Director, Talent Development from CA Technologies at the LEAD2018 Awards this past February. Here are

What is the overall objective of your program?
Our Leadership Development Program (LDP) is designed to enable employees to develop themselves as leaders, ensuring a pipeline of highly capable Leaders at all Levels across the organization. As such, the goals for this year’s program are to:
 

 
Who do you impact with your program?
The LDP is designed for mid-level employees with one-year tenure who are aspiring leaders in the organization and may someday assume a leadership position. This target audience includes both individual contributors and managers.
 

What are the lessons you’ve learned this year from facilitating your program?
Applying year-over-year enhancements based on our measurement data, the LDP at CA Technologies is positively driving impact and insights. Our overall return on investment and net promoter score are well above the industry averages.
 
As a result of the LDP experience, participants are able to demonstrate increased:
 

 
How do you measure the return on investment and success of the program?
We carefully measure overall reaction and knowledge transfer with our main focus on ensuring our leaders can apply what they have learned on the job, and share their learning with others.
 
Our measurement strategy is based upon Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Evaluation theory.

Level 1: Reaction: evaluating participant expectations.
Level 2: Learning: evaluating participant’s perception of being able to directly apply what was learned on the job.
Level 3: Application (Behavior Change): evaluating Return on Investment of participant time, energy, and resources.
Level 4: Business Impact: evaluating Net Promoter Score to see how likely a participant is to recommend the program to a friend or colleague, voluntary attrition rates, and employee engagement scores.
 
Gathering and analyzing feedback for each of these levels is not enough. Stakeholders, executive leaders, managers, and potential future participants want to know if this program is a worthwhile career development investment, and if it is positively impacting the business. Therefore, we groom the measurement strategy based on these audience groups to help determine our data mining and how we will share the story.
 
What lies ahead for the program and how will it continue to succeed?
Our continued focus is on positively affecting behavior change and business impact.  Some enhancements and new content for this year’s program include:
 
Mindfulness: Mindfulness is a topic that is showing up more and more in the context of business. Introduction to the practice of mindfulness is incorporated into our first in-person session to increase engagement and help participants to be present, and to be aware of what is going on around them. This content is based on our partnership with Cory Muscara, the founder of the Long Island Center for Mindfulness. Cory serves as faculty at Columbia Teachers College where he teaches mindfulness to school leaders and principals, and is an assistant instructor for the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed his graduate work.
 
Mindset: When it comes to leadership in today’s ever-changing work environment, mindset can play a critical role in a leader’s ability to be successful. A leader who displays a fixed mindset can set themselves, their team, or the company up for failure. The world is divided between people who are open to learning and those who are closed to it. This trait then affects everything from your worldview to your interpersonal relationships. Mindset has significant implications, although most people are very inaccurate at estimating their own capabilities. Through the work of Dr. Carol Dweck, author of Mindset; The New Psychology of Success, the model of fixed vs. growth mindset shows how cognitive, affective, and behavioral features are linked back to their belief about the malleability of their intelligence. Each mindset leads to different patterns of behavior.
 
Sales Strategy Senior Leader Virtual Session: Growth is key to the continued success of any company.  To help employees move our company forward it is important that every leader understand and support our Sales Strategy, regardless of role. Our, President of Global Field Operations engages with the LDP participants and Alumni during a one-hour virtual session to share our holistic sales strategy, how it is executed, the challenges we face, and the perception of CA with our customers.
 
ETeam Video: It is important to inspire participants to apply what they learned back on the job. To achieve this goal, during the first in-person session, which is the mid-point of the program experience, a montage video including messages from each ETeam member, and the VP of Talent Development, reinforces the program themes through inspirational messages that connect to program content experienced over the three-day session.  
 
Reading Assignments: Reading business books has always been an integral part of the LDP. More than ever, leaders face the challenge of staying abreast of current business-related information. We partner with getAbstract; a leading online media company that provides participants with access to compressed, relevant knowledge to drive innovation and help solve everyday business problems with accuracy and efficiency. The getAbstract platform offers a time-saving and highly intuitive solution that helps keep participants ahead of the competition. This will be used for various assignments throughout the nine-month program we expanded our licenses to include LDP Alumni.
 
New Books: Two new books were added to the reading assignments that reflect our internal organizational challenges as indicated in the leadership capability audit findings. One of the challenges identified is Change Leadership. Therefore, reading Leading Through Continuous Change: Navigating Churn in the Real World by Bill Passmore is an assignment for all participants. Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement by Peter T. Coleman offers content and techniques that aligns with higher level roles in an organization.Exposing the participants to this content will generate engaging discussions and ultimately help to create a positive ripple effect in the organization to be better positioned to address the challenges at CA.
 
Customer Experience: Every point in a customer journey is critical to driving a positive customer experience which means every single employee must deliver incredible customer experience, every time. Whether employees are internal facing or customer facing, customer experience is everyone’s business. According to the Temkin Group report, Employee Engagement Benchmark Study 2015, companies who lead in customer experience have 50% more engaged employees.
 
CX resources integrated in the Leadership Development Program include:
 

 
Philanthropic Activities: Being socially-aware is part of the DNA of CA Technologies.  We know that making a difference in our communities, matters. The large LDP audience of 650 coupled with local Alumni will have an opportunity to contribute their time during a coordinated philanthropic activity at each in-person session location. Participants and Alumni will partner together to assemble backpacks with school supplies for STEM students.
 

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