‘Future-Proofing Skill Development Begins With Managers’: Jennie Yang, VP, People & Culture, 15Five

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In an exclusive interview with HR.com, Jennie shares how she plans to future-proof her company's skill-building activities, her take on the importance of coaching and mentoring, new L&D trends, and more.

Excerpts from the interview: 

Q: According to the World Economic Forum, 85 million jobs will be displaced and 97 million new jobs created by 2025, as a result of the ongoing uncertainty that we see, as well as on account of accelerated automation. Companies need to build skills at an ever-increasing pace. How do you plan to future-proof your company's skill-building activities?

Jennie: We leverage our own offerings to meet our goal of developing best-in-class managers. As part of that our key results include seeing increases in our engagement results for specific drivers (goal support and supplying feedback). 
 

We have an opportunity to enable our managers to help their team members set goals that move the needle on business outcomes, and to provide more constructive feedback that strengthens and redirects behaviors to encourage high performance. 

We plan to have three different development tracks. First, for folks who are exploring the path of leadership and management, who are curious about it and want to develop their own skills. We have another path for first-time managers or managers who have not received formal manager training. The third path will be for seasoned leaders (directors, VPs, and the C-suite) who've gone through formal manager training and can double down on some of the leadership skills they’ve already acquired. 

While we can look at skill-building in terms of human skills—what people call soft skills—and technical skills, like being able to leverage our vast technology stack, we are future-proofing our skill development in this way because we believe that it starts with managers.

Q: Today, an increasing number of employees crave growth opportunities to excel in their careers. What are the challenges and how have you been addressing them?

Jennie: For us, it begins with our core value of “Be and become your best self.” We have a radical commitment to our growth and development, and everything cascades down from there. 

Managers engage our team members in a “Best-Self” journey and that starts with the “Best-Self Kickoff” conversation, where the manager and the team member share each other's aspirations and visions for themselves and professional and personal goals. Planting that seed of a vision together and supporting each other is the starting point and then from there, as an employee goes through their journey at 15Five, managers and employees review and realign these visions with quarterly Best-Self Review® cycles. 

These conversations are more centered around growth and development, and so managers will ask what an employee can focus on in the next six months to up-level a specific skill. This is documented, often via individual and self-development OKRs, and also in a growth plan in our Career Hub feature. We have this entire product suite that enables us to document and track our intentions for learning and growth for ourselves, and hold ourselves accountable for that too.

Q: With classroom training no longer viable on a virtual plane, what are the other modes of learning and development that are set to take off in the corporate training arena?

Jennie: We are seeing this with Transform right now with our customers. Some are looking for online or on-site training, or a blended approach with follow-up happening with (virtual) group coaching sessions. 

There are many different modalities of learning that include online, in-person, blended, as well as micro learning, which can be short, two- to three-minute videos on different topics that target specific behaviors that managers are able to rapidly integrate. Or it might be a two-hour workshop that's immersive to teach a more nuanced concept, along with breakout groups for people to discuss that topic and how that shows up in their life or work.

The different modalities are based on the varied learning goals with an emphasis on having the learning stick and positively changing behaviors moving forward. 

Q: How important are mentoring and coaching in the current scenario? Why?

Jennie: Extraordinarily important. I spoke to this somewhat when I discussed our manager training initiatives. A big part of that is transforming managers into coaches or refining their coaching skills so that they can drive high engagement and performance. 

For mentorship, we've leveraged a platform, which is essentially a marketplace of internal mentors and mentees. While participation is voluntary, we’ve seen great adoption on the team since we rolled it out last summer. Based on the feedback we’ve received, we know that mentorship is very important. 

There have been some mentor/mentee relationships that have kicked off and actually completed and we’ve received positive feedback in terms of the ability to build cross-team relationships with co-workers that would otherwise be challenging. For example, our CFO, who is based in Colorado is mentoring a coordinator, who is based in Tennessee. That was a mentor relationship that likely wouldn't have developed otherwise.

Q: How can HR help employees align their goals in order to build a career path visualization?

Jennie: I don’t mean to keep returning to our product, but to your point around accelerated automation, technology is a vital component for enhancing people’s experiences at work. We integrate all aspects of performance management, including OKR and goal management, ongoing performance conversations, and a Career Hub where people can plan and track their career paths. 

Everything we do is based on the latest science and research, so we believe that HR can help by providing evidence-backed tools to help establish role clarity and allow employees to understand what aspects of their roles energize them. Then go through a strengths discovery process to determine if what they are currently doing and the path they visualize are aligned with their strengths and passions. These are necessary parts of the process that have to be understood by employees and managers before finalizing the final components— the career vision and growth plan. 

Q: What are the new trends that you find in the L&D space?

Jennie: Ensuring that organizations are aware of what Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) means to the organization and what effective DEI training looks like. We made an investment to hire a senior director of DEI, internally, who is now owning that curriculum.

Organizations are also leveraging technology. We use a learning management system (LMS) for a lot of our company-wide training or for onboarding team members. Certain teams like sales and customer success also use it for specific role training. We also use our Guru system for internal knowledge documentation. 

L&D tech stacks vary between organizations but one thing that is a growing trend among people leaders is the need for integrations between the LMS and HRIS, so they can track learning and see the impact on employee development and performance. Currently, some of our teams are using an external LMS and we track utilization—how long learners are staying in the courses— and if they are actually holding on to the content. 

Q: What is your take on building a culture of learning? What has been your experience?

Jennie: Practically, we empower individual team leads and the groups within each team to incorporate learning in the goal-setting process of each employee, so that they can then allocate time to learn and grow as part of completing their quarterly business objectives. 

But in terms of the culture of learning, I’ll go back to the core values again. What's really incredible about 15Five is just this desire to work with people, who are invested in their own growth and development, and so in our interview process, we have a “Mission and Culture” interview at the end.

We go through each of our four values with the candidate (Be and Become your Best Self, Cultivate Relational Mastery, Do the Extraordinary, and Create Customer Transformation) and see how this person embodied them throughout their life and career. What we're looking for is someone who is hungry to grow.

It's just been wonderful to witness my colleagues having that same personal motivation and to witness their growth throughout their tenure, which is generative and exciting and a deeply fulfilling experience.
 

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