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This is the first of a series of stories about PDG partners who have demonstrated strong and unique leadership in driving business results through learning. Leah Minthorn is the Director of North American (NA) Operations Learning at Iron Mountain, where she has been instrumental in driving organizational change. She and her small team of 11 learning and development staff are consistently reaching strategic business goals through innovative programs. Leah shares how she and her team continue to support the business goals and drive change at Iron Mountain.

After working at Iron Mountain for over 10 years, Leah Minthorn has developed a knack for listening. “I feel it is important to get out in the field and listen to what employees are saying," says Leah. "Companies want a solution to a problem, and rather than listening to employees, they often come up with solutions before really understanding the problem,”  Her tip is to go to the source directly to find out the why behind the problem. Often the problem is not the employees but a process that needs to change. “Staying connected to the employees who are on the front line can make a big difference in driving organizational change.”

Being connected to her learning and development staff has been vital to driving organizational change at Iron Mountain. “My staff is like a family. I have never worked with people before who are so much like brothers and sisters.” The people in her department understand the business at Iron Mountain because they immerse themselves in the field to hear their internal clients’ needs. Her department plans to increase the use of technology used for learning to give employees more control over their learning and to increase self-directed learning. They will continue to use e-learning and on the job training, while increasing the use of videos, online webinars, “six second learning,” crowd sourcing, and social media.

Leah’s team uses on-the-job reinforcements and peer coaching to help meet strategic business goals. Their program currently uses a mapped curriculum of e-learning, coach-led hands-on training, regular feedback sessions, job aids, and knowledge and performance assessments. This model works well for Iron Mountain; the coaches reinforce organizational changes and what is required for employees to transform and grow.

Iron Mountain has received a great deal of industry recognition for Sentinel, their innovative peer coaching program for front-line employees. They have made the Training Top 125 list for the past two years, won a Gold CLO Learning in Practice Award, and a Corporate University Best-in-Class (CUBIC) Award. Recently it was announced that the NA Operations Learning team won a Best Practice award for the Sentinel program from Training Magazine. Leah’s team is currently working on designing a new Sentinel management training program to continue the professional development of front-line operations managers and supervisors.

Iron Mountain has integrated the learning organization into all strategic planning activities, providing them with a ‘seat at the table’ to take part in the organization’s decisions. With an in-depth understanding of the organization’s direction, the learning group has the perspective needed to provide the tools and support that Iron Mountain needs to reach their goals. For example, when CEO William Meaney decided to address cultural and leadership change, the learning group developed a strategy to support his three-year plan. “We recognize that at least 50% of our employees have Spanish as their first language. This creates a greater learning curve and employees are not able onboard as quickly if the training is not in their native tongue,” observes Leah. To support their North American employees from diverse backgrounds, the learning organization is engaged in a project to translate their learning programs into Spanish and French Canadian.  Her team is also supporting their growing business by developing methods to onboard new employees more quickly, leveraging their overall strategy to use technology to deliver more self-directed learning.

Because they have a small staff of 11, NA Operations Learning tries to leverage internal and external business partners to reach their goals. They rely on subject matter experts in the field to help with messaging. Recently they adopted Iron Mountain UK’s tools for transportation, using telematics in company vehicles to measure their employees driving.  Leah’s team also relies on key relationships with preferred vendors. “PDG is a long-term preferred vendor of ours who I enjoy working with because they understand our business. PDG understands our design aesthetic and can translate what is in our heads into a properly articulated design.” These are just a few of the ways Leah and her team is able to support Iron Mountain’s business goals and to continue to drive real business impact through organizational change.

Iron Mountain is a storage and information management company, assisting more than 156,000 organizations in 36 countries on five continents with storing, protecting, and managing their information. Iron Mountain employs almost 17,000 professionals and an infrastructure that includes more than 1,000 facilities and 3,600 vehicles.

For more information about Iron Mountain or for additional interviews with Leah Minthorn click on the links below:

Chief Learning Officer: Special Report: Metrics and Measurement

Chief Learning Officer: Special Report: Learning Technology

Training Magazine: Paths to Success: Responsibility Vs. Promotion 

HRO Today: Out of Recession, Companies Turn to Training

PDG's Marcus Hswe will co-present with Keith Willis, the Associate Director, Cardiovascular Training for Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) for an exciting new webinar presented by the Life Sciences Trainers & Educators Network (LTEN) on January 9, 2015. 

Benchmarking Your Best: Using Your Top Talent to Grow Your Salesforce

Friday, January 9, 2015 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM EST

Many of us are challenged by salesforce turnover, and the need to constantly onboard new talent. But the Cardiovascular team at Bristol-Myers Squibb had a more intriguing challenge. BMS built and nurtured an extremely high-performing team, one that experienced very little turnover. How do you grow a great sales team and make them even better? How do you change the behavior of a team that’s had great success with the “old” behaviors?

Attend this lively and practical LTEN webinar to learn how BMS uncovered the differentiating behaviors of their top performers and created a series of best practices and benchmarks to help raise the performance of the entire team.

In this session, participants will learn:

• How to motivate and grow a mature and high-performing salesforce.
• How to evaluate and benchmark best practices to drive up performance of all team members.
• How learning needs to be approached differently for an experienced audience.

Our Presenters:

		Keith Willis Associate Director Cardiovascular Training Bristol-Myers Squibb Keith Willis has 22 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry where he has honed his sales management and sales training skills with companies like Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer Pharmaceuticals and Otsuka. Keith is currently Associate Director for Sales and Access Learning at Bristol-Myers Squibb responsible for Cardiovascular Training. Throughout his career he has won several sales awards, launched numerous products as a district manager, operations manager and training manager and developed several training curriculums.
		Marcus Hswe Consultant Performance Development Group Marcus Hswe is an Associate Vice President, Business Development with Performance Development Group (PDG) of Malvern, PA. He has over 10 years of experience in design, development, and management of enterprise training initiatives. With a concentration in the life sciences arena, Marcus works directly with senior executives to determine effective and efficient solutions to their business issues.

For more information, or to register for the webinar, click here.

Many of us have been in “Leadership Training” since we were very young. We learned leadership informally, through participation in sports teams, youth organizations, or community groups. And sometimes we learned it formally, through events, retreats, and challenges. But one thing that’s probably true of all of it is that we never called it “leadership training.” It was about having great experiences.

Leadership is a difficult topic to get your arms around. Part of that is because leadership content is easy to understand, but hard to actually do. It’s rare that I hear someone say, “I just read Peter Drucker (or Covey, or Kouzes & Posner, or Conner), and I have no idea what he’s talking about.” Actually, I find people are very inspired by these books, and are excited to put these ideas into practice. And that’s where things get dicey, because sometimes these behaviors are very hard to do properly. Why? Lots of reasons: I’m intimidated by my team members. I don’t want to give people bad news. I don’t think my boss will support me. I don’t think my organization “gets it.” The list goes on and on.

It certainly doesn’t help that a lot of leadership programs are a parade of models, disjointed, without context. Situational Leadership! Myers Briggs! DISC! These are wonderful, thoughtful, well-researched models, but when they come at you in rapid succession, as if fired out of a cannon, they can become an endless series of matrices, process graphs, and pie charts that have little relevance to actually being a leader.

So what are the missing pieces? The first is context. These models are not stand-alone solutions; they are tools in a toolkit. Can you imagine learning carpentry by spending one day on the hammer and then the next day on the screwdriver? Of course not; there’s no context. Your goal is to build something; tools help you build. As a leader, you manage people, processes, tools, and money (yes, money). The tools need to help you do that. If you don’t understand how the tools get you closer to your goals, then you really don’t understand the tools.

The second missing piece is experience.  Effective leadership programs have a strong experiential component, the more, the better. Sometimes, experiential learning can be low risk, as in simulations. A good simulation can provide a safe environment to practice new behaviors, try out models, and get a feel for how people will react to you. An angry team member can be a rude surprise for a new leader, but if the leader has had the experience of dealing with this behavior in a simulation, she may be able to handle it better in real life. But good programs will also have experiential assignments, the chance to use new behaviors in real life. This may include job shadowing (observing an experienced leader as they go through their day), leadership of project teams or communities of practice, or feedback from coaches and mentors.

In her wonderful book Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership, Linda Hill of Harvard Business School observed that a very high percentage of first-time managers failed at their jobs, due to a gap in expectations between what they thought the job would be like, versus what it actually was like. In simplest terms, they didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. By creating leadership programs that focus on context and experience, we help guarantee that our next generation of leaders is prepared for the realities of the job.

Read more about leadership:

Rich Mesch is Senior Director, Customer Engagement at
Performance Development Group.

I am a big fan of blogs, but not just the ones we typically read for business purposes. The ones I find most appealing are the “mommy blogs”— especially the ones who do interior decorating or crafts or offer recipes on a regular basis. One of the things I find most appealing about these authors is that they make regular time to share their daily work with others in order to document, inspire, and collaborate with others. That’s pretty much what we’re doing in Talent Development isn’t it? We call it Informal Learning, but the attributes are pretty much the same:

1. Start with the best recipes, then add your own ingredients

Whether it’s dinner plans or an onboarding approach for your new hire sales associates, “recipes” help. Of course, modifications are often necessary, but why start from scratch when there are proven approaches that can jumpstart your success? 

2. We’ve been “doing more with less” for as long as I can remember

When I see bloggers that recycle components I would normally throw away into useful and beautiful items, I’m inspired. I’ve been in this business for 20+ years and I’ve never seen a time when budgets weren’t tight.  There never seems to be enough money, people, or time to get it all done. That’s where strategy and planning come into play. An investment up front, with a clear cut plan and deliberate goals and objectives, help bring clarity into view and resources easier to allocate and manage. Too many learning executives simply let content drive the build. That’s a big (and expensive) mistake made regularly by learning people everywhere. 

3. Someone always needs tending and attention

If Social Media has taught us anything, it’s the value of sharing ideas. It’s often difficult for learning professionals to carve out “me” time to do the deep thinking required of the job. The result is lack of a clear learning strategy that demonstrates connectedness to the goals of the business. If you can’t see it, trust me, no one else can either. Negotiate with colleagues if you need to trade responsibilities to buy some solitude later. This planning is crucial to your learning plan’s success.

4. You can easily get into a rut; inspiration from others in similar situations is useful, encouraging and enlightening.

It’s amazing what a little benchmarking can do. Whether it’s seeing how someone else set up their family’s coffee cart, or learning about how another company addressed their global learning challenge, inspiration comes from connecting with others.  Do you make time to belong to a community of practice within your own organization and in the learning community? Why not start one yourself?

There is a real balance between the science and art of talent development.  For me, connecting with others allows a view into the application of the science as well as the fine details of the art, and a great opportunity for Informal Learning. Whether it’s Daniel Pink’s blog, or Meg Duerksen’s, I find it this sharing to be rewarding, reaffirming and a great way to refresh and renew on a regular basis. 

I have a sister in-law and brother in-law who create the Baby Mouse and Squish graphic novels. They not only hooked me on graphic novels, but their graphic novels were the start of my daughter’s love of reading. So, when I started to see a number of graphic novels being developed for our corporate clients, I took a look, and I was amazed!

PDG recently published a new white paper called “The High Performing Learning Organization: 8 Attributes for Business Success.” The white paper focuses on what makes up a High Performing Learning Organization and the benefits to the business.

Here’s a section from the white paper:

What is a High Performing Learning Organization?

A High Performing Learning Organization (HPLO) is a Learning Organization that operates like a business, using the tools and processes of business to create workflows that are timely, efficient, cost-effective, and demonstrate a clear impact on the enterprise.

High Performing Learning Organizations:

So what are the tools necessary to build and sustain a High Performing Learning Organization? How do you identify the gaps in your organization that need to be closed to create a HPLO? While there are many categories that make up a HPLO, too many organizations focus on the solutions the learning organization creates. Great solutions are the result of an effective Learning Organization, but improving solutions doesn’t necessarily improve the organization. It’s not just where you end up; it’s the path you take to get there. High Performing Learning Organizations needs to be structured to perform optimally, by having strategy, process, people, and tools that support their path to success.

Successful HPLOs focus on the following eight key success areas:

1. Business Alignment & Performance Impact
2. People Capabilities & Development
3. Scalable Processes, Tools, & Assets
4. Organization Structured for Leverage
5. Global & Local Optimization
6. Governance, Demand, & Resource Balancing
7. Flexible Resource Management
8. Content Strategy & Asset Leverage

 To read more about High Performing Learning Organizations, download the free white paper!

 Rich Mesch is Senior Director, Customer Engagement
at Performance Development Group

A Real-World Roadmap to Successful CIA Learning Rollout

The PDG white paper, Implementing CIA Learning, provides an overview of planning and implementing the learning programs that are required as part of a Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA). Here’s a selection from the white paper:

The learning components of a Corporate Integrity Agreement are unique and different from any other type of corporate learning your organization will do. Traditional learning models aren’t enough for CIA learning; a CIA has very specific legal and regulatory requirements, and failure to meet them comes at a significant cost. An organization managing a CIA needs a very specific learning strategy for success, a pragmatic plan which is outlined in this white paper.

What is a CIA?

A Corporate Integrity Agreement (CIA) is a document that outlines the obligations an entity agrees to as part of a civil settlement. An entity agrees to the CIA obligations in exchange for the OIG’s agreement that it won’t seek to exclude entity from participation in Medicare, Medicaid or other Federal health care programs. The CIAs have common elements, but each one is tailored to address the specific facts of the case and CIAs are often drafted to recognize the elements of a pre-existing compliance program.

The manufacturers and distributors of pharmaceuticals, biologics, and medical devices are the most frequent recipients of CIAs, and CIAs are typically issued as part of the settlement relating to actions an entity has taken in violation of government regulations. Therefore, virtually all CIAs include provisions that the entity takes steps to change practices and behaviors that led to previous violations.

What is your CIA Learning Readiness?

How will you…

•          Identify and locate Covered Persons?
•          Determine your LMS and certification ability?
•          Reach your vendors and contractors?
•          Identify what content you have and what you need to develop?
•          Communicate with OIG and your internal stakeholders?
•          Deal with constant changes and updates?
•          Resource your CIA team?
•          Rollout and track effectively?

…all within 120 days?

Want to learn more? You can download the white paper here for free! You can also find out more about implementing CIA learning with these resources:

• Implementing CIA Learning; A Real World Roadmap to Successful CIA Learning Rollout
• Corporate Integrity Agreement: A Practical Roadmap for CIA Learning