The Role of the CLO

Without appropriate senior leadership, many L&D organizations run the risk of focusing on the delivery of training related tasks while misaligning with strategy. Top performing organizations, on the other hand, assign the task of L&D leadership to seasoned executives with strong business and relationship building skills. The strategic reason for this approach is that such individuals have a keen sense of how to leverage L&D effectively to achieve business goals.

The title CLO is a popular term used to describe the head of the learning and development unit (sometimes called a corporate university). In some cases, the CLO reports to the CEO and has broad mandates to be a strategic partner across business units. According to CUX research, however, only 14% of CLO’s fall into this category, while 55% of all corporate university heads report to HR.

Much of the enthusiasm for the CLO title has to do with the notion that it sends the message that learning is an important organizational value, with support from the executive suite. Though many CLO’s don’t agree on the value of the title, they all seem to agree that what matters is the desire of executives at the highest level of the organization to treat learning as a strategic initiative that makes considerable contributions to the bottom line.

According to a study done by ASTD, the most critical skills of a CLO are business acumen and strategic planning. Tamar Elkeles, CLO for Qualcomm and author of the book The Chief Learning Officer (CLO), states that the CLO plays a critical role in business alignment, managing resources, innovation, delivering measured ROI, and customer service. In order to be effective, the successful CLO works closely with other business leaders to develop holistic solutions for driving performance in areas that will have a significant and measurable impact on overall business results.

Along with the aforementioned skills, there are five key competencies the CLO must possess:

• Communication
• Vision
• Strategic Alliance Building
• Performance Consulting
• Innovation

Communication

The ability to communicate effectively is a critical skill for CLOs, since it is the foundation upon which learning programs will be built in an organization. The CLO is responsible for heightening the awareness of the strategic importance of communication and facilitating more precise and purposeful messaging throughout the company. In order to be effective, strategic objectives must be articulated so that the context is simple and easy to understand, and should not require any re-reading or interpretation in order for the reader to fully comprehend the message.

Most organizations pursue multiple communication strategies simultaneously, so it is important for the CLO to see how the pieces fit together and align learning and corporate strategy in all related messaging. For example, one organization that was studied requires executives and managers to memorize the company’s core values and strategies, which means that the content must be succinct, accurate and relevant in order for them to take the task seriously.

Vision

The CLO must be a champion for learning and is required to paint a vision for the organization of how the development of human capital will create a competitive advantage. The CLO’s vision must be tightly aligned to the key goals and strategies of the company, and speak directly to the interests of senior executives. A successful CLO will understand that to gain legitimacy for the learning organization, senior executives need to be fully aware of how it helps them achieve their business objectives.

The CLO needs open communication lines with organization leaders that must be ongoing and active. A relationship with the senior executives is a must so the CLO can share ideas and thoughts, and gather feedback when developing their vision. The CLO’s vision is not useful if it is not communicated organization-wide. He/she needs access to major internal communication channels in order to present the vision throughout the organization:

• Executive and board meetings
• Executive business unit meetings
• The annual SMT operations meetings

Strategic Alliance Building

For a successful organization that is growing globally every year, the ability to build strategic alliances is critical. In order for the partnership between line and learning executives to work, the CLO must invest time and energy into relationship building and understanding the business issues of line executives – visiting with business leaders and discussing their goals and objectives, business strategy, vision for the future, personal goals, the quality of the leadership team, culture, environmental issues and their succession plan.

With training as a company-wide occurrence, and several other units planning to develop programs that may overlap, it is important to be able to align all training within the organization. Therefore, the CLO must be able to create collaboration across business units and job functions that integrates with and supports the organization’s learning department. In order to achieve this goal the CLO must have a strong relationship with the CEO. The CLO must become the CEO’s sounding board for the people-side of business initiatives such as mergers, acquisitions and new product launches.

A successful learning function supporting a global business also requires many suppliers to provide technology, training programs, and services. Rather than treat those suppliers as vendors, the savvy CLO develops strategic alliances and creates an ecosystem of partners who deeply understand the business. There are many benefits associated with this strategy, including:

• Prices are better since the supplier has a reliable customer committed to their success
• Partners learn the business and are able to better tailor the process
• The service level improves because of the quality of relationship that is developed

Performance Consulting

The CLO must be an expert performance consultant, and must be relied upon to help solve the most difficult business problems within the organization – those involving people. He or she must deeply understand change management and the process of changing behaviors.

Furthermore, the CLO will need to understand the inter-dependencies that the organization has, and develop a holistic view of business performance gaps when planning strategies and interventions to address these issues. As a performance coach, the CLO must meet with business unit leaders, all of whom deeply understand where the business is heading and the key strategies and priorities.

Digging deep, the CLO must be able to identify where performance gaps exist and uncover the root causes of those gaps. This individual must also measure the costs and benefits of closing performance gaps to give the organization an objective way to best apply resources to problems (Rothwell, et al., 2007).

Innovation

Innovation is a critical part of every business strategy, and the CLO must be an innovator in helping drive an organization’s operations and the creative performance of its people. When developing human capital, innovative approaches must be utilized to challenge past experiences and broaden the thought processes and capabilities of the individuals. For example, learning strategies that encourage creative problem solving can improve the ability of a workforce to quickly learn and adapt to changing conditions.

The key benefit of innovative learning strategies is that the resulting improvement to employee problem solving skills will create a competitive advantage that cannot be copied by competitors. In contrast to technology and process improvements, which can easily be imitated, human capital remains a form of advantage that will grow and build upon itself over time. Therefore, investments in workforce innovation training will help to create sustainable and unique improvements to a firm’s ability to react to change, address problems and grow on both an individual and collective level.

Conclusion

Since the role of the CLO is fairly new, having originated at GE in the mid ‘90’s, it is helpful to compare it to the rise in prominence of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). The CIO role has evolved from manager of data processing, to director of information services, to VP of Information Technology, to CIO. With each successive description change came a substantial increase in status and compensation, combined with a requirement for much stronger business acumen.

Analysts declared ‘top technical officers who are going to stand the test of time are those whose number one asset is that they understand the business well.’ Corporate learning departments and the CLO have much to learn from their IT colleagues, and appear to be getting to the answers of governance, business alignment and measurement much faster as a result of the IT experiences.

Written by Alan Todd, Chairman, Corporate University Xchange For The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania