A conversation wi! Michelle Thompson. IT6750: Current Trends and Issues in In$ructional Technology. Submi%ed by Gin&r Nichols.

Transcription

1 A conversation wi! Michelle Thompson IT6750: Current Trends and Issues in In$ructional Technology Submi%ed by Gin&r Nichols September 20, 2'8

2 Who is Michelle Thompson? Simply put, Michelle is the Director of Leadership & Professional Development at Janus Capital Group, a mutual fund company. Michelle wears many hats. She is an Instructional Designer, Trainer, executive coach, and leader of her team of Instructional Designers and Trainers. Recently, I had the pleasure of talking with Michelle about her experiences in the corporate training world. Ginger Nichols: Michelle, how did you get into corporate training? Michelle Thompson: Most people wind up in corporate training when it s not what they planned. I have my Bachelor s Degree in Psychology. I knew that I wanted to work with kids. My first job was working with children who had various levels of disabilities at a facility located in Denver. The job was mentally and emotionally draining and I realized this was not my life s calling. While at the facility, I had a great mentor, Chris. Chris usually organized new hire training but would be out of town for an upcoming session and asked me to lead the session. Thinking about sitting through orientation myself, I thought the trainer had a cool job so I said yes. I took on new hire training and within six months became a one person training department. My responsibility grew to include managing new employees and helping them determine which children they could best help. I thought training could be a career but I wasn t sure. You also don t know what you don t know so I attended the University of Colorado at Denver Master s Degree Program in Instructional Design. It was at this time, that I realized that I needed to leave my job and be with professional trainers. I had no one to share ideas with or learn from in a one person training department. My next job was at Echostar also in new hire training in their call center. Here I honed my facilitation skills. I worked with 12 trainers and facilitated train the trainer sessions for management and trainers on site in the new call centers Echostar opened during an expansion. After Echostar, I worked at Rythms DSL as a full time Instructional Designer. I learned that I was not meant to sit behind a computer for 8 hours a day. Unfortunately, Rythms was a company that didn t survive the tech bubble and they went away in Later in 2001, I started supervising a call center training team at Nextel. I taught this team Instructional Design and training principles. Throughout the company, training was specific to each individual department and some departments had no training staff or training at all. The company centralized all training to report through the Human Resources department. When this reorganization of training occurred, I was promoted to Senior Training Manger and was in charge of training for 1,200 employees in various locations. I was on the road visiting different sites three out of four weeks a month. My biggest challenges were coordinating training because people were spread out across the country and making A Conversation with Michelle Thompson 2

3 arrangements for which part of the company was responsible for paying for the training. In 2005, I took maternity leave from Nextel. Over dinner with friends, Amy and Wendy, a discussion regarding an open training position at Janus occurred. We talked about the people we knew who might be interested in the position for a long time that night. Wendy said to me, Michelle you should apply. I told her no and the conversation continued. I called Wendy the following morning to ask her where to send my resume when the news of the Sprint-Nextel merger broke. GN: You are the Director of Leadership & Professional Development at Janus, can you tell me a little bit about what you do? MT: We have four roles in Professional Development Resources (PDR): Leadership Development Professional Development Required Development Organizational Development Our training is not job specific and can cut across any part of the company. I manage the team and the budget. We meet as a team each week to discuss upcoming projects. I have weekly one on one meetings with every team member. Each team member is different but I manage a team of i s [ Influence personality type from the DiSC Personality Assessment ( ] and some of them need their weekly time with me to touch base. PDR Mission: Empowering employees to grow through comprehensive development opportunities. As far as training, what I do is a lot of ad hoc programs for the vice president level and above. I plan executive off-sites and provide coaching for senior management. Programs are custom built and unique for this level of management. I designed, developed and facilitated the Evolving Leader program and work with outside vendors like the University of Denver for The Peak. I need to educate our vendors regarding the Janus corporate culture. I conduct about three-quarters of the training at our international offices and at Intech and Perkins Wolf [subsidiaries of Janus Capital Group]. Gary Black [Janus Chief Executive Officer] asked me to observe Perkins to assess their corporate culture and what tools they needed to integrate into the Janus culture. GN: What keeps you excited about your work? MT: The change I see in people. I don t see change in everyone who attends a class but I do reach some individuals. I love it when people come up to me and say what did you do to my manager? They explain that they noticed positive changes in that individual also. I facilitated a team session at Intech. When I walked in, the room was very tense. An Intech Vice President approached me and said, I don t trust Janus HR. The PDR group A Conversation with Michelle Thompson 3

4 Janus Professional Development Resources Management Training Courses The Peak Leadership training for senior executives at the Vice President level and higher Evolving Leader For graduates of Essential Leader focuses on transformational leadership and evolving relationships Essential Leader Training for supervisors, managers, directors and AVPs based upon the company s values and direction and external best practices Emerging Leader For Individual contributors who hope to become people managers is a part of Janus Human Resources. About two weeks after this session, the same Vice President called me for my advice with an issue that arose within his team. The same person who saw me as an enemy a few weeks later realized that I could help. I loved seeing that impact. GN: Is there one thing that you can attribute your success to? MT: Some companies are structured where there are Instructional Designers and there are trainers. I think what served me well was being well rounded to be able to design training and facilitate as well. GN: How do you choose and apply new technology in PDR? MT: As a department, we are behind in technology usage. Three years ago we started building out the department and next year we plan to introduce more technology. For training, we are just babies learning to walk. There is an intern in our Information Technology department that I spoke to regarding the technology that s available to us. She actually contacted me to arrange a meeting in the future to discuss a few options. She was exposed to a lot of technology ideas at the University of Denver. Thomas Toth is our on-staff online guy. Next year we need to have more technology in place, we are behind. GN: What challenges or issues do you face in your position? MT: We are developing focuses for the future; technology, measuring impact, and transfer of learning. We must know what our department impact is upon individuals because if the economy goes the wrong way, I need to justify the department staying. There is a difference between knowing and doing. My job is easy, I can show you what A Conversation with Michelle Thompson 4

5 you have to do, but you actually have to do it on the job. Why do we teach if we don t expect people to use the skills? How do we measure the transfer back to the job when we teach leadership and soft skills? GN: How do you keep up with trends in the field? Is there a certain source or resource you rely on for new information? MT: There are several things I do; read training and development magazines, attend conferences, I also attend a local networking group with other training and development managers to hear what they are doing. Another thing I did the end of August was I held a 2-day offsite with my team for 2 purposes: Day 1 was to explore what is going on in our industry that we need to know about and Day 2 was to begin our 2009 planning. I got the idea for Day 1, which I called "Think Week," when I read an article on Bill Gates. (Guth, 2005) Each person on my team was required to do research about our industry and come present it to the rest of the team. I told them to research, explore, etc what we all need to know about the latest in the training and development industry. We had topics on the latest thoughts on leadership, technology usage, how to measure and evaluate. It was a powerful day where I required my team to research the latest trends and then share it with the entire team. GN: What advice do you have for people entering Instructional Design and related fields? MT: It doesn t seem like it, but it s a risky position. When a company needs to scale down, marketing and training are the first places to go. In 2005, Janus needed to reduce staffing and one of the areas impacted was training. I had just started in my role and my department was cut back. When speaking with Greg Frost [Janus Chief Financial Officer], he told me that it was an easy decision to make when cutting the training department because no one could tell him what the department did. He automatically made job cuts without a second thought. People inside the company need to know who your are, what you do and how that impacts the company. Today, Greg Frost said he would have to pause before he cut the department because he knows our value and what we do. Maybe instead of cutting the entire department, I can save half of my employees. Not only do you need to know your business and how training fits in the business but you need some general business knowledge as well; cost, profit and loss, budget. You need to have business knowledge to defend your decisions. You need to know where the money comes from and what drives the funding. I m considering going back to school for an MBA to better understand the business side of things. On another note, corporate training is truly a networking field. I receive lots of calls from people saying I saw your name on a resume, what do you know about this person? I applied for my job at Janus after a conversation over dinner with friends who worked there at the time. A Conversation with Michelle Thompson 5

6 Reflection As I re-read the interview with Michelle, I realize that you really can t tell the true impact Michelle had and continues to have on training at Janus. Before Michelle, in my experience, employee training centered around teaching new skills for the employee s current job and training required by the bodies that regulate the mutual fund industry. Today, training at Janus is diverse and unique. It ranges from computer classes in Word and SharePoint to the leadership development classes discussed in this interview. Employees really have an opportunity to acquire new skills, to grow personally, and professionally as a result of the direction PDR has taken under Michelle s guidance. The financial industry has a reputation for being a boys club of sorts. Some might say that Janus is no different from the industry. One thing that really stands out about Michelle is her ability to break into the club to hold her place among senior management. Michelle is very well respected by members management at Janus and has impressed them enough to earn their trust. What I respect most about Michelle was her honest real world advice. Many companies consider training a luxury and it is among the first departments to be cut when hard times come. I don t think you can underestimate the power of networking and making decisonmakers aware of how the training department has an impact on the bottom line of the company. When speaking with Michelle, you can really tell that she loves what she does. As I progress toward a career in Instructional Design, I only hope to have the passion for the profession that I saw in Michelle. A Conversation with Michelle Thompson 6

7 References DiSC assessment. (2008). Retrieved September 19, 2008 from wiki/disc_assessment Guth, R. (2005, March 28). In secret hideaway, Bill Gates ponders Microsoft s future. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved September 19, 2005 from A Conversation with Michelle Thompson 7