Speexx Exchange Podcast – Episode 23:
Efficiency vs. Effectiveness: Learning Generosity in the L&D Profession with Stefaan van Hooydonk

Intro 0:01    

Welcome to the Speexx Exchange podcast with your host Donald Taylor. As a renowned learning and development industry expert, as well as chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, Donald sits down with experts from around the globe to talk business communication, learning technology, language, digital transformation, and engaging, upskilling, and reskilling your organization. This podcast is brought to you by Speexx, the first intelligent language learning platform for the digital workplace. Listen in, and you might learn a thing or two.  

Donald Taylor 0:33    

Another Speexx Exchange podcast. I’m Donald Taylor, your host. I have with me Stefaan Van Hooydonk, chief learning officer of Cognizant. Stefaan, great to have you here. Very quickly, can you introduce yourself? What’s your role? What have you been doing? What are your passions?  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 0:48    

Well, boy, that’s a big question. Thank you very much for having me, Donald. I’m enjoying doing things like this, and I am looking forward to it. This is going to be a very nice chat. I’m the chief learning officer of Cognizant. So, that means that I’m taking care of the knowledge well-being of about 300,000 colleagues. Which was quite daunting when I started the job, but it’s beautiful to see how much passion there is and how much curiosity there is in all kinds of different demographics. So, it’s just a question for all of us in L&D, how do you unleash that? What tips and tricks do you use on them to make that happen? I’m sure we’re going to talk more about this. My passions, I have many passions. I meditate two hours a day; I am a fervent reader. I try to spend as much time as possible with the family. But, it’s not always feasible because pre-COVID, I was traveling three weeks a month. So, when I was in Belgium, I was an art restorer. I still love that, but I don’t have a lot of time now. So, let’s talk about learning, I guess.  

Donald Taylor 1:57    

There are so many more questions I could ask about the travel, the meditation, everything else the art restoration, but we have to stick on the learning track here. We’ll have the other conversation over beers sometime. You’ve been in learning and development for a while, as the best people have been, including some senior roles. So, what have you learned during that time? What are the key takeaways?    

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 2:18    

First of all, I started in investment consulting for about six years, and then I moved into learning and development. I set up a business school in China; I’m very proud – it’s one of the major business schools now in Asia, China Europe International Business School. Then I’m moved into the corporate side – I was setting up learning, I’ve always set up learning structures. For Nokia, I’ve done that back in China, but also globally, at Philips, at Akfa, Flipkart, now at Cognizant. Very early on, I was quite close to senior leadership. I think that local senior leadership, with regards to learning and development, they all get it; they all know why this is necessary. Typically, all these leaders are very curious themselves and avid learners, and avid kind of being really interested in the world and others and so on, so forth. Now, so though they get it, they often don’t really see the value of the L&D group to really help them towards supporting or helping the organization towards the move towards a certain goal where skills are needed. Quite a number of research studies have been done as of late, the last ten years or so, also within Cognizant – for example, we did some research where you see many CEOs that have just left lofty goals for the next five years. As in, five years from now, we’re going to conquer the world; the world is really changing all around us, we need to be ready for that change, and therefore we’re going in this right strategic direction. Now, very often, when the question is also asked in those surveys, do you think that your L&D department or your people strategy or your skills in your organization is really going to help towards that goal? Very often, the answer is no, or at least in a few of the organizations the CEOs, think that they have everything lined up for this magic to happen. Maybe reflecting on us in L&D, maybe we’re looking more backward than forwards. Maybe we’re trying more the tricks of the past versus preparing towards the tricks of the future. I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on curiosity, on meta skilling, getting deep into data. Making sure that our L&D folks are really in tune with not only their own intuition of how learning should look like but really – what does the science say? What does cognitive science say? What is the difference between pedagogy and andragogy? How do you redesign whatever you want to do to move towards those goals? How do you, therefore, create credibility in your organization to drive this? Maybe back to the questions, I have never had a single CEO ask me, they do ask about impact, but nobody’s ever asked about return on investment. They get it that these dollars are needed for engagement purposes for upskilling. What they’re much more interested in is the return on expectation. Are you delivering the big goals and the expectations they have of the future? And that’s a big challenge for all of us.    

Donald Taylor 5:07    

I think it’s fair to say that those surveys generally return lists of top priorities of CEOs in which skills and talent are in the top three. For the past ten years, we’ve seen people saying, yeah, this is important to our organization, but they don’t associate that necessarily with the learning and development department. Very often, they know they have to recruit for skills, they have to be learning more in the organization, but they don’t necessarily think that it’s the learning and development department’s job to do it. Is that your experience? And if so, where are we failing to register in the minds of the people in that sort of organization?  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 5:40    

I think 10-15 years ago, absolutely not. But, I think nowadays, they see that more and more, at least in the CEOs that I’ve been interfacing with. Also, I’m seeing that learning, and because of the skilling, in the past, skills could be bought really easily. Nowadays, especially skills or the cutting edge and in our case, I’m working in Cognizant, you know, IT, IT support, IoT, machine learning, artificial intelligence, digital engineering, and all these skills there are just not enough people out there in the industry to recruit. So, you have to start skilling, and many companies were quite complacent and saying, yes, we can find people on the street. But nowadays, we have to start skilling people internally, and creating different ecosystems, and creating different cultures, because I think a lot of companies are paying lip service to skill. Often doing work is considered productive time, and doing skilling or learning is put in the same bucket as holidays, therefore not productive time. I think a lot of managers are getting that now. I’m also seeing that skilling, therefore, is becoming a board conversation. I think the challenge with all of us is, and especially also with our customers, is that we all went to school, and we all have this romantic feeling of what good looks like. Now very often, especially our leaders, they don’t realize that learning when we went to school is a function of pedagogy and not of andragogy, and there are just completely different forces at play when you’re dealing with learning and development for adults. Now the challenge for a lot of L&D folks is exactly the same. We have this idea, and we have learned through trial and error, through opinions we have about learning, through some things we’ve picked up on the way. The challenge by enlarge is that there are no degree requirements for getting into L&D, anybody can come into L&D, and that’s a beautiful thing because you can create diversity. But it’s also a challenge because there’s no baseline of knowledge. If you go to the legal department, I used that example earlier – if you go to the legal department, the business leader is not going to say give me a two-page contract with 14 chapters. They’re just going to trust you or your legal colleagues with whatever they need to do, and you do your magic, and we won’t even interfere. In learning and development, that’s not always the case very often. Also, research shows that very often, not only the what but also the how is decided by senior management because we’re often interfering as learning and development folks with people senior to us. If we’re not careful, they’re going to just tell us what we need to do. Not having that theoretical backing or not having that credibility combined with good project management and all the rest of it and organizational fluency is just harming us. That’s why it’s so important for all of us to really get in tune with cognitive psychology with the latest theories and move away from that intuition. Because the way I’m looking at the world is not the way you’re looking at the world. Just because I like to learn in a certain way doesn’t mean that you like to learn in such a way; let’s just get rid of those feelings.  

Donald Taylor 8:47    

You’re right, of course, that there’s this issue that everyone’s been to school, therefore, everyone imagines they know what learning looks like. There’s a sort of natural progression of the idea that a behavioral issue can be fixed with learning, and that may not be the case. Or that the learning has to take place via a course and that course has to take place simultaneously with other people, ideally, in the classroom environment, and that may not be the case either. But that progression of ideas is something we’ve all experienced, regardless of gender, class, background, ethnicity, just about everyone’s gone through that process of learning at school; as you say, that’s the andragogy side of it. But of course, adults are very different. I completely agree that cognitive sciences are essential for us to understand, but is that the basis for us being able to persuade other people in the organization that we know what we’re talking about?  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 9:37    

It’s a start. If you know that stuff, you’re so much more advanced than if you don’t. For instance, spaced learning is much better for memory creation than blocked learning. Putting people in a room for work for four hours is always going to be worse than doing one hour a week. It might be a bit more logistically challenging to do one hour a week, but it’s much better for your memory. We have so many myths that were also imposed on our kids. For instance, underlining and highlighting is one of the worst ways to learn something. But we’re still holding our kids accountable for how colorful their textbooks are, this type of thing. But if we as learning and development folks are not in tune with the latest theory, or for instance, whether you’re an auditory or kinesthetic type of a learner, complete, complete rubbish. But we’re still going along with those things, and as learning and development folks, we need to be in tune with that. It’s not only cognitive psychology but it’s also applied psychology, its andrologists. It’s also just sheer professionalism. We need to have organizational fluency, we need to speak the lay of the land in our organizations, we need to be damn good at project management, and so on, so forth, as you expect from any professional.  

Donald Taylor 10:53    

I agree about the project management side of things. I have to say that one of the key skills I think that we’re missing in learning and development is yes, we need to be better at marketing, yes, we need to be better at data and analytics. But project management has a huge yawning gap generally in learning and development. Organizations that do that well are spectacularly better, typically at L&D. So, look, we need these skills to be proper professionals. That may give us a certain amount of confidence, but when we’re going into a conversation with the CEO or, indeed, the senior managers, there’s still the chance, isn’t it, that they will treat learning development like a pizza order company? Yeah, I want it this size, I want the ham, not on the pineapple. So how do we avoid that? In the past, when we talked about the issue, you mentioned the idea that you had to speak their language. You’ve mentioned organizational fluency a couple of times; what does that mean? How much does data have a part to play?  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 11:45    

That’s beautiful. I think the learning knowledge gets you into the door. It’s data that gets the conversation going. I think you see that also broader in HR, and also many places in your organization, that we’re not celebrating data well. For instance, what I’m telling my teams now is I don’t want them to go to any meeting until they have the right data with them. So for instance, last year, we’ve trained 5,000 people. How has the billing rate changed since last year? Because we made this investment as an organization. Or how has the efficiency in your team improved versus last year and things like that, and let’s have a discussion about that first before you’re going to throw some other pizza requests in our direction type of thing. It’s amazing how the conversation changes dramatically. Instead of a parent-child conversation, you suddenly have an adult-level conversation because they also have to justify that they’ve done the right things with that stuff and that they’ve enabled their growth in their organization. Also, I think at a senior low level, or at any level, I think we’ve established in the company that there’s a direct correlation between attrition and skilling. Now, suddenly, you have the chief financial person, or the chief HR person or the CEO talking, because you can calculate how much it costs to recruit a person and how much a person is up to speed and all that jazz. If we’re saying that the more people learn, the chances for them to stay back is longer – versus the people that don’t learn, suddenly you get them talking. Now, this is data, which is where we used HR data and learning data together. I’ve also established, and that was more recently, the shadow of a manager and the importance of a shadow of a manager, especially if the manager learns a lot. I’m not talking about learning and just going to classes, it’s also reading books and articles and all the things that we can measure on our tools, and we have lots of different opportunities for people to learn so many methods. But once we see that the consumption of items goes up with a manager, the team reacts in the same way. Inversely, if the manager does not learn anything, then also the team’s learning behavior is really low. That’s not for everybody because you always have A-players in your team; people that naturally want to go places regardless of the shadow of the manager. But it’s enormous, I never realized this, and actually, in the past, I was a little bit skeptical about management development as an overall theme. Not about management development, but to over-index on management development as if managers are radically different animals than the rest of the population. But I’m starting to think that maybe over-indexing in a manager isn’t that bad after all.  

Donald Taylor 14:30    

So just to be clear, what you’re saying here. People are consciously or unconsciously emulating the behavior of the manager they’re with. The managers learning will spend more time learning; managers not learning will typically, with exceptions, spend less time learning. Again, that’s something that is news to me and does show that it’s probably worthwhile training managers possibly on anything just because you get the rest of the people multiplied and get the effects multiplied across their team. So yeah, I do agree with you. I, too, have been skeptical about the value of management training in the past, but I can see that there might be value there. You’re talking here very fluently and very confidently about correlations between learning data. It’s the stuff that we’re in charge of in the learning and development department and data from outside attrition rates and so on. How confident do you think most learning and development people are in your experience with making those correlations? Those who don’t mind getting ahold of the data to do it and are able to make the correlations and talk about them confidently? Do you think we’re in a good place there?  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 15:25    

I think we’re in as good a place as we can ever be. It’s all a function of creativity, and it’s living like treasure hunting; you just start digging, and you hope you find something. You have some hypotheses that learning is valuable in the organization and value can mean a number of things and could mean that people stay longer, or people are better engaged, or, you know, you could come up with anything. So, I think you have some smart kids in all companies; you have really smart kids and adults and people who can do some data analysis. If they’re not in your L&D group, I’m sure there are people in either your IT group or some other business group who are good at this stuff. I’m quite lucky in every organization that I had I always set up an analytics team and also a marketing team. I think these two teams are really important to drive things forward. So, I’m a little bit lucky now, but it doesn’t have to be your own team. It’s just how much you are curious really about proving your value? It’s not proving your value because your CEO wants to see that value; it’s a value that you want to prove to yourself first and foremost. If that’s the case, anybody else will follow because you’re going to stumble up onto really magical data. It’s not about the bums-in-seats type of thing. But it’s something bigger. Now with COVID, I challenge every L&D leader and team to think deeply about what can we do to prove, analyze, to move the organization in a new direction? For me, learning is much closer to transformation and change than anything else. So, how can we, as learning and development folks, support that change and transformation? What data do we need to prove to the organization that they should take us seriously to move in that direction versus just tactically do some onboarding and do some management development and do some of the normal tactical stuff, you know? I’m not saying that this tactical stuff is wrong, you always have to do that, and you have to do it damn well. But there’s a sea of opportunities out there if you just put your gaze towards it.   

Donald Taylor 17:40    

We do have to do this tactical stuff. There’s always going to be the onboarding; there’s going to be the mandatory training. There’s going to be stuff that we just need to do to keep the organization operating. But you’re saying that’s not enough? When we’ve talked, Stefaan, you’ve often used the word “transformational” to suggest the idea that the learning and development department has a crucial strategic role in what the organization’s trying to achieve. Can you just describe that a bit more? Because we’ve talked about it quite tactically. If you’re like, having a conversation with the manager, how do you establish your credibility? What sort of things do we need to know? But now we’re stepping back a bit, and we’re looking at the role of the department as a whole across the organization. What’s it trying to achieve? How can you make sure that it’s able to achieve it?  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 18:06    

Oh, that’s a beautiful question. For me, that boils down to: are you focused on efficiency, or are you focused on effectiveness? For me, with efficiency, the metaphor would be a supermarket. Where everybody is well structured, and you have rows, and you have sections, and you have people responsible for the sections. You just check in with your proverbial cart, and you put whatever in your cart and you checkout without your manager knowing, and typically, an LMS is managing that structure. Then you get on with things. But what we’re interested in, in a supermarket, is only what happens within the supermarket when people are actually in the system and buying that stuff. Also, the people that are working in a supermarket are typically just responsible for their counter, and they’re limited because they haven’t designed the products or they’re not deep into that stuff. So, that’s one way of looking at learning and development, that it’s the engine or the non-transformational part, I’d probably say. On the other side, you can have the metaphor of a boutique shop, maybe a tailor, when you go for a suitor for a gala dress or so. This person needs to know everything there is about your body, about measurements, about how it would look like. So suddenly, in a boutique shop, the course might not be the solution. I’ve experienced with sales groups that people say okay, our sales guys and girls don’t know enough about our products. Let’s draw some more training at the product with those sales guys. We found that they don’t have the right portal to find out all there is to know about the product. So, just maybe creating a portal does the trick. Or in one of my previous companies, we said our managers are not cascading in strategy; let’s do some training with them. Then we said, hold on, putting our boutique shop hat on, but what is the issue? We did a monthly questionnaire with five questions to all the people in the organization. How do I have a one-on-one meeting with my manager? Will we have a team meeting once a week with the team? Does my manager commend me for something I do well? We found out that 30 percent of our managers never had a one-on-one meeting with their team or never had a team meeting. So, just by focusing on those points, the problem went away automatically. Because when we started measuring those things, suddenly things happened, and we didn’t need to try and think. So that’s very much a boutique shop approach where you are focusing much more on the basic problems.  

Donald Taylor 21:01    

Also, seeing the problems and focusing on performance. I think it’s Boxall and Purcell have this formula, that performance is a function of AMMO. A is ability, knowledge, and skills, but the M and the O are motivation and opportunity. If, as you’re saying in that example, people can’t get to what they need to get through the portal, then the opportunity is effectively reduced to zero. No matter how big their ability and motivation are. And of course, we know that motivation is crucial for people. You can be typically, I don’t know, let’s say 60 to 70% skilled for your job, but if your motivation is zero, you’re just not going to get out of bed in the morning. So, it doesn’t matter how well skilled you are. So, if we have that remit to talk to people openly about motivation and about the opportunity, as well as the knowledge and skills part, then we truly are a performance engine for the organization rather than the training department. Which does the stuff that people imagine is learning, whereas in fact, of course, the performance side is much wider.  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 21:56    

Actually, Charles Jennings came up with a very good phrase around this; he said something like the “conspiracy of convenience.” Because when they come to learn, they can offload it, and whether something changes or not doesn’t matter.  

Donald Taylor 22:10    

Everyone feels they’ve done their thing. Every year they tick the box. Yeah, I asked for the training they deliver the training, we’ve done it. There’s this conspiracy: nobody’s actually looking at what got done. The answer, unfortunately, too often is nothing got done. Stefaan, before we wrap up, there’s one phrase you’ve used in previous conversations we’ve had of learning generosity; I think it’s a really interesting idea. Now we’ve sort of come up with this bigger picture view of what our role is. What for you is learning generosity, and why is it important?   

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 22:36    

I probably unconsciously came up with this.   

Donald Taylor 22:40    

It was a great idea. You were talking about people being curious and sharing their experiences.  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 22:44    

Yeah, no, you’re right. I’m a great believer that learning is not only about consumption but also about contribution. I’m the proud owner now of 300,000 trainers because everybody has something great to share with at least one other person, and very likely more than one other person. So, I’ve put it on my team, and we’ve looked at this as a challenge. What do we need to do now to magnify the voices of every single person within the organization because there’s so much knowledge? Nowadays, with people on LinkedIn, on Facebook, people are much more used to sharing than ever before. So, let them share something useful. I also think generosity, for me, also links very closely to the notion of curiosity – that’s a beautiful gift that we, as learning and development folks, can give to the organization. Not only training people’s primary skills or secondary skills but really focusing on people’s meta-skills. At the end of the day, in an organization, as everybody’s naturally curious, they don’t need L&D, and we can do something fun otherwise. So, if we’re able to point people’s attention towards the notion of curiosity, towards a growth mindset, towards having the right learning strategies, “learn to learn” type of thing, then I think that generosity will be enhanced much more. We’ve launched some beautiful work at Cognizant in this space. We actually see people changing the moment people have language, the moment people have words. If you’ve never heard growth and mindset in the same instance, then you’re not able to reflect on it. At least 50% tell us three months later that something has actually changed for them. They become more interested also in terms of their late learning hours. I’m not a great believer in measuring learning hours, but we’re seeing learning hours doubling 12 months before and after people have taken those really short sessions, those eye-opener sessions I call them, curiosity reengineering. I think it’s a great part also to cure this learning generosity in sharing.  

Donald Taylor 22:52    

Once you’ve sparked people’s interest in how they learn, how they can learn, how that can affect their personal growth and productivity, once you spark that, then this idea of unleashing your 300,000 trainers becomes so much stronger because they are from their own will without having to be told going out naturally sharing. Also, being multipliers of knowledge in their organization, taking good stuff and spreading it across the organization. Let’s wrap up with our final questions, which we always wrap up for every guest. Firstly, what do you wish you’d known when you started in Learning and Development? What are you curious about right now? I’m going to guess you might say you’re curious about curiosity, but you’ll have to tell us more about that. So, what do you wish you’d done when you started? What are you curious about?  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 25:42    

Now I would have needed so much more knowledge in cognitive psychology in the basic stuff, the baselining of knowledge. What great leaders, great people have been thinking about learning so far. You’re talking about Al Ries, you know, Jack Marisov, all the people that I only found out probably in the last couple of years. The really big thinkers – John Dewey, a beautiful thinker in the area of learning. I would have wanted to learn so much more about those great things because I also winged it for a long time. I still am, I think, but I’m trying to be aware of it, and we talk a lot about it. I love learning; I love reading. I’m getting ready to start a bachelor, in fact, in philosophy. Maybe I came to an age – I’m still young, I think – I’m 52 now, I want to keep on learning. I am a great reader, and I want to get deeper into stuff, and I’m also very interested in curiosity. Just the concept of it and how to do this more. If that’s one of the transformations that we can do to our organizations, it’s such a beautiful gift. If we are not only doing the tactical stuff, but we can also point people in this curiosity dimension so that everybody becomes an A-player. These people in organizations that are B-players, people that want to learn but then miss something, they need some electricity for them in order to become A-players and to start reading books and asking the right questions.   

Donald Taylor 26:43    

Makes total sense. I am a firm believer, actually like you, Stefaan, that we do need an agreed body of knowledge, and it’s something which I hope we will be working on at some point in the future. A great body of knowledge for people coming into the industry and people in the industry to get their heads around with some of those writers and thinkers that you mentioned, absolutely being part of it. I think Dewy, absolutely. We should be really part of the fundamental background knowledge that we have. But look, we can have another conversation at some point in the future about what our core body of knowledge should be throughout. But you are still young Stefaan, a mere 52. You’ve got so many years ahead of you. We’ll have time for that conversation again in the future. So Stefaan Van Hooydonk, CLO Cognizant. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast!  

Stefaan Van Hooydonk 26:43    

Thank you so much for having me Donald, it was a pleasure!