The CPO of Aperian, Addie Johnsen talks about what it's like to be CPO at a 65-employee organization. We discuss:

• how she uses the smaller company size to personally coach every leader.
• how she indexes company values team by team
• her book recommendations for HR professionals

Enjoy! ☕️ 🎧

I break down my problem with the Kirkpatrick model and what you should do about it!

If L&D wants to evolve from "order-taking" into a strategic entity, a significant mindset and behavior shift is required.

In comes Dr. Keith Keating, author of The Trusted Learning Advisor and CLO at BDO Canada.

He covers:
1. The most common stumbling block L&D professionals run into as they adopt a strategic mindset.
2. How to leap over this stumbling block.
3. The critical traits of a learning advisor.
4. What to do when you face resistance from stakeholders.

Hope you enjoy 🤓

In this interview, CPO of Consensus Cloud Solutions, Lynn Johnson, explains how she scales and sustains company culture to 600 hybrid and remote employees.

A few highlights include:

1. How she sustains culture with "an iron fist but a velvet glove."

2. How despite being a 600-employee company, she scales executive coaching to all of her first-line leaders.

3. Lynn's favorite books and advice for CPOs

Enjoy! ☕️ 🛋️ 🎧

In this episode, we sit down with Heather Laychak, the CPO at The Aerospace Corporation. She covers everything from her best-in-class approach to aspiring leadership programs to an industry-shifting diversity initiative and her top three book recommendations.

Key topics include:

• The Aspirational Manager Program: How and why Heather and her team take an “open to all” approach to her aspiring leader program.
• Measuring Program Success: The unique way that Heather and her team measure the success of their aspiring leader program.
• Space Workforce 2030 Initiative:* An industry-wide effort led by Aerospace to significantly increase diversity within the technical space workforce by 2030.

Enjoy!

*CORRECTION: One of the goals of the Space Workforce 2030 pledge discussed in this episode was inaccurately presented. To learn more about the initiative, visit http://swf2030.org.

Five years ago, I wrote a check for $1 million to launch an AI-powered coach using IBM Watson.

We then created the world’s first executive coach bot (long before Chat GPT).

And it DID NOT work.

Here’s why:

Even though the leaders liked the tool…

The BUYERS—CPOs, CHROs, CLOs—DID NOT.

The issue was this: Occasionally the bot would make a mistake. And this put the Buyers at risk.

Sure, the mistakes were small, uncommon, and not costly. But, any risk when it came to a coach was too much risk.

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So here’s what we realized: People didn’t want a Bot coach. They wanted affordable, text-based access to a coach.

And here’s what we did to meet that need: We put together a staff of on-call, ICF-certified coaches to interact with leaders by text.

Like a call center of expert coaches.

Learners can message an expert at the exact moment they run into a challenge or a question.

That was the balance between scalability and impact that people wanted.

Abbie Buck, CPO of Collective Health, breaks down her scrappy approach to leadership dev. This one's full of creative and stealable ideas!

Key Topics Covered:

• Her scrappy approach to develop frontline leaders: Abbie designed and delivered in-house development programs and recorded them for future use.
• Cultivating a customer-centric culture: The company uses "love letters" from customers to reinforce company values and maintain a strong mission-driven focus.
• Her innovative sabbatical initiative: Abbie gets into the company's sabbatical program which rewards tenured employees with long periods of time off.
• First-principle thinking for CPOs: Learn how Abbie Buck leverages first-principle thinking to navigate ambiguity and align actions with the company's core values.

Tune in for an inspiring session full of actionable advice. 🔉

In this conversation with Courtney Panik, CPO of Symphony, we cover:

• How she helped Symphony scale its culture as it grew from a startup to a scale-up
• How Symphony's flat organizational structure and an open-door policy foster accessibility and trust.
• The role of people managers as "culture carriers" at Symphony.
• Leadership Development Tactics: Panik's "secret weapon" for cultivating effective leaders.
• Practical advice for aspiring CPOs.

She covers all of the above and much more!

Enjoy.