Scott Rutherford

Hello and welcome to the AXIOM Insights Learning and Development Podcast. I'm Scott Rutherford. This podcast series is about driving performance through learning. And there are many reasons to focus on building a learning culture in an organization. Things like improved employee engagement, supporting the growth of leadership behavior, fostering innovation, and more.

Today, we're going to take a look at the journey to build a learning organization through the guidance and experience of Rick At Lee. Rick is senior Vice President and Director of Enterprise Learning Solutions at Truist. Truist is the financial services company you may have heard of with nearly 2,000 branch locations ranging from roughly Pennsylvania through Texas. So, Rick, it's great to talk to you. Thanks for being here.

Rick At Lee

Yeah, great to be here.

Scott Rutherford

So let's just start off, if you wouldn't mind, by introducing yourself and your role at Truist. You've been with the organization through some changes over the years, so maybe take us through that story.

Rick At Lee

Sure. Just a few changes. Yes. I am the director of Enterprise Learning Solutions. What that means is the teams that report to me include our internal design teams, our media team, our content management team, and then several facilitation teams ultimately report up to me. I've been with Truist for over 25 years and in various different iterations over that period of time. Truist in itself, in its current version, is only over five years old, just over five years old now. But, you know, so we've see, I've seen many mergers along the way, including the one that created Truist. As far as myself, I started out right out of college, as in the branches, as a matter of fact. And I was thinking, oh, you know, branch management program, that would be a great way to be a resume builder. I won't be here long, and 25 years later, here I still am.

Very different approach, but it was. I was only in branches for a couple of years before getting a job in the. As a facilitator. And at that point we called it corporate training. And it was then that I discovered what I wanted to do when I grew up. At that point, I didn't know what I was doing then, but that's. Yeah, that's. That's where. That's where I discovered my joy of learning and developing for sure.

Scott Rutherford

Right. Well, you know, it's funny how many people I talk to who end up falling into, I'll use the term, I guess, falling into learning and development from a related discipline often. And then so many folks just find, okay, this is where I should have been all the time. Because, you know, and there's a number of reasons for it, but I tend to think that the common denominator is learning. And development tends to attract people who like to help other people.

Rick At Lee

I would agree.

Scott Rutherford

So tell me about the team that you lead. What learner audiences are you supporting?

Rick At Lee

Yeah, so we are the centralized group at Truist. And so first of all, we support enterprise learning programs. So think about what we would consider priority. Professional skills, you might call them soft skills or something like that. We are leaning towards professional skills, compliance, things that go across the enterprise. Less so, interestingly, leadership. We have a whole separate group that focuses on leadership for Truist, a leadership institute. It's really amazing. So that's first, we are very involved with the enterprise programs, but then there are some of our businesses that have high incumbent populations. So you think about branches, the mortgage group, commercial group, in those situations, we also support them more directly.

Beyond that, because [of] Truist's size, we recognized relatively early in the merger, in particular, when we essentially doubled our size at that point, that we were not going to be able to support everything centrally. So we transitioned to hybrids, federated, whatever you want to call it. But we essentially also established ourselves. We've been establishing ourselves as a center of excellence for learning and development practitioners across the organization, recognizing that there are some groups we're not going to be able to support directly. And so that's where we enable them to do what they need to do more effectively.

Scott Rutherford

The center of excellence model was something, if I'm just trying to get my timeline right, the most recent merger, I guess I'll put it that way, was BB&T and SunTrust in 2019. Right. Is that when the center of excellence model really came into being? About the same time?

Rick At Lee

Yeah, I would even say we've been building it up since then. The first couple of years were about just getting through the merger and accomplishing what we needed to do do as part of the merger. And so that was a much more tactical learning and development at that point. But interestingly, in that process, I think we recognized even while we were in the merger, there were groups that we weren't going to be able to support directly that needed help to be able to do some of their own learning and development needs for the merger. And so even at that point, we kind of created an advisory function where we would have workshops for these folks and they were eating it up. They loved.We were creating templates and tools. That was the first iteration, although a little bit informal at that point of our center of excellence since then. Once we saw how that worked, that worked pretty well. But then we've been working on formalizing it since then.

Scott Rutherford

Well, moments of change in an organization, a merger can be one of external pressures. We talk about managing through moments of change. Sometimes they do create an opportunity to do that needs assessment, to say, okay, well, in this new normal that we're building, what do we need and what do we have? And you assess the gaps and you start to look at things.It's an opportunity to pull back the covers a little bit.

Rick At Lee

Oh yeah. It was one of the most exciting moments in my career because we were able to, it was almost like we started from scratch. Like when this came together, we got to step back and think through if we wanted to, you know, if we get to re envision learning and development. And it's in how it interacts with the organization kind of from the ground up, essentially. So we can kind of step back and create a framework and create a team to support what we feel is right for this new organization. And usually you're not having that. Usually you're, you know, you're trying to work with, you know, the existing paradigms or something like that, trying to make changes in a much slower state. You know, let me change things little by little. And this was a massive explosion where we bulldozed what was there and started from scratch, which was exciting.

Scott Rutherford

Well, it's exciting, but also I'd love to hear you talk more about the sort of maybe opportunity for leadership alignment in that moment. Because essentially in a merger you're building a whole new company at one level or another, which means building new processes, new structures, but also new culture. And you as a leadership team, one of your tasks in that moment is what culture do we want? And then, you know, I'll look to you and say, well, how do you, how do you connect learning into that conversation at that moment?

Rick At Lee

Yeah, yeah, that was definitely a moment in time where we had talked. Even in the previous organizations, you know, there was always a desire to create or foster a learning culture. You know, it's, it's, that is a, that is a multi year, long term situation. But in this moment in time when something is so new and nobody has, I mean, yes, they're coming with their history for sure, but, but there is this moment in time where things are new for everyone. And so we have the opportunity to insert a learning culture as part of the broader organizational culture.

And that, I think it showed up what was great with this. And I've got to give our executive leadership, our senior leadership, props for this. As they were creating our purpose, mission and values, they brought that in right from the get go. It lives in our mission at this point. Part of our mission, the teammate part of our mission is to create, create an environment that empowers teammates to learn, grow and have meaningful careers. And so I mean, by that being there now, that could just be words, but it was the starting point that we could then, you know, kind of anchor everything we did to push that culture and foster that culture beyond.Yeah. And so that was a great opportunity. It helped us kind of jumpstart that.

Scott Rutherford

Right. Well, there's some importance to having an anchor point or that mission to refer back to, which it's basic sort of structural alignment to say, okay, well if our goal is learning and growth, well, you know, this is, this is the goal that I'm, that I'm building all of this structure and program around. Is that where. And I know you mentioned before we got on this call, we were talking the other day about and you said there was the phrase, when you grow, we grow. And that sounds like that's related to that same mission statement.

Rick At Lee

It is, it is very much. It is part, it's that, that, that process we had last year in particular, we decided to take some very big steps towards creating, towards fostering a enterprise wide learning culture. And you know, one thing my leader says regularly is that vision comes before resources. And so we wanted to have a vision of what that could be, of what was possible. And so there was this vision of this company wide event. And I can take no credit for this whatsoever. The, this event, what ended up being Teammate Growth Month started as Teammate Growth Week. But through the ideation process of that, one of my peers had this idea for this tagline, when you grow, we grow. And it's funny, taglines are things you don't think that much about. You think, oh, it's about the stuff. But man, if you can find something that people can easily remember and say that that tagline when you grow, we grow has now taken on legs of its own. And we're hearing leaders across the organization reference that ever since that happened, as we said a second ago, it's an anchor point. It ties what you're doing back to the mission, which is a great reminder.

Scott Rutherford

So talk me through the growth of Teammate Growth Week into Teammate Growth Month. What was the initial scope of the week and how did those conversations progress? How did that come about?

Rick At Lee

Sure. Yeah. Well, after post merger, it was always a desire to do something to build that again, kind of jumpstart that growth culture. And so Truist has a wealth of resources for teammates to help them with their career from Career Discovery center and lots of different ways they can build skills through different capabilities and different resources that are available to them. But the trick with a lot of that is you can have those, but if they don't know about it, it doesn't do anything, it doesn't help anything. So we wanted to try at first the goal was to create a single enterprise wide event that was focused on growth that everybody from the senior leadership and executive leadership on down was, was championing and, and you know, and participating in as much as possible. Technically optional, but we wanted it to be a big event essentially.And yeah, and they, and so originally it was just going to be about helping them become more aware of all of these career development and growth resources that are available to them. But as process grew and actually it was in the, as I understand it, when it was presented to the senior leadership, they said well instead of a week, why don't we do a whole month? And our first, the team's first response was like, yeah. And then we're like oh, that's a big goal.

Like, oh, now we got to figure out what that means and how we're going to even make that happen. Going from one week to a commitment to an entire month was a massive change, you know, and not to mention we were also doing some technology updates like a new LMS at the same time.

Scott Rutherford

You know, just small, oh a minor, minor disruption.

Rick At Lee

Minor disruptions that were happening at the same time. So, so yeah, so that, what was great about that though was that we didn't really have like, we didn't have to really sell it hard to the senior leadership, to the executive leadership. They, they were as excited about this type of event as we were.And so then it was all about, you know, I've got some peers of mine are excellent at getting commitments. We had senior leaders that were part of the, you know, they would talk about it in their town halls. They would talk, you know, they do enterprise wide videos about, you know, this is coming and this is something to be excited about. They started getting communication, drip communications out there about just all this ended up being, but it, instead of career resources, it expanded into just about, learn about, just about, about anything we could get our hands on at this point. So we had some, we had vendors that, that offered to do special sessions for areas that they were specialized in. We had Teammates, including, you know, teammates not only in, in our talent and learning organization, but across the organization leaders as well that would do that, were going to, that volunteer to do sessions on things that they knew about like a day in the life of this role or you know, or you know, for.I mean there were so many different topics and different things and they were just available. It was this massive enterprise wide conference that was openly available to every teammate at Truist.

Scott Rutherford

What was your assessment of the sort of rank and file endorsement of this? I think what you're describing from the senior management, marketing and promotion of it sounds wonderful and I think that there's a fair number of folks I've spoken to and worked with in learning who would very much wish for that level of executive sponsorship and support. But I'm curious to see how that really filtered down to the rank and file because when you talk about learning culture, it's great to have the structure and the support and the propagation of the idea, but it really comes down to, on a day to day basis, do the, do the staff members think it's important enough to make that decision to invest their time? What was your experience with them?

Rick At Lee

Yeah, so another general guideline that we use, it's a, it's not a tagline, I don't even know what I would call it at this point, but it's something that we say regularly is that our careers and growth at Truist are teammate owned, manager supported, organization enabled.

And that's important for a couple of reasons. There of course, the event itself was the organization enabling the potential for this development. It was responsible on the teammate to own that, to register, to find things, to allocate time. But I would argue that one of the most important pieces was that leadership support, that manager supported aspect of that. And while we had the senior leadership piece and this was good because we learned again, last year was our first year, we're going to do it again. We've got approval to do it again this year. So we're super excited about that. But one of the things we learned is that the groups that had the most frontline participation were those that not only had senior leaders. I mean the, the executive leadership support was essential, but you also had to get the hearts and minds of those middle leadership, the ones that were closest to the front line. If you could, if they said like, hey, this is important, want you to, you know, we want to make this available. We want to, you teammates should be able to plan for time away to do these kinds of things. Those that are very, you know, we've got areas in our, in our organization that, you know, their schedules are very structured and very organized. And, you know, it's their, their workforce that planning is used. And so that's. This is part of work to do this type of development. And so the leaders that owned that and leaned into that, those are where we saw the most penetration into those teammate populations. Those that did not. You did not see as much. You did some because, you know, some of the teammates had more development and some frontline managers had some more of that. But the ultimate wins were where you had strong executive leadership, strong middle leadership, and you saw massive explosion of participation.

Scott Rutherford

Right. When you have everyone pulling in the same direction from the, from the learner who is self advocating for their participation through the line manager and above. That makes total sense. Was that formalized in any way? Realizing that participation in this sort of thing as a component in a performance review sometimes can be a difficult element. But was there an expectation set with that or was this all carrot, no stick?

Rick At Lee

This was all carrot, no stick at this point. And that was, this was our first one. So there was a lot of test and learn in this event. We're also kind of hesitant to... we want, I think we will talk about opportunities potentially to create accountability, especially at the leadership level, to do this. You know, one thing we were very conscious of is we don't want, you know, when we say telling a teammate, you must attend this or you must do this is the same as telling them to take our compliance training.

Scott Rutherford

You don't want learning to be spinach.

Rick At Lee

That's right. But there are ways that, you know, we could do that. But that was, that was not our focus for this time. This was very much a, you know, let's try this. Let's learn what we can grow better for next year and continue to expand this as we go.

Scott Rutherford

But you've seen a change then over the course of this. Well, what was the first iteration of the learning month and how the organization sort of embraces learning, learning as a function of the work then?

Rick At Lee

Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, we. And again, I think one of the greatest things, I mean, the event itself was wonderful and got a lot of very positive feedback. You know, we did try to get feedback for not only the sessions, but just overall and just the impact. And some of the anecdotal comments that we got as part of that feedback gathering included things like, you know, I feel, you know, there's this feeling of support for the organization. The fact that the organization made this available and I was. I could participate in it, and I learned some new things. There was. There was this engagement that was created. Engagement bump that was created just by. By making that available to them. But one of the coolest things has been the legs that that that event has brought forward. And that's where it kind of accelerated our move towards a actual, you know, learning. A true learning culture is we. We want our learning culture to be less about what we do and more about who we are.That. That's just part of who we are. It' is part of our life as Truist teammates.And so we have seen again, the whole. When you grow, we grow. The fact that that tagline has continued to be spoken by leaders and teammates across the enterprise since then, and it's been brought up in other purposes and we're still hearing about those.The ways that leaders have taken this idea of making learning available and applying that even within business unit. So they're taking ownership of that. So it's not us creating it, we are maybe fostering it and planting the seeds, but it's getting that, you know, getting that watering. So that that culture grows kind of organically in some ways, right?

Scott Rutherford

Well, yeah, you're counting on people taking that and running with it. So it becomes a talking point and, you know, conversations between managers and their teams or perhaps even a talking point that's. That's raised when you're. When you're recruiting for a new hire. What type of company is Truist? Well, at Truist, we believe that's right.

Rick At Lee

Yep. This is who we are.

Scott Rutherford

So how have you measured? You sort of alluded to some anecdotal feedback, which is always valuable, difficult to organize and report on, perhaps. But what's been your experience and what sort of structures have you put into place to help you measure and then manage of this? As you know, you've moved through last year's into this year's and looking forward.

Rick At Lee

So from a measurement of learning culture, one of the pieces we thankfully Truist as a whole has a number of different ways to measure engagement, including a regular engagement survey that we do that includes different things. And so one of the wins that we had was about two years ago, last year or two years ago, we got in a couple of specific questions into this engagement survey that were to design to measure the perception of people's opportunities for development.And I wish I could tell you what the exact wording was, but they were designed to that and the goal there was to get a baseline of where are we as nor we wanted to get a sense of from a teammate's perspective how the organization looks, sees development and their opportunities to develop their career and grow.And so we got a baseline and you know, it's the baseline gave us a starting point if you will. And so honestly we haven't done our engagement survey this year yet. So I don't, you know that, that that will be the next one after that event. But we're waiting on.

Scott Rutherford

So you've set a baseline at this point.

Rick At Lee

Yes, yeah, we set a baseline. So we're interested to see the outcome of that because that at a broader enterprise scale we expect we will see improvement. Maybe we'll be wrong, but that will be a first indicator that we're making progress towards that. And then as we continue to go forward, our hope is again to see that metric continue to rise.

Scott Rutherford

Right. And sometimes the socialization of those metrics, once you have it gives you a story to tell which you can then share back with your organization to say, well you know, this is, you know, a little bit of, little bit of marketing by sort of sharing others experiences. But look, your colleagues are saying this is valuable, or whatever the finding is. So maybe you can use that to support participation and growth.

With all of this said and I realize that building a learning culture is something that a lot of folks in learning will look at it and say well I wish I'm working on the tactical and sometimes it's difficult to get it to a broader strategic conversation like this. Based on your experience in socializing this and getting buy in with senior leadership and getting the buy in of the organization, are there a couple pieces of advice you would give to someone who's really trying to get off the starting mark with an initiative to change the way the organization looks at learning?

Rick At Lee

Sure. I would say probably one of the first. That whole thing about measurement piece. I think it's hard to argue with data. And so if you've got some way to get some kind of quantitative data about the general perception of growth and development opportunities in your organization, that is if you've, I mean this is assuming of course you've got a leader who cares about this. It's just to be frank, I mean that you've got to have leadership that especially at the upper levels that actually care about teammate growth and development. If you don't have that, you're kind of. It's going to be hard. That's going to be a much harder thing to do.

Scott Rutherford

It's a harder argument to make, I think then that becomes an education lift too, to say, you know, senior leadership, you have to find out what, what, what is important to them in the language that they speak. And again, this is a whole, this is a whole strategic alignment question. But, but, and we've talked about this on other episodes of this podcast too. But, but, you know, taking the time to have the conversation with, with your stakeholder senior leadership or C-suite, you know, director level, whoever that might happen to me. But finding out what, what's the language they. How do, what does success look like from their perspective? And then figuring out how your function can support that. And then it's kind of your job as the learning leader to build that bridge. Right?

Rick At Lee

Yeah. And there's, I mean, there's a ton. So getting a baseline for your organization. But then also, if needed, thankfully, we had kind of already done some of this groundwork already, but establishing the organizational benefit to a strong talent and learning culture and the engagement that that comes with what that does as far as like retention and competitiveness. I mean, our bas, our premise is we're a bank. We've got products that are very similar to other banks. One of the key differentiators for us is going to be our people. I mean, our talent is going to be what differentiates us. And so if we want to win in our space, it's got to be through that. And so if we invest in that resource, then that's going to give us, that's going to help us win in all of the financial goals that the organization has. So making that, getting them to believe that again, we kind of had already done a little bit this. Our senior leadership was already kind of bought into talent. Hence why it was part of our mission.It's part of that because it's not just because it's the right thing to do, but it's also beneficial to the organization to have that level of talent.So creating. And if you're starting from scratch with that, again, it's harder. But there's a lot of research out there through like Gartner and others that you can pull and show this is the impact that a strong talent, that, that investing in your talent can have on, you know, how, how much it, I mean, some of the typical things. How much does it cost to. When somebody turns, if you've got high turnover, what does that actually cost us versus, you know, retaining our talent?You know, what are things that, you know, if they, if we invest in this, what are the, what is the what, what kind of, what do we get back out of that as an organization? From a. From just productivity increases as well that we lose when we don't have that. So, you know, it's mentioned, you know, in some cases there's, there's a few skills in particular in roles. When you think about like some of the high tech types of skills that are. If you, if you're trying to buy them through, through talent acquisition, that's. Yeah, the. There is less talent out there and it's much more competitive. Whereas if you grow that talent and you focus in on certain skills, like you could end up that while you invest in those capabilities, you not only get better, more retention of those teammates, but it ends up being more cost effective, cheaper to do that to build their skills rather than buy those skills.

Scott Rutherford

Right. And it's an investment, it's an investment into the people, the people who can then share their skills within the organization. It becomes a, it's a momentum building in an ideal sense.

Rick At Lee

Absolutely.

Scott Rutherford

Well, Rick, I appreciate it. I think that you've given lots of folks something to think about and perhaps a goal to strive to in terms of culture transformation in the organization. But pleasure to have you appreciate your time here on the podcast.

Rick At Lee

Thank you for having me. This was fun.

Scott Rutherford

This has been the AXIOM Insights Learning and Development podcast. This podcast is a production of AXIOM Learning Solutions. AXIOM is a learning and development services firm with a network of learning professionals in the US and worldwide, supporting L&D teams with learning staff augmentation and project support for instructional design, content management, content creation and more, including training, delivery and facilitation, both in person and virtually. To learn more about how AXIOM can help you and your team achieve your learning goals, visit axiomlearningsolutions.com and thanks again for listening to the AXIOM Insights podcast.