Three Steps to Launching a Peer Mentorship Program

It’s no secret: growing organizations grow their people. The surprise is ‘how’ and ‘where’ you find and build the ‘personal growth culture’ for your organization.

Your organization’s ‘personal growth culture’ is in the people you currently employ. Enabling your people to learn one-on-one creates a culture of learning. This happens today, often informally. All you need to do is identify who, train them, and deploy them. Developing the person(s) who are doing the work scales the company.

Welcome to ‘re-seeing’ your organization’s greatest assets: the development of your people.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: March 18, 2019 3:47 pm

Democratizing Coaching at Shopify

How Shopify built and scaled Coaches Corner, with René Moortgat

Shopify has one of the most democratized internal coaching programs. Unlike executive coaching at other companies, anyone at Shopify can sign up for coaching at any time. To enable this at scale, Shopify has a team of full-time coaches.

René Moortgat, Talent Development Operations Specialist at Shopify tells us how he supports the team of coaches in delivering coaching to employees.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: December 18, 2018 4:23 pm

How to spin up and scale up learning in your organization

Learning as means to an end

First thing first: We are not implementing learning opportunities solely for the sake of learning. Instead, we’re focused on enabling our people to do their best work. This is our promise to them. To that end, learning is a means to removing impediments and helping people have the right skills at the right time so they can get the job done.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: October 17, 2018 2:28 pm

How to get experts to share their knowledge

People naturally want to share their skills with fellow coworkers. Often, they don’t think they know how. It’s the equivalent of the blank-page syndrome that causes the writer’s block.

It turns out that a bit of a system can help. Here’re a few ideas:

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: July 10, 2018 12:05 pm

Empowering the organization with Nazhat Salim of Credit Karma

Nazhat Salim, Talent Development Specialist at Credit Karma, shares how the Talent Development team created and continues to evolve Credit Karma University. A centralized learning program that includes classroom teaching, mentoring and coaching, the goal is to empower the organization and equip teams and individuals with the knowledge and tools they need — not just to do their job but to help others do theirs as well.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: November 15, 2017 4:28 pm

Adult development theory and leadership effectiveness with Jessica Amortegui of Logitech

Jessica Amortegui, Senior Director of Learning & Development at Logitech, created the Leadership Leap program, which offers an innovative approach to leadership development. Drawing on Robert Kegan’s theory of adult development, the program invites leaders to explore the essence of their identity to achieve personal transformation.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: November 3, 2017 3:34 pm

Taking a holistic approach at Twitter University with Simeon Franklin of Twitter

Simeon Franklin, Staff Technical Instructor at Twitter, is a Program Manager for Twitter University — the technical education program for engineers at the social network. That job involves teaching courses, mentoring instructors and occasionally writing tools for Engineering Effectiveness team.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: October 11, 2017 3:37 pm

Applying positive psychology to business with Keith Gatto of UC Berkeley

Positive psychology, the scientific study of strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive, is a field that you might associate more with personal development than with leadership and business. Here Keith Gatto, The Positive Psychology Fellow for the Fung Institute of Leadership at UC Berkeley, describes how he has applied his research in this area to a practical business context to create positive work cultures where innovation can flourish. His Positive Leadership and Innovation program is part of the university’s College of Engineering Executive Education offerings.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: August 29, 2017 3:40 pm

The power of feedback and metrics at LinkedIn with Rajon Tumbokon of LinkedIn

Keeping an eye on customer pain points, and finding solutions that will address them, is the best way in which we can ensure that a product is relevant and useful for them. Here Rajon Tumbokon, who leads engineering on-boarding, training and development for engineers at LinkedIn, talks about what they learned from feedback and metrics that led to redesigning their new hire ‘bootcamp’. What follows is how they’ve now embraced a new, more hands-on, learning curriculum and a more iterative training design process.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: July 11, 2017 3:42 pm

A new approach to leadership development with Victoria Sevilla of VMWare

In an ever-changing business environment, leadership development is more important than ever. Victoria Sevilla is responsible for Leadership Development on the Global People Development team at cloud infrastructure and business mobility software company VMware. She describes how her team is changing the way that leadership development is carried out, and the success of their award-winning Genius Maker program.

Category: Ideas Author: Marko Gargenta Date: July 6, 2017 3:44 pm