Speaker Adam Hickman: How will you develop your most talented employees?
UNLEASH America speaker Adam Hickman asks how organizations are developing their best talent, and are they listening to what they want?
Why You Should Care
What does your people strategy look like? How are you evolving? Are you listening to and retaining your best talent?
Join speaker Adam Hickman in Las Vegas this April but before that, get a flavour of his session right here.
Editor Jon Kennard sits down with Adam Hickman of Partners Federal Credit Union, an affiliate of the Walt Disney Company, ahead of his session at this year’s UNLEASH America 2023 show this April. We join the conversation as Adam gives us a taste of what’s to come, by casting our minds back a couple of years…
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Adam Hickman: The strategy piece to any sort of learning function or OD (organizational development) function is such a critical part now more than ever.
Let’s go to March 2020 for a short minute compared to where we are today; you can imagine the workplace has changed, but also the needs have changed and those that have remained stagnant are probably the ones that are experiencing the problems right now.
So what do you do? Well, you start back with the basics, which is how do we develop managers and leaders that make the difference to the work experience, for those that are closest to your customer?
So what I hope really we can get a dialogue in this conversation is, what’s changed for you, what’s different? I’ll share a little bit of insights of what we’re doing and how we’re seeing this transpire within our group in a hybrid work model. And then I’ll share a little bit of our magic on how we’ve implemented some different strategies based on the updates from everything that has taken place.
Jon Kennard: Looking forward to it. I know I’m gonna be pulled in several different directions when I’m there, but I’m hoping I can attend. If we can get the crystal ball out perhaps…we know that obviously HR and talent have changed so dramatically for very obvious reasons.
But like you said, cast your mind back to 2020. It’s a completely different place, really. But what do you think we’re gonna be seeing in 2023? A continuation of the issues now?
AH: Without going off on a tangent [laughs], I think if you had really bad managers prior to 2020 in March, this didn’t hide them. This exposed them to a great degree, but this also provided a platform to say, where are we strong and where are we not? And then, I would say, the opportunity that comes from this is that we now should know the reaction to who has what preference [for hybrid working].
And you can see the hybrid models that are working out there that are exposing a lot of, I would say, sunlight to executives that have a bias towards ‘we’ve gotta be in office, we’ve gotta be at home’, and in reality, do you have the right set of metrics in there that can measure the outcome of which does work best?
And then as it relates to talent and HR, what do your consumers want? There’s a lot of conversations related to elearning… ‘we’ve gotta have that’. And I would say, oh, maybe, but did you ask your customer what they wanted? Do we know how our employees like to be developed? That’s an ongoing conversation.
Sometimes I hear, ‘well we’ve got to have a three- to five-year shelf life for a course’. And I would say, well, why? Because if you do a three- to five-year cycle, look at all the things that have changed in the process. Sometimes our leaders will say, what got us here won’t get us there.
And I don’t forget that because that’s 100% true. We’ve got to continue to evolve and the only way you do – that’s kinda where we started – is to say, what does your people strategy look like?
If someone comes to you in an interview and they say, ‘hey, how are you gonna develop me as a person, as an employee, as a leader’; you got to have an answer to that, right?
Your most talented employees want to know that. And your most talented candidates coming in the door need to know that. And that’s what I would say the biggest challenges coming are.
JK: Definitely. I think we can all at this point recognize that things have changed fundamentally, and we should all be on the lookout, obviously, for these continuing changes.
I’m wondering from my last question, what are you looking forward to about UNLEASH America as a whole, as the event? Because it’s been a while. We had our first event in May after three years, and it was a wild success, and we’re looking to build on that. So what are you looking forward to?
AH: Yeah, I have not been. I think just the word ‘UNLEASH’ itself is interesting. So I’m curious to see what we are unleashing [laughs], and then also just to hear what we’re experiencing, others aren’t experiencing as well.
And when we get out of the way of ourselves to say, can we share best practices and can you hear what’s going on; that’s where I think that we make the most out of these sessions and conversations. What we’re working on is what everybody else is aiming for as well.
The difference is the brand and what goes along with that, but we’re all more or less under the same umbrella where we should be, right? So being able to come into a room together to share and network based on that, I think it’s a fantastic event.
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The agenda is live – get the latest speaker and session info for UNLEASH America 2023 here.
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Editorial content manager
Jon has 20 years' experience in digital journalism and more than a decade in L&D and HR publishing.
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