Deloitte: Relationship Mastery: The Art of Empathy
At Deloitte, senior managers are typically responsible for leading teams, managing project budgets, selling services, and excelling at relationships with client executives. Through client interviews, Deloitte discovered that its newer senior managers were finding it challenging to build trusted client relationships and hold natural advisory conversations. They sometimes were perceived as driving their own agenda at the expense of the clients, and not listening effectively.
Challenges faced by the Training team included:
- The need to design a program that could scale sufficiently to significantly penetrate the senior manager population.
- The need to provide live coursework and reinforcement to a population spread across geographic locations.
- The need to use internal leaders as teachers to meet scalability needs and promote the apprenticeship model, but limited leadership time was available.
- The need to market the program to support a pull, not push, model for attendance—Deloitte didn’t have the luxury of making the program mandatory because it reserves that designation for compliance and regulatory trainings.
- Finally, the need to address empathy, which is a “soft skill.” This made the content challenging (How do you teach someone to suspend self-interest and genuinely put another person’s interests above their own?). It also made it challenging to attract the population, which tends to value technical skills over soft skills training.
Content Development
To create the training content, Deloitte first researched how to build relationships through empathy and inquiry. It held three rapid “prototype” meetings with senior leaders to test rough ideas (leveraging concepts such as emotional intelligence; awareness of nonverbal cues; and common mistakes made in conversations, including steamrolling over another person’s ideas or thinking about what you are going to say next vs. listening).
Using the outcomes of these prototypes, Deloitte designed content for a one-day, interactive program with few slides and a lot of exercises, video case studies, and role-plays. The designers broke the content into four faculty roles so they could leverage leaders to deliver approximately two hours of content without overloading each individual. The program was designed with an action learning component whereby senior managers bring in a specific client relationship and work on it during the program.
Delivery
A faculty staff of four partner/principal/director leaders teaches live classroom sessions in the local office. Pre-work includes a personality assessment, as well as identifying and assessing a specific relationship to improve before joining the class. Video case studies are used to observe and critique during the program to demonstrate desired behavior (important with a soft skill such as empathy). A SharePoint site is used as a community of practice; it contains pre-work, agendas, resources on the topic, ability to dialogue with other participants, etc. The site also provides an ongoing “Relationship Tracker” to monitor progress after the program. Rapid prototyping in the development process ensures relevance and high quality in a short development time frame.
Training is reinforced in three ways after completion:
- All alumni of the program are invited to join a monthly 15-minute call with a senior leader of the firm, who shares a story of an experience he or she has had using empathy techniques.
- Deloitte developed a series of “empathy-program-in-a-box” mini-modules that all graduates can use to teach the material to their own engagement team staff.
- Deloitte follows up six months after the learning program with a survey to assess progress on the relationship learners are working on and keep them accountable. The results of the survey are shared with the learners, and ongoing work is encouraged.
Results
- Some 1,200 senior managers across all lines of business (revenue generating, as well as internal operations) in the U.S. were trained. Deloitte also has piloted the program globally everywhere from Athens, Greece, to Bogota, Colombia, and anticipates future rollouts in India and other countries.
- Learners give the course a score of 4.59 for courseware and environment on a 1 (low) to 5 (high) scale. The score for “impact on current job” is 4.68, and the score for “overall value” is 4.69.
- Assessment of relationship progress after six months showed 76 percent improvement in relationships and 46 percent of “cold clients” viewing the senior manager as more of a trusted advisor since attending the course.
- The same survey showed that 58 percent of the participants identified new client business opportunities that were generated due to techniques from the course used on “cold” clients, and 76 percent identified new business opportunities generated using techniques from the course with “warm” clients, leading to a direct impact on revenues.
- Today, the Art of Empathy course has become an ongoing offering in Deloitte’s Leader Development curriculum.
IBM: Technical Leadership Exchange (TLE)
Annually since 2006, some 5,000 IBM technical leaders would travel to a different location in North America for a face-to-face, three-day conference with fellow technical experts. Another 5,000 IBM technical leaders would do the same in Europe. These annual events were eagerly anticipated and well received by attendees. However, because of the gradual increase in IBM’s global workforce and especially in emerging markets, this model of thousands of employees traveling and gathering off-site eventually became cost prohibitive.
In response, IBM piloted a totally virtual approach: all attendees experiencing events online. Its transfer of valuable insights remained successful, but participants said they missed the face-to-face component and its ensuing networking opportunities.
So in 2011, IBM designed and implemented a “hybrid” model of the conference-style learning event. The Technical Leadership Exchange (TLE) model now has become a traditional, face-to-face conference-style event, simultaneously video-streamed around the world so all IBM te l chnical leaders can attend. Attendees of this new design now number in the tens of thousands, as they discuss from around the globe IBM’s latest technical developments in critical business areas such as analytics and big data.
Content Development
Thus, the TLE’s reach is now global. Its content is highly topical and crowd-sourced, and its application-based learning opportunities are provided through experiential business challenges. These business challenges create an opportunity to cross both geographic and functional boundaries, and bring together global teaming and diverse skill sets to solve real business and client problems. Technical leaders in each of the revolving face-to-face locations develop and present content. They submit a call for abstract to the technical community prior to the event. Then a committee of technical leaders reviews and votes on each abstract. This allows leaders the opportunity to speak at the events and be recognized by their peers for their expertise. After selection, speakers participate in a Speaker Care enablement session to prepare for presenting via mastery modeling videos created in collaboration with experts from Harvard Business Publishing.
Delivery
IBM uses streaming technology and blends in online social elements to engage large virtual audiences. During the live presentations, virtual attendees can ask questions of each other and the speaker, creating global social interaction. Chat sessions have dedicated chat moderators at each face-to face-event, as well as virtual moderators who guide the virtual participants through the sessions. In addition, in 2013, IBM added mobile components to the event, which now allow participants to register and review the event agenda on their personal mobile devices. The new design also introduced the TLE Community to foster collaboration and ongoing education. Replays of sessions are available via the TLE Website and can be accessed via desktop or personal mobile devices.
In 2012, the program shifted such that half the events were taking place in growth markets, such as Brazil, Hungary, and India. In 2013, events were held in China, Turkey, and South Africa.
Results
- In 2012, TLE events drew 1,967 face-to-face participants and 23,920 virtual participants, and in 2013, TLE events saw 1,670 face-to-face participants and 45,839 virtual participants. Equally as important, shifting from a conference held annually in one or two locations to the current design comprising several locations resulted in a cost reduction of 94.3 percent.
- In the post-event survey, satisfaction with the learning event consistently scores in the high 90 percent positive range, with an average of 40 percent knowledge gain from the event.
- Outreach to technical leaders in emerging markets increased by 288 percent. Attendees from more than 64 countries now actively participate. Two additional outcomes are the enablement of mentoring across geographies and global collaboration.
- Kirkpatrick Level 4 results are realized by the level of participation in the TLE Business Challenges that are presented at the learning event to solve real-world problems and develop expertise via global, virtual project teams. For example, one TLE Business Challenge team formed in California and investigated Demand Sensing for automotive sales forecasting. Using predictive analytics approaches and tools with social media data, the team developed a software model to correlate consumer buying behavior and future automotive sales. These Business Challenge teams represent hundreds of volunteer hours of highly skilled technical talent from at least 100 participants each year.
Every year, IBM transforms TLE based on new developments in technology and the marketplace, and it makes improvements in response to participant feedback.
