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Our guest today is Jason Windgard who's the chief learning officer of Goldman
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Sachs. And Jason was earlier the vice dean of executive education here at Wharton. Jason, great to have you back
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at Wharton. Great to be here, Micole. Thank you for asking me. Well, uh I I wonder if we could start talking about
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some of the challenges that you may have encountered both at Goldman Sachs and at
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Wharton Execed. that is what are some of the challenges that companies face in managing managers of different
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generations? Sure, it's a great question. There are, as you know, several generations or as organizations
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continue to expand and grow and evolve and become more multinational. There are lots of different populations of
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employees and managers within that organization. And so as such it becomes very difficult sometimes to have those
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different generations work together. Their values are often different. Their background, their experiences, their
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education is different from one another. So when you bring them together and ask
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them to produce work results often we have to think through what those differences are and help to educate them
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on how they can overcome those differences to be as effective as possible. Right? And so one hears a lot
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that has been said and written especially about the millennials. Now how do you define the millennials and
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what are some of the unique challenges in dealing with this generation? Millennials in general are character
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characterized as generation Y. Uh I think about them from a corporate work perspective as being of age around 18 to
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25 26. So they're the youngest probably most junior population in any corporate
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organization. Uh what's unique about them is that their parents uh who are the baby boomers have raised them in a
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very unique way. They have given them in general I'm speaking in generalities
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here but in general they have given them um background uh experiences support unlike any other generation in history.
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They have been helicopter parents to this generation and so they've been very
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sheltered, very entitled some may say. As a result, they come to work uh very well experienced. Their base of uh
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relationships and things that they've done has been really expansive. The problem is for some corporate leaders
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and managers is that they do feel like they're a little bit more entitled. Although they're willing to work hard,
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they also want to have access. for example, to strategy. They want to spend time in the war room of an organization
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to understand how their role, as small as it may be, funnels into the larger organizational strategy. They want to
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know a little bit more about how the culture is going to benefit them beyond just ping pong tables and beanag chairs
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and free food. They want to understand that coming to work is actually a great place to be. They want to be able to
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tout it as an effective, fun, engaging environment. And so that accessibility, that culture is very important to them.
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Also, they want to make sure that it's the the career orientation element is
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really important to them. They don't want to take a job and think about it as
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being a lifetime of employment and that they're going to follow through the ranks and go from step to step. They
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actually want to think about their time in this job as being able to build transferable skills. How can I take this
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first job of mine or this second job of mine and build a set of transferable skills that will be with me for the rest
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of my career that I'll be able to utilize uh to benefit me and to benefit the kind of work that I can use to be
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productive members of the of corporate society. So they want to know what those transferable skills are. Again, they
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want to be able to be exposed to clients. They want to be able to be exposed to strategy. They want to make
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sure that the communication that they're getting about the nature of the business
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is relevant to them. They want the culture and the work environment to be suitable so that they feel good about
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where they work and that they want to stay there and they want to dig in and really be a part of it. So what
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implications does this have uh when it comes to the millennials work ethic for example or their attitudes toward things
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like work life balance. The perception often is that millennials do not want to work hard. I haven't
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found that in my experience. In fact, they want to work very hard. The difference is is that they want as I
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said earlier uh to be challenged um by understanding the broader strategy and the broader organizational goals. Work
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life balance as such is a is a is an interesting phenomenon because although they're willing to work hard, they also
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want to know that they have some predictability and when they aren't working. They want to have some
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predictability and flexibility in being able to spend time with their family, with their friends, focused on their
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health or focused on other parts and aspects of their lives which will h help to make them a little bit more balanced.
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So contrary to prior generations at this age and at this stage in their the junior part of their careers where they
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may have been more willing to invest a higher percentage of their work time and their lifetime to work. This generation
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wants to have more of a balanced experience earlier in their careers. Now remember we said the generation Y the
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millennials are a product of the baby boomers. So they have seen their parents and their parents' friends work really
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hard in the 80s and they sacrificed a lot of time with family. They sacrificed a lot of time with their health. They
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sacrificed a lot of time with uh uh members of their friends and other constituents in order to spend time
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climbing the corporate ladder at work. So they saw that that led in some cases to divorce or in some cases to chronic
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illness. And this generation, the millennials, do not want to do that. They do not want to experience that
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themselves. So although they've learned how to work hard, they've seen that in
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action, they know what it takes to be successful. And of course, they want to be successful, they are definitely
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engaged uh and motivated to be successful. They also want to see that a corporation has the flexibility to give
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them a little bit of balance so that they can change their lives to be much more balanced than they saw their their
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parents and their and that generation experience. Right? So now going if we were to loop this back to the idea that
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we started with of uh you know how you manage uh millennials along with older generations uh such as the baby boomers.
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uh what sort of implications does this have for the kind of leadership programs that you see companies putting into
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place uh and and and what are some of the issues that come up uh that need to be resolved? That's interesting. Nicole,
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in addition to the millennials, another population which cuts across generations
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as well, but from a leadership development standpoint that we see and we work with exclusively is the producer
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manager. So the producer manager is a definition of u an employee who has risen through the ranks. They were an
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individual contributor. They worked at the lowest levels of the organization and they accelerated through the
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organization by doing their jobs and their tasks as individual contributors really well. As they did that work and
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as they progressed through the organization they became managers. Not necessarily because they are good
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managers but because as individual contributors they produced a really good work product. As they become managers,
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it becomes the responsibility of the organization. And this is what we do at Goldman Sachs as well. Uh as they become
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managers, it's incumbent upon us to teach them how to be good managers. How do you motivate employees? How do you
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create followership so that they are willing to follow you? How do you communicate what the strategy is so that
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there's expectations that are known and understood by the people who are following you? How do you make sure that
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you are setting a culture where people are having fun? As we said earlier, for the millennial generation, how are you
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making sure that your population of workers is diverse? How are you making sure that you are evaluating all of the
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people in the organization objectively and not just subjectively? These are skills and attributes that managers
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don't necessarily have by working their way up through the organization as producers, as commercial killers, if you
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will. And so what we need to do as learning and development professionals is to take these highly charged, highly
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impactful, largely producers in their career and show them the benefits of being a good manager, how to be
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effective effective in such a role and how to develop each of those skills and attributes so that they can lead people
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and cascade the good work that they're able to do to others. Now part of being
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a good manager uh regardless of the level that you are at within an organization uh is the ability to uh
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create effective teams and as business becomes more and more global uh we find that very often teams have to work
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across multiple geographies multiple time zones etc. Now, what what's some of
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the current thinking on how you navigate some of the cultural differences that arise when when you're not not just uh
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trying to uh uh uh get strong performance from intergenerational teams but even teams that are diversified by
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geography and time zone? It's a great question as well. Many organizations, Goldman Sachs included, are faced now
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with because of growth, because of global expansion, having offices, having partners, having clients located all
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over the world. As those groups of professionals interact, there are a series of challenges whether it's time
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zone and you know, what time do you turn on the video conference? How can you be
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sensitive to those in Asia or those in New York? you know, how can you be sensitive to the different cultural
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styles and how you deal with uh topics such as gender? In some cultures, uh women are treated differently around the
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boardroom or in professional executive situations than in other places, how do you manage that? How do people of color
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in various regions uh how are they going to be treated, you know, in this global
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uh intergeeographical context? So as companies become more global and they are forced to deal with clients,
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employees, partners working more closely together and having to navigate all of those cultural differences. One of the
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key aspects of leadership development that becomes necessary to the performance and the strategy of an
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organization is making sure that the sensitivity is there. often people have no trouble working across geographic
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contexts, but it's not until they understand what the differences are and how their behavior may be perceived and
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how their actions may be received. And so we spend a lot of time coaching different leaders and organizations and
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bringing people together to to generate that kind of cultural awareness and sensitivity. That's really interesting.
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And now now this brings me to another point that I've been meaning to ask you
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about. Uh one of the words terms that I have often seen bandied about quite a bit is thought leadership. Uh what
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exactly is thought leadership and how do you nurture that within a company? Any examples? Sure. Thought leadership
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define is new insights, new ideas about a given topic that can be shared with a wide range of people so that those
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insights and ideas can be applied to whatever their um desired need is, whatever their line of work is. Thought
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leadership in organizations can take on a variety of forms. In its simplest and most basic form, it can be articles,
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white papers, books, blogs, things that leaders write about to share ideas with other people in that organization. Now,
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that can be senior leaders in the organization, board members, division heads, uh, directors, vice presidents,
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etc. who have insights and ideas that they can share broadly within the organization. That could also include
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external thought leaders such as government leaders or sports coaches or leaders or any of a number of people in
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the world who have leadership positions and who have new insights on what makes them successful and productive in those
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roles and how that might be broadly applied to other industries to other roles to other lines of work. So an
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example is many organizations um particularly in the United States take some of these leaders they bring them
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onto the corporate campus and they expose their workers to them. So, if you are a World Series baseball general
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manager, you may have thought about five reasons why you were able to lead the team to victory. And they may include A,
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B, C, and D. And you talk about what those are, how you implemented those leadership lessons with the
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organization, and how they may be applicable to that specific business. You may have a prime minister of a given
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country or a given government talking about a crisis that they've gone through
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from a leadership perspective and how they went through and navigated that crisis and came out victorious. How were
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the lessons that were learned in that exchange through that process through that experience applicable to this
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organization? And so the process of sharing those ideas and having a dynamic dialogue between the people who are
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working in that organization creates an atmosphere where you're really learning
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about new themes about new experiences and the takeaways become really relevant to the person at the lowest level as
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well as the highest level. So thought leadership can come in all of those different forms from writing from
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interactive dialogues and interviews such as this or it can come in the form of much more intimate one-on-one
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discussions with men through mentorship um or through uh you know more intimate Q&A exchange with outside leaders as
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well. Got it. Well, one of the biggest drivers of change in organizations these days uh is technology. uh what impact
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has technology had on the way in which companies uh approach corporate learning?
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Corporate learning traditionally has been much more of a push approach, push in quotes. The learning is developed,
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the curriculum is designed and it's pushed out to the employees in a variety
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of different modalities. Those modalities may include the most basic which is classroom, but they also may
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include executive education at a business school like Wharton. It may include experiential learning where you
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take people off site and you do team building and other leadership activities. It may also include
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executive coaching which used to be just for people who had some kind of a need a
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negative need for developing themselves to be more productive in the organization. But now that is becoming
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much more proactive as well. So even strong high performing leaders are getting executive coaching so that they
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can again cascade the good work that they're doing to their peers and to others. So you have all these forms of
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traditional learning that corporations have been engaged in and some more than others have been delivering uh for
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decades. The other side of that what e-learning does to your question is it creates much more of a pull operation.
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So now whether it's the millennials, whether it's the producer managers that
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we spoke of earlier, whoever the audience is in an organization, if they have a particular need to help them
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engage in their work and to be more productive in real time just in time, e-learning presents that opportunity. So
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now all of a sudden you have a platform. You have a mechanism for gaining access
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to content when you want it as opposed to what someone else has deemed is necessary for you and delivering it to
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you in a way that may not be uh correlated with the way you learn best. It's that's interesting Jason because uh
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one of the things that we've seen in academia is that there's also a pull
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mechanism here. uh there's there's been so much written about these massive open
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online courses or MUOKs as they are called uh and and and these are having profound u implications uh for business
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schools and other kinds of educational institutions. Uh I wonder if you see any of those kinds of trends in corporate
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learning and if so what are some of the key lessons so far? Yeah, MukOs is a wonderful phenomenon that as you said
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has emerged first from the university, the academic environment where you're
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able to take the best academic research and teaching and broadcast it to tens and thousands of people around the
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world. So, it's making it more accessible. What we see as a trend now in the corporate space is that these
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these muks are becoming packaged and closed more for a corporate experience. So the corporate mukes is a new
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phenomenon that many of these MOO providers uh are developing. We at Goldman Sachs actually have launched
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several corporate MOOs ourselves and part of the benefit is is that for people who don't know what a MOO is, it
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actually is an e-learning experience that combines video, it combines assessment, it combines uh data
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knowledge management materials that you can read. Uh it also includes um social media so you can talk to the professor,
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you can talk to the people in the classroom. It uses lots of different elements that actually are intended to
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mimic a real social classroom experience. And so the benefits that we're seeing is again as a pull
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opportunity, people are able to use this learning at the time that they want to use it. Um they're also able to do it on
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their own time. So a lot of traditional corporate training happens during the workday. It takes people away from the
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desk, away from the office, and it may in some cases sacrifice time from doing the real work of the job. With
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e-learning and with MOUS in particular, you can take those courses whenever you want. You can start them. You can pause.
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You can take it again later. You can do that on your own time. You can do it during your commute, on your way home.
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So, it makes it really accessible in a way that people can actually use it in a way that's not detracting from their
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day-to-day experience. Number one. Number two, it also caters to a different learning style for a
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generation that prefers to be able to have a flexible learning experience. So, a millennial who is taking the train um
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from Chicago to their office is able to open up an app. The MOO is there. They can watch the video during their train
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ride in. They can take an assessment test or a quiz to find out whether they know the learning um that's intended or
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not. They can take an evaluation test at the end. They can read supplemental articles. They can look at a
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presentation from various faculty members all over the world and that's the way that they want to learn and then
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they can communicate with other people who are taking the course to find out what themes they learned or ask
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questions of them or of the faculty members. And so that dynamic set of choices uh and variability in the
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learning experience is what many people in the younger generations really want. But even in the older populations of
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learners, they're finding it to be much more convenient because they can pick
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the topic that they want at that time for the given challenge that they're experiencing right then, as opposed to
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saying, "I'm going to take three months from now a leadership development course
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on negotiations." And maybe I'm not dealing with negotiation problems or
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issues in my job right now. Maybe what I really need help with are the legal implications of managing women, and I
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need help with doing that. and I want to be able to take a course and there's a
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moot course there that will help me to be more sensitive to understand my challenges, my behaviors, my biases. I
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want to take that right now. And so the MOOs are a really good vehicle for helping them to be able to do that right
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away. As you get more involved in these technologydriven learning initiatives, what have you concluded
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about the limits of technology? Uh in the sense what what do you think technology can do really well and what
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does it fail to do? For large organizations in particular, what technology allows them
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to do from a learning standpoint is to really take the curriculum and the content to scale. So when you have a
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small organization, you can take 30 people, put them in a room, spend a day, and you
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can really have a dynamic and impactful session where you're sharing ideas and
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you're relaying content is really useful and necessary for a given moment in time
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for that group. as the organization grows and you want to take that content and distribute it to more and more
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people where the company may have had 25 vice presidents but then maybe 10 years
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later they may have 15,000 vice presidents and when you have 15,000 vice presidents and you have a checklist of
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curriculum and competencies that you want them all to know about then all of a sudden it does not become feasible to
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take all of those people put them in a room and have group think and group uh education. So technology for the most
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part allows people to have scalability in distributing learning content. But secondly, as we just talked about, it
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also provides an opportunity for just in time learning that is becoming more and
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more necessary for people who are working in dynamic work situations where issues come up where they don't have the
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learning, they don't have the knowledge. They need to be trained on it immediately. and e-learning allows them
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to be able to go out into that world to select what they need and to take it when and how they need to do it. So for
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those two reasons, scalability and for accessibility just in time, e-learning provides a much better opportunity. Are
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you seeing much use of gamification and social media initiatives? Gamification is a phenomenon that is
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really growing rapidly in the corporate learning landscape. Uh most people know and have seen games
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being used by young kids who are playing in uh really live looking 3D worlds just
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for fun. What corporate trainers and designers have been able to do is to create these immersive learning
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experiences for corporate settings. So one example uh is when you create avatars of real people in organizations
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and you model the world the office environment and you create these avatars and you have them navigate the real
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world experience uh in such a way that you can teach people what it's like to
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provide leadership to communicate strategy to create followership as we said earlier to do many of the things
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that we would teach in a traditional classroom setting. you can watch it happen in this immersive learning world.
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And so people have the opportunity to see a real world character with the same kind of content with actually supporting
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nuggets such as video clips or little bubbles that may come up above a person's head with supplemental content.
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And so it's a real opportunity for people to be entertained, but actually to still have real hard-hitting content
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being applied in just a much more uh a much different environment. And so for some people it's it mirrors having a
00:23:30
classroom session where you do a live case. So, you may have a session where I'm teaching a class about um
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intercultural communication and leadership and I give you a PowerPoint presentation with all of the key themes.
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And then I say, "Now, we're going to do a role play where we're going to act out
00:23:48
these themes and we're going to show you how this works in real life." And so
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then I'll ask for two volunteers. I'll have them sit on the stage. I'll give
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them both a script and we'll kind of play it out. Right? In gamification, it
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allows you to do that through the whole sequence. So you can actually you can actually present what the themes are but
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then they are actually being modeled and acted out in really we um real world looking uh entertaining experiences. So
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lots of organizations particularly as they are trying to entice millennials to stay in the organization to think that
00:24:20
it is a fun culture to learn in a way that meets their needs are using MOOs are using gamification are using other
00:24:27
forms of social media to make sure that those experiences are coming to the millennials in a way that they want and
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actually the other older populations in the organization are really warming to these new ways of learning as well.
00:24:40
Right. Uh I wonder if we could end with a couple of uh sort of real broad brush questions. Uh there's a lot uh that uh
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has been written about the so-called war for talent. Um what are some of the new
00:24:56
strategies and tactics that you see uh uh in this war? Well, we talked about a few of the
00:25:04
tactics that corporations are using. The war for talent really is a real phenomenon now. We've talked a lot about
00:25:10
millennials. We've talked a lot about the global marketplace opening up. So,
00:25:14
for the first time in the last 5 years, there are a lot more job opportunities available to employees, you know, in
00:25:21
their region, in their industry, but outside of their industry, and people are leaving the industries that they've
00:25:25
worked in and grown up in at much more rapid pace than they have in the past. So when you have the millennials as one
00:25:31
population, but you also have the global marketplace opening up, all of a sudden
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companies are finding that it's really challenging to keep their people uh in
00:25:40
their organizations and to go out and get new replacements for those. So that war is really escalating. Uh one of the
00:25:48
things that we're seeing is that what are the strategies that companies can do
00:25:51
to recruit the talent? Well, you have to be able to go out and give a message of
00:25:56
the value proposition for why working at that organization is so important. Now,
00:26:00
obviously, you have to be able to do those things in the organization. You have to have a set culture that is
00:26:06
attractive. You have to have leadership that is really strong and dynamic and has created that sense of followership
00:26:11
that we talked about earlier. You have to have an environment where people are saying this is a great place to work.
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This is a place where we win. This is a place where we are productive. this is a
00:26:20
place that nourishes and nurtures me to be the best that I can be. That message gets out and becomes broadly
00:26:27
communicated um as rumor as real and also you can do it with your recruiting function to be able to codify what those
00:26:35
themes are so that people really do want to come and work. The other side though
00:26:38
is retention. And so once you do get the best people, you go to the best schools
00:26:42
and the best organizations, you attract the best talent and now you have them. What kinds of things are you doing in
00:26:48
your organization to make sure that they want to stay? And it leads back to all the things we talked about before. U but
00:26:54
organizations have to spend a lot more time on that than they did in the past. When we were in markets where jobs were
00:27:00
hard to get, companies could focus much more specifically on the bottom line and
00:27:04
on the attributes that allowed them to be successful in the marketplace. Now, when we're in this talent war uh
00:27:10
environment, companies have to spend much more time on their human capital. Let's stay close to our people. Let's
00:27:15
make sure we understand what they want. Let's make sure that we are providing at
00:27:19
least some of what they want. Let's make sure that we are monitoring and evaluating how well we are doing against
00:27:25
those needs. And companies haven't had to do that much in the past at all, particularly large companies because uh
00:27:32
people would always have the talent that was coming in. You could go if you were
00:27:36
Goldman Sachs even, you could go to a top business school and you know you'd
00:27:40
be able to attract the best talent based on the work performance that Goldman Sachs has had for years and the
00:27:46
reputation for excellence and people would come and they would think about wanting to stay in that job for a long
00:27:51
time over their career. Now, because of the millennial orientation and because of other factors of other opportunities
00:27:58
available to them around the world, we're seeing that they may want to come for a little while, but they're much
00:28:03
more inclined to want to go and work somewhere else and try other things at small companies. Uh, for example, small
00:28:09
technology companies, small hedge funds. And so we have spent a lot of time thinking about that dilemma and creating
00:28:17
a culture where people actually do want to come where they actually do want to stay where actually do uh develop
00:28:23
transferable skills that allow them to think about their career in a much longer way at the firm and so a lot of
00:28:30
companies are having to think about their talent in just that way as this war heats up. Right. Well, let's let's
00:28:36
uh tackle one last question which I know you've thought a lot about. Uh what is the relationship between
00:28:44
corporate learning and corporate strategy and is there any evidence that uh companies that are able to integrate
00:28:55
the two can uh see better performance? Yeah, that's a that's a great question.
00:29:02
Uh historically companies have developed corporate strategies. Well, I should say
00:29:09
the companies that have been most successful in business and in the markets in whatever area they produce
00:29:16
products or services have been the most successful when they've been able to
00:29:19
develop a very strong corporate strategy. It wasn't necessarily true that corporate training, learning and
00:29:29
development, leadership development needed to be aligned with that corporate strategy in order for them to be
00:29:34
successful. The global sense of business boundaries wasn't as dynamic as it is
00:29:39
now. The speed of product to market wasn't happening as quickly as it is now. Those two forces alone have created
00:29:47
an environment where organizations now are facing competition in such a myriad of ways that they need to now make sure
00:29:55
that not only do we need to have a really strong rockolid corporate strategy, but we need to make sure that
00:30:00
our people can implement that strategy as quickly as we can develop it. and as efficiently and better than anybody
00:30:07
else. How can we get our people to be prepared to develop the strategy we're
00:30:11
developing in a much faster, much more creative way? Well, that's where corporate training comes in. And that's
00:30:17
where jobs like mine are so critical to an organization because you have to think about not only the traditional
00:30:23
forms of of corporate training and not only the e-learning forms but even other more creative ways to stay linked very
00:30:30
tightly and and in real time with what are the leaders of the organization developing in the in the form of
00:30:37
strategy? How are we going to develop new services, new products? What are the barriers that we're facing? How are we
00:30:44
going to resist pressure? Whatever the corporate strategy variables are, the learning function needs to be at the
00:30:50
seat of the table at the same time to think about and be asking the questions concurrently. How can we make sure that
00:30:56
our people will be able to do and implement whatever it is that we're thinking about trying to do as fast as
00:31:02
possible? How can we get them ready? How can we get the people aligned with the right roles? And once they are aligned
00:31:08
with the right roles, how can we develop them quickly so that they can implement
00:31:12
those challenges? How can we also be creating a pool of successors so that once the former population has cycled
00:31:20
out, we have a new population of new leaders that are prepared to do the same work. If we don't have in organizations,
00:31:27
particularly large organizations, global multinational organizations, a seamless
00:31:32
connection between the people and the leadership development and the professional development and the
00:31:37
strategy, then what you're going to be faced with is a really dynamic and good
00:31:41
strategy that the people can't function with and they can't implement. And so
00:31:46
we're seeing lots of examples of that now. Historically, you have seen organizations like GE where they've
00:31:51
developed their own corporate university and Croinville and they've actually made
00:31:55
a very strong and public point of creating strategy and creating people development learning together and making
00:32:02
sure that time was taken to do that. But now you see a lot of other organizations
00:32:05
doing that as well and Goldman Sachs is one that also does that. So we are constantly in the process of de
00:32:11
developing dynamic strategy, responding to the market, making sure that we're
00:32:15
providing service and excellence to our customers and to our clients and working
00:32:19
seamlessly with our partners, but also making sure that our leaders are getting the right leadership development um
00:32:25
lessons and interventions, coaching, you know, and access to content that they need to be able to be as dynamic in that
00:32:32
exchange as possible. So uh you'll see a lot of corporate universities you know
00:32:37
following suit on that multinational organizations that are hiring chief learning officers where they are
00:32:44
creating forums for corporate strategy and corporate learning to come together spending money providing the resources
00:32:52
taking the time because it's already been proven from a return on investment
00:32:55
standpoint that if you do that then you will actually be able to implement your strategy more effectively and you will
00:33:01
get the return you're looking for. If you do not do that, you actually may lose. Now, now is a time where you can't
00:33:06
just have the strategy. If you don't have the learning mapped together, we are seeing companies that are losing uh
00:33:11
their game, their competitive game. Jason, thanks so much for speaking with Knowledge at Wharton. Appreciate it,
00:33:17
Mico. Thank you. [Music]