Kim Ruyle, Ph.D., Lominger - Learning Agility and Leadership Potential

Speaker

Hello, and welcome to People Performance Radio, sponsored by SuccessFactors, the global leader in performance and talent management software solutions. Now, let's get to the show.

Jim

Welcome back to People Performance Radio, you're here with Jim Matheson and Steve Hunt. We are continuing on with the Thought Leader series of People Performance Radio, and this week we had an interview with Kim Ruyle.

Steve

Yeah Jim, we had a really interesting interview with Kim Ruyle, he's the Vice President of Product Development for Lominger International, which is a Korn/Ferry company, and a really good discussion around what it means to be high potential, what high potential is, and Kim shares some very interesting research and thoughts around defining exactly what potential is, how to measure it, and gets into the really important role of learning agility, that is the ability to learn from experience and adapt your behavior, based on different things that you're exposed to, and he said that's really a key aspect of potential, and it's the thing that's probably missing the most, and he talks about how to define it and how to measure it, so it's a fascinating conversation, and also I found out that Kim is a fellow north-westerner from Washington State, so I've got a lot of that too —all the best thinkers come out of rainy climates, did you know that, Jim?

Jim

I did not know that, but it sounds like you guys need to stick together.

Steve

Probably! All right, let's listen to it.

Jim

All right, take it away Steve.

Steve

Good morning, we're here with People Performance Radio, and today we're continuing our SF Research Thought Leader series, and we're with Kim Ruyle, who's the Vice President of Product Development from Lominger International, and Kim, first thank you for coming to People Performance Radio, and my first question is, what do you do and what are you working on that's cool?

Kim

Well, I'm glad to be here Steve, and as you said, I am the Vice President of Product Development and Research for Lominger International, and I don't know how many people are familiar with Lominger, but we're part of Korn/Ferry International, which people probably are familiar with, it's the world's largest executive search firm, but what a lot of people don't know is that Korn/Ferry has a pretty comprehensive and very fast-growing business in human capital management consulting, so they acquired Lominger a couple of years ago, almost to the day when I started working for the company, and Lominger is the intellectual property engine that supports the talent management consulting part of the business, so I work with a very bright and talented team of people, and we're focused on developing intellectual property use in our solutions, and we develop tools used by HR, OD and talent management professionals as well in the field.

Steve

So Kim, anybody who's been working in the talent management field for very long has heard of Lominger, and we all pronounce it "Lominjer", right?

Kim

Exactly! We answer to anything.

Steve

That's the first question everyone probably asks, "How do you say your name?" So Lominger's famous for the work around competencies, the competency deck, for your information, so there's a lot of things that are really mainstays of what Lominger has done, that everyone knows them for. What are the things that you're working on now that you really say are, this is the next generation of where Lominger's going, and going to help their clients beyond the traditional, "Here's a deck of cards"?

Kim

You're right that the foundation of the business was around our competency library, and that our FY books and our Voices 360 tool, but we also tools for the whole span of talent management, the whole spectrum from interviewing and selection through succession, but what I've been working on lately, and actually it's really cool working here, because I've just been here a little over two years, and in that time I've co-authored some books with some real pioneers in the field, I mean founders of the company, Bob Eichinger and Michael Lombardo of course, but also Dave Ulrich, who many people will know, and the books that I've worked on are around performance management, strategic alignment and then most recently a book on employee engagement that really focuses on the engagement and retention of high potential talent, and I also just added a best practices book on succession.

So what I've been really working on a lot lately are topics that have at the core this concept of high potential talent, and the focus on developing, retaining, engaging high potential talent, and that can probably provide a context for what we want to talk about today, which is learning agility.

Steve

Yes, that was one of the questions, it sounds like, one, you've been incredibly busy, writing a lot?

Kim

Yes, absolutely.

Steve

High potential, you hear that word thrown around all the time, and one of the things that I always rally on about is the need to have more meaningful terms in HR, high potential for what? —it doesn't mean anything by itself, so what do you mean by high potential, when you talk about high potential, what is it, what does it look like —how do you define it and make it more measurable and tangible?

Kim

Well, I think there's not a lot of agreement about what potential means, so probably we have to start by defining that, so since there's not a lot of agreement out there, and I've worked with a number of organizations around succession, and many don't have a good definition at all, they talk about the "how" of performance as being the potential, and really I see the how as being a dimension of performance, not a dimension or a definition or part of potential. Some people even define, some organizations even define potential as mobility, the willingness to relocate or things like that; others get pretty close by, when they're using potential in succession planning, to describe the ultimate level of leadership to which a candidate might be expected to achieve, so they talk about things like long-term potential and we knew that they were referring to the position level in an organization that someone might reach if all the stars align, and that's not too bad, but I think it really misses something important. There's a big difference between the leadership skills required of someone who's aspring, or moving into a general management role, versus someone who's moving into a specific functional technical role, and the differences are that the general management role really requires breadth and a lot of adaptability, and that's where the whole learning agility piece comes in.

So our definition of high potential includes this concept of learning agility, that's an integral part of potential.

Steve

So if I can summarize then, you've made a good point, so when people talk about potential, it really is multiple things, I mean, one, sometimes when they talk about potential, what they're really talking about is your current performance right now, which is like, well yes, if you're not probably achieving your current objectives, that's future behavior is well predicted by past behavior, so you obviously have some concerns about there, but really that doesn't go far enough.

The second way is just, are you willing to move, or will we want you to move, which is kind of funny, but I guess at the end it's going to be show-stopper if they're not.

And the next one really sounds more like aspirational —could this person ever be some ultra high goal, but it's very sort of vague, and then what you're saying, the fourth one that you're really talking about is saying - so all those three are relevant, but they're not enough - the fourth one I'm hearing you say is, looking at potential in the terms of, is this a person that's learning agile, which I'm guessing has to do with, is this a person that learns from experience? —and so they're going to, nobody's ready right now, but is this a person who's capable of becoming ready, if we give them the right opportunities? Is that the right way of thinking about it?

Kim

Yes, so let's put some definition around learning agility, then we can come back to these four elements that you talked about, I think. So if there's one word that I would say really captures the essence of learning agility, it would be the word "adaptability", so and you said it, it's the ability to learn from past experiences, and quickly apply that learning to new situations. Charles Darwin is often misquoted as referring to "the survival of the fittest", what he actually wrote about was the struggle of the species to survive, and the ones that were successful, he said, "they won out at the expense of their rivals, because they adapted more effectively to their environment", so even Darwin is really writing about learning agility, if you want to stretch the bounds of it a little bit.

Steve

Just talking about....

Kim

Go ahead.

Steve

I was just joking, he just didn't know it yet.

Kim

He didn't know it, right. So we talk about this adapting, and synonymous with learning agility, and so the ability to learn from life experiences, to notice patterns in those experiences, to derive rules of thumb, that you can apply to new situations, and the thing is that people who are good at that, they're the best performers in new situations, because they can quickly apply what they previously learned, into something in an entirely different situation, so basically they just know how to adapt.

Steve

It's fascinating, as you're talking about that, because I think one thing that got a lot of press a few years ago - emotional intelligence, which if you read the actual research on it, the fundamental thing about emotional intelligence was the ability to be aware of emotions, and modify and change your emotions, based on how other people were reacting emotionally to what you were doing? —which to me sounds like both really a subset of what you're talking about, this learning agility in general, which is a high level of self-awareness and other awareness, and then doing something with it?

Kim

Yeah, absolutely. People who are high in learning agility are very self-aware. When I think about, and we go back to the four factors you were thinking about earlier, I often think about, when I'm looking at, let's say we're in a succession situation, and I've got 200 managers I'm assessing to say, "Which of these 200 managers really belong in my high potential pool?" —and the reason that I want to differentiate those is because high potential people do require differential treatment, they need different experiences, they need different development, they need different kinds of rewards, so it's really important that I'm clear about how to accurately assess potential, so I really look at three elements, and kind of a three-legged stool: one thing I'll just call raw material, and I would say that includes raw intelligence, IQ, but also emotional intelligence, and certainly the motivational aspect, so those things, and probably you could also include other things, depending on the organization.

I worked at Siemens before I came here which is one of the largest global companies in the world, and for Siemens it was very important that our high potential people were mobile. Also fluency in other languages was an important thing, so those things were considered, when we were looking at our high potential pool, were these people mobile and so forth, but more importantly, do they have the right intelligence, do they have the EQ, do they have the career motivation, because even if you have everything else, if you're not highly motivated, you're not going to go very far, so that's raw material.

The second one, and this is where I think a lot of organizations miss it, is they have to have the right experiences that build the key competencies that are required for those future jobs, so organizations that do this particularly well, they not only are able to assess candidates, and identify those that high potentials and those bound for those high-level GM type leadership roles, but then they're willing to take a risk, and very aggressively move these people through a series of experiences that kind of span a whole career, to give them the variety of experiences they need to be prepared for that corner office some day, and organizations that don't do that, then they really don't give people the opportunity to develop, so that's a second thing, is the variety of experience, and then the third one is the learning agility.

So those three components make up in my mind, high potential.

Steve

So I think that's good, I like how you've put that. So intelligence is really just the raw ability to process information, think through things, solve problems, then you have to have the experience which is, the chance to use that ability to learn, but I guess the learning agility is, it's an interesting one because I would think that if you didn't —I guess I ask the question, does learning agility depend on, could you have somebody that's low in reasoning ability/intelligence, yet still be high in learning agility?

Kim

Well, I don't think I'd go so far to say that, but I would say that there's no significant correlation between IQ and learning agility in the research we've done, and actually there's a researcher at Yale, Bob Sternberg, who studied this, and he also found that learning agility, or basically learning from experience and IQ, are unrelated. I think there's a certain baseline of IQ that's going to be required obviously, but your smartest people often are not your most learning agile; they may become your high pros versus your high po's, and often have depth of expertise, they're very bright, they lead functional technical areas, but they're not good at a general manager role.

Steve

Yeah, in my experience I'd agree sometimes you'd find, and the research has shown that when you look at CEOs, they are not, I think they're like one standard deviation above the mean on IQ tests, they're not like two or three standard deviations, well three would be ridiculous! —but two standard deviations above the mean, and in the work that I've seen, and I'm choosing this because I used to do executive coaching, I found that sometimes people that were very high in intelligence, they just thought incredibly quickly, they could process information, often because they could think their way through things, sometimes rather than looking around their environment and saying, "How can I collaborate more with the people around me?", they would just say, "Well, I'm just going to think my way through this", individually, when really, what being part of an organization is working with other people and involving them, whereas somebody, I'd see other people that sort of said, "This is more information than I can handle —I need to work with other people", and it forced them to work more on the skills that I would say are related to learning agility, which are what I would think have a lot to do with how you interact with others, how you influence others, as opposed to how you just solve the problem yourself.

Kim

Yeah, no that's right, in fact in our research around learning agility, we've identified four factors of learning agility, there is a mental agility factor, and that one probably is the one piece of learning agility that's most highly correlated to IQ, because it is the ability to deal with complexity, and to handle complex problems and not be put off by those, in fact actually to relish those kinds of things, so that is an indicator of learning agility, somebody who has mental agility, they're curious, they're interested in thorny problems.

And then people agility is another factor, which you were just talking about, and that's the ability to relate well to others, to understand others, to be good at conflict management and things like that.

Steve

And what are the other two? —you said there were four?

Kim

Yeah, the third one is change agility, and that, as you would expect, if we're talking about people that are high in adaptability, it's the people who really are dissatisfied with the status quo, they shake things up, they embrace change, they drive change, and usually they're good leaders of change.

The fourth one I'll say is a little bit contrived, the research isn't as clear on this, but as we're working with our clients, there's this kind of expectation in the marketplace that, if you're going to have people in leadership positions, they have to be focused on results, so we have a fourth dimension called "results agility", which is really the ability to drive to results and so forth, but I would say this Steve, that people that are high in those other three, they'd naturally get the fourth dimension, which is results agility.

Steve

It's just the natural result, I can see what you're saying, it's an outcome of the others?

Kim

Yeah, if you're high in mental agility, you're high in people agility, you're high in change agility, those are meta-competencies for a general manager or a leader, single leader? —and those people will be effective and they will get results.

Steve

That makes sense, I think that's a good point. I think one of the things that's really interesting about this I think is neat with what companies like Lominger are doing, is taking, how you've peeled back the onion on these very vague terms and saying, the word potential by itself is so vague, it's somewhat meaningless, but then you said, but we can peel it back and say, potential falls into these four different areas of current performance, mobility, I guess motivation, aspirations, and then learning agility, and then you go down one more level, and then learning agility, we can define it to get to some very tangible things, and I think this is having, I guess I'm just saying in general, which is a neat movement in talent management, is this idea that yes, people are complex, but they follow patterns and structures, and you can manage it by working through these things, it takes some research, and gets from something potential, which means, this person doesn't have potential, which doesn't mean anything, in some sense, you're like —why? —and now you say, yeah, you can break it down to say, this person is not change-agile, which actually you could give somebody feedback on that?

Kim

You can, and actually, if you're familiar with the Lominger competency library, we have mapped our competencies, if you will, we've correlated them with learning agility, so we know which competencies are most highly correlated with learning agility, so things like tolerance for ambiguity, perspective, learning on the fly —those are competencies that are very highly correlated with learning agility, and the beautiful thing about it is that we know that even mature adults can develop learning agility. Now, I would say that people are predisposed to be learning agile or not, and probably were born with part of it, there's an innate predisposition, but probably our upbringing, the nature versus nurture argument, probably our upbringing does influence our adaptability, so someone who grows up in an environment where they have a lot of experiences, they're exposed to a lot of cultures, a lot of different experiences, that probably predisposes them to be more highly learning agile, but the key is, if you're in a development position in an organization, let's say you're head of talent in an organization, and you really want to grow this ability, we call learning agility, in your workforce, there are competencies that you can develop, and we have developmental remedies for all those things, and we have tactics around how to develop learning agility, so that's the good news —it can be developed.

Steve

It can be developed, and it probably is really just figuring out what specific facet of learning agility is holding people back? —and I'm guessing it's a different intervention, depending if it's mental agility, people agility or change agility, there'd be different advice that you'd give them?

Kim

Yeah, I think you'd coach people differently, if you've created a development plan, you'd certainly need people that are high in self-awareness, so I think that's part of it; probably there's some 360 feedback involved, and helping people become self-aware, and then helping them develop the ability to see themselves more accurately, because most of us don't see ourselves very accurately. We don't see ourselves the way others see us, and so the learning agile person does do that very well, and so coaching people around that, for instance.

Steve

So do you think self awareness is very much something that people can develop as a skill? —are there some people that will never be self aware?

Kim

Yeah, some people just choose to, and it's really interesting, I do a fair amount of 360 coaching, and I've coached some very senior executives, and I've had executives say, "You're not telling me anything new, every time I've had a 360 over the last 20 years, I've heard the same thing, and I'm not going to change", and it's interesting, because they are self aware, but they've made a conscious decision to not change, so if you're going to change your behavior, and you're really going to demonstrate this adaptability we're talking about, self awareness is just the first step with that, so absolutely, we can help people become self aware, and help them learn to continuously look at themselves, re-evaluate things, look at situations, and kind of do their own little debrief after a situation, so they just came out of a meeting, and things didn't go as they expected, so let's step back and analyze your own behavior, and people can learn to do that.

Steve

Yeah, I think that's a good point, I think it's funny too, you're talking about kind of, I'm self aware but I don't care! —some people!

Kim

And most people are pretty hard to coach, right?

Steve

Exactly, then there's the other one, where you have high self awareness and low self control, which is I think neuroticism, which, "Oh no! I'm going to screw up! Don't say that, don't say it! —I said it! —ah!"

Kim

But the learning executives that I've coached, they are the most coachable of all, I mean they're not only self aware, but because they're change agile, they love to adapt, they want to change, and so they're usually not only welcoming of feedback, they go out and look for it, they go and ask people for feedback, they're always looking for, "Tell me about myself —how can I do better?" —and they want to change, so that's an indication of learning agility I think.

Steve

OK, we just have a few more minutes, so a couple of things I wanted to touch on with this —so you're talking about this development, I guess the last question is, what challenges, are there any downsides to being learning agile? I think one of the things that I really liked about the FYI book that Lominger has is that they show, every strength hides a weakness, and years of coaching have taught me there is no strength they can't show the flaws in.

What about learning agility? Is there something that you have to watch out for people that have a very high learning agility?

Kim

Well yeah, I think they make some people uncomfortable, because they are challenging the status quo, they tend to shake things up. For managers of high potential people, people high in learning agility, because these people, they have this really tremendous drive to be continuously learning and challenged, then some managers look at these people and say, "And these are high maintenance employees", and indeed they are, and indeed they do require special attention, they require special development, and I think that's one of the challenges of working with high potentials is that, if you don't keep them challenged, if you don't keep them stimulated, they are likely to go look for that stimulation and challenge somewhere else, and so the development, the engagement, and the really thoughtful, planful, aggressive assignments of high potentials into jobs that matter, jobs that will be developmental for them, jobs that will challenge them, jobs that are different, if you don't do those things, then you're going to lose them.

Steve

And just a final last question is, clearly you've shown learning agility is really important, and I agree with you, and there's a lot of research showing that. How many people out there are learning agile, and my guess is it's probably not the majority of people are high on learning agility, and are there things that organizations can do, if I'm that director of talent management for an organization, are there basic programs I can put in place that are going to raise the level of learning agility across my organization?

Kim

So there are actually two different questions there: the first one is related to what's the distribution of learning agility in the population, and our research shows that it's normally distributed, so I guess if you just think of a standard normal curve, you've got about two thirds of the population within one standard deviation on one side, on the other you have the mien, so that's sad, that doesn't mean then that you have 15 or 20% of your population that are truly high potentials, because you remember you actually have to look at the performance of people as well, and so depending on how performance is distributed in your organization, that's going to determine, if you think about the nine box model, I think of us are familiar with the succession planning? —what percent of your workforce would typically be in the nine box? —that's a question we get a lot, and so I think the organizations that do it very well, that really assess learning agility well, and they also assess performance well, in other words, they don't over-inflate performance ratings, they're typically looking at three to five to no more than 10% of their employees in that nine box, probably 5% is a pretty common number.

Steve

Wow, and is there anything that a company could do to increase that number? Are there any systematic interventions that you think would help learning agility for just about everyone?

Kim

Yes, we talked about the competencies that are correlated with learning agility, so anything that, any kind of developmental remedies that you'd put in place to address those competencies would move the needle, but it's the most important thing by far, by far the most important thing you can do is to understand your key jobs in the organization, where they're at, what competencies they develop, and then you really, as an organization, take the risk to move high potentials, who don't have experience in that particular role, and have a high likelihood of failure, but you take the risk and you move them into those jobs for development, and that's what organizations, the ones who are the best in talent management, they do that very well, they move people into jobs and they do it consistently, periodically, so every two and a half, three years, the high po's move into a new job assignment, they're getting a new set of experiences, and they're developing , and that's how you develop that strength for those general management positions.

Steve

So it's sort of like saying, if you've got people on the bench, and you want to know if they're star players, at some point you've got to put them in the game in a crucial place.

Kim

You have to.

Steve

It's the only way they're going to develop that game experience?

Kim

Yep.

Steve

Well, so Kim, first thank you, this has been a fascinating conversation, I wanted to give you a chance, if there's any additional things you'd like to share before we wrap up? —are there any additional nuggets of wisdom, or observations, or questions you wish that I had asked?

Kim

Well, I think you did a great job with the interview, Steve, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be with you today. I guess if I was to summarize, I would just say that, for organizations that are looking at, well we know that talent is what really drives organizational success, right? —so if talent is as important as we all know it is, then we really have to do a good job of assessing our talent, developing our talent, selecting our talent, and learning agility is a key part of that, so becoming clear on how we assess learning agility, how we develop it in our workforce, and have basically maniacal focus on talent, especially high potential talent —that is key to organizational success, and that's what I would end with.

Steve

Well, I think those are great words to end on, and I think you've provided some great frameworks for how companies can do that in a very systematic, methodological manner, as opposed to randomly trying to find high po's, there's a very clear pattern to it, and so with that, Kim, thank you very much, and hopefully we'll have a chance maybe to get you back on People Performance Radio again in the future, to learn about your next book. Thanks.

Kim

Thank you.

Jim

Thanks Steve, for that great interview. For those looking for more information about the Thought Leader network, you can find it at the SuccessFactors' website in a few different places. The first place to go is always www.successfactors.com/podcast, where you can get all your show notes for the individual episodes. There's also a whole section on SuccessFactors' research and the SuccessFactors' Thought Leader network, which is available at www.successfactors.com/research, and one other item is that we have a SuccessFactors' Thought Leader bookstore, which is available at www.successfactors.com/bookstore, where you can get a lot of great books and information written the folks in the Thought Leader network.

Zak

So we've just got a major announcement here at People Performance Radio, it's just huge for all our UK and European listeners. Jim, why don't you tell us what it's all about?

Jim

Thanks Zak, yes, we have a new podcast, it's going to be coming out, we're going to start out with about a half dozen or so episodes, it's going to be focused on how organizations today are leveraging their talent with the uncertain economic times, and it's going to have a sort of Europe/UK flavor. There's going to be some interviews with some customers, as well as some stuff with Erik Berggren, who I think people have met before on earlier episodes of this podcast, and I think there's going to be some great things coming out of that camp, so let's just keep your eyes peeled, and see you all next week.

Speaker

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