Supernova Award Category

Future of Work: Human Capital Management

The Problem

In 2015, T-Mobile’s customer base grew by more than 13 percent which placed an increased importance on having strong leaders ready to meet the needs of the business as it continues to scale.

Our goal was to identify and grow talented senior managers, leveraging their knowledge and passion for the business, and their understanding of our “Un-carrier” culture. We needed a way to get these star performers leadership-ready quickly, without impacting the business by pulling them away from their day-to-day work.

With the most diverse customer- and employee-base in wireless services, we also wanted to do away with the “one-size-fits-all” leadership development curriculum of the past and chart new territory. It was our goal to meet our leaders-in-the-making where they are on their career journey, recognize their areas of proficiency and focus on meeting their individual development needs rather than assuming every participant comes to the table with the same set of strengths and opportunities.

The Solution

As America’s “Un-carrier,” we wanted to break away from the old-school approach to training and support our fast-paced, digital, multi-generational work environment. We were able to achieve this with Cornerstone OnDemand.

Cornerstone has enabled us to transform the way people think about Leadership Development through the creation of our Magenta 9 program (M9)-- an enterprise-wide solution designed to accelerate the leadership capabilities of T-Mobile's top talent. M9 was developed as a complete system, incorporating a learning culture that includes early stakeholder involvement, enterprise-wide support and social connectivity. Using Cornerstone’s learning management system and social collaboration solution, content is broken down into micro-learning components and immediately applied to on-the-job situations with real-time feedback.

The results

M9 is a program like no other, enabling us to 'break the way' people think about Leadership Development. The adoption and excitement surrounding this enterprise-wide top talent program is quickly becoming the standard at T-Mobile.

With Cornerstone, our learning content is broken down into micro-learning components and immediately applied to on-the-job situations with real-time feedback. Each learning path consists of a mix of online, self-paced, and virtual instructor-led micro-learning activities, as well as experiential learning opportunities designed to put what they learn into practice. Some paths also include an in-person component. Most activities take less than one hour per day with minimal impact to their work. There’s also a social component through our learning management system that allows participants to engage in dialog with their “path-mates” throughout the month.

M9 has enabled us to provide our employees with relevant and engaging content. Our use of video work, integration of social learning conversations and the implementation of the 70-20-10 model (the belief that 70 percent of learning is on the job, 20 percent is from relationships and 10 percent is from formal training), all under the umbrella of micro-learning would not have been possible without Cornerstone.

Metrics

With its continuous enrollment of 150 participants each year, it’s estimated that more than 200 high potential senior managers will participate in M9. Thus far, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

Based on end-of-path surveys:

• 80% say they that their managers are actively engaged in what they are learning in the program

• 90% say that the learning experiences have improved their understanding of the topics covered

• 94% say they are able to apply their learnings on the job

Many of our four-week learning paths using Cornerstone now have more than a 88 percent completion rate.

These results reflect the level of participation in the program, but to see the real impact of M9 we also look beyond the numbers and consider feedback from our participants, path leaders and sponsors. Participants are seeing the building blocks and connections between the different paths, and our path leaders and sponsors are seeing the behavioral changes driven by “everyday” learning and the ability to immediately and tangibly put that learning into practice.

The Technology

Cornerstone’s Learning Suite and Extended Enterprise

Disruptive Factor

One of the challenges we faced with implementing M9 was changing the way people think about Leadership Development. When we started out on this path, we had more of a traditional top-down leadership development program that 18-20 leaders went through every year. But, because of our growth, we were going to have to hire 80-100 new directors annually. With such a small Leadership Development program, there was a big disconnect here and we knew that we were going to have to break the mold in order to have a strong new batch of company leaders.

When we started M9 we experienced some push back from skeptical employees who were hesitant to change and we had to come up with a change management strategy to ensure the entire organization was aligned. It helped to have the support of our senior leadership team, who sent an organization-wide email making a broad commitment to internal mobility, with a goal of filling 90 percent of roles with internal candidates. This made the need for an effective Leadership Development program even greater and helped make M9 a company-wide priority.

With M9 we’ve done away with traditional leadership development and changed the status quo. M9 is a more personalized approach to learning and leadership development, is especially helpful for our diverse workforce, including our large population of millennial employees. M9 has allowed our people to really grow into who they are as leaders and forge their own path to success.

Shining Moment

M9 has experienced overwhelming executive support. Leaders are commenting that the results from this program are far greater than they expected. For example, a senior manager had some initial hesitancy about the program and was skeptical about online learning. However, it turned out that the M9 Learning Journey was “not even in the same league” compared to his previous experiences. Now leadership is pushing to expand the program to more participants.