I recently ran into someone from my
professional network, Tom Clancy, vice president of education services for EMC.
I’ve been fortunate enough to work with Tom as a speaker, author and source
over the years, and when I saw him in Phoenix at the CLO Forum, it was nice to
reconnect.
Besides, you can always count on a guy
named Tom Clancy to share a good story. (I’ll tell you a non-scary story about
a learning leader named Stephen King one day too.) I’ll flip to the last
chapter here: The bottom line is to try to be an over-achiever.
Let’s go back to the beginning now. Tom
has a pretty diverse business background, coming up the ranks through sales and
marketing organizations, but also spending time working in manufacturing and
service, among other roles. He’s been with EMC for 16 years, first in sales and
marketing and then transitioning about eight years ago to his VP role leading
EMC education.
So from first-hand experience, Tom
speaks the language of the business. He’s finding that more and more people in
his professional world are as well.
“We often in the training world say that
we want to be able to speak the language of our customers,” Tom said. “In my
group, we want the customer to speak our language, because we believe we’re
already speaking their language. We spoke the language for years. Now our
customers, our internal customers, they literally speak in the training
language when they talk to us. They understand what we’re doing because we’re
so aligned with them.”
Tom’s learning team has many associates
with learning backgrounds, of course, but it’s also led by senior managers who
grew up with business.
“I think it all comes back to aligning
with the business extremely well, understanding what the business priorities
are and over-achieving,” Tom said.
Look at EMC’s sales teams, for example. The
sales function is one of many internal departments requiring training
initiatives. Each specific audience has unique requirements that Tom said need
a similar but unique solution … in the sales example, the function has more
than 200 product releases each year, all requiring a fast time to market
globally. Learning’s assistance needs to be aligned, on-target, fast and
far-reaching.
This story ends with some happy news …
and some new news. Just this week Tom say initial feedback from a quarterly
survey EMC runs globally to track customer input. Education again ranked as one
of EMC’s main competitive differentiators among its competitors.
Within an hour of hearing that news
himself on Monday, Tom was sitting in front of the company’s president and COO.
The information, he said, was at that level because it’ll be leveraged at that
level.
For Tom, that’s a nice payday. The worst
thing a training department can be positioned as is a “check-the-box item,”
something that’s provided out of habit more than need. The best case, he added,
is when your training is viewed internally and externally as a competitor
differentiator.
That’s Tom’s parting advice:
Over-achieve on expectations and the more you can leverage customer input to
align to their needs, the more opportunities will be uncovered. Tom expects to
continue building learning with a partnership mentality in mind.
“Whoever your customers are, it’s one
thing to speak the language and it’s another to over-achieve on their
expectations,” Tom said.
