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Talent management

Cat Lang

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Cat has been helping build skilled customer and partner workforces in the Cloud world before it was called Cloud. She has a deep background in education and enablement, and a honed understanding of what it takes to align a market of talent with a business strategy. Cat has led innovation in customer and partner training, job-readiness certification, adoption-oriented change programs, subscription-based customer success, university and workforce development partnerships, and user-centric learning platforms for some of the largest Cloud companies in the world, including Salesforce, Google, and ServiceNow. She is known for her ability to create high-performing teams, an enduring culture, a compelling vision for how learning intersects business, and to help executives over “the hump” of multiplying their strengths through their teams. When not at home in New England, Cat will usually be found behind her camera somewhere where wildlife roams.

In your 20+ years of leading organizational transformation, what are the right set of skills to look for when building a leadership team?

I often describe the ideal leadership team as a combination of builders and runners, experience and ambition, and folks who have keen self-awareness (and humility) about what they bring to the table. You want a leadership team who have their area of specialty, but have or are in the midst of developing influence, communication, and culture-building capabilities because those are the skills most needed and most often overlooked. And don’t overlook the power of a team that truly wants to work together and learn from each other.

Your expertise lies at the intersection of customers, talent, and product, helping leaders deliver a truly differentiated experience internally and externally. Can you give us an example of this in practice and why it’s so important?

Time and again, leaders get enamoured with their product or offerings, and completely forget that two things are true: 1) customers want to be able to see the end state, and 2) the best solution in the world means nothing if the people who are supposed to use it don’t. The best companies frame their use cases not just in ROI and for the buyer, but also in stories that demonstrate what the solution feels like for customers and puts a real face on the people whose jobs or careers change for the better. That’s what starts the change process and leads to adoption – a practical business connection AND motivating and exciting the workers who need to drive the change.

You’ve led talent development, training and enablement at some of the biggest names in cloud. What is the secret to building successful, scalable programs?

Scalability and sustainability start with a clear connection to the purpose of the company and alignment to a business strategy. Why does talent development (internal or customer/partner) matter to the company? Why does it matter to the workforce? Why does the customer or partner care? Those answers will give a leader perspective on how big to go, how fast, and where to prioritize activity. Scalability is built on multiple successes – and the ability to see where you need to be with a market of talent several years out and start working today toward that goal. Talent takes time to mature – there is no quick fix, but the right connection to the business strategy sets a roadmap and milestones for what talent is needed when.

How is AI changing the way companies create impactful learning experiences?

There is so much potential here! But we’re in early stages. I’m certainly impressed with the productivity of learning experience creation (sophisticated simulations, speed to create digital content, assessment, etc.), but the real magic will happen when it’s business-as-usual to have AI involved in the business of learning and we’ve started to focus on how AI changes/enhances what learning means in the workplace. That said, AI is creating a renewed interest in how a learning culture drives a company’s success, which I couldn’t be more excited about!

Bob Maller

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Bob is the former President and Chief Culture Officer of Collaborative Solutions, and an expert at growing teams, practices and partnerships in the fast-moving cloud computing space. To call Bob an IT services veteran might be putting it mildly. He started his consulting career in the ‘90s at global consultancies Accenture and Deloitte, before going on to manage consulting teams at PeopleSoft. That experience served him well when he joined Collaborative Solutions as its second employee. Over the years he’s grown Collaborative to more than 1100 employees and Workday’s longest tenured partner. Along the way, he’s also created a firm well respected for its work, culture and dedication to diversity, winning a ridiculous number of Best Places to Work awards. Collaborative was acquired by Cognizant in 2020, and Bob continues in the same role at Collaborative as Cognizant’s standalone Workday practice.

Why are you passionate about helping people-based businesses?

When we developed our core values at Collaborative, the clear first value was People. While it can be cliche to mention People as a core value, it’s the businesses that truly nurture and develop their people who are most successful — especially in services. Real magic happens with collaboration, which is why when you’re building a firm or a practice, teamwork is such a critical trait. The “smartest” or most-skilled person may not be a fit for your organization if they don’t thrive as a member of a team.

As the second employee at Collaborative Solutions, you grew the firm from a niche PeopleSoft federal contractor to a ‘crown jewel’ of the Workday ecosystem with more than 1000 employees. What was the most challenging part of that early journey and what was it when you reached scale?

In the early days, the challenge was to differentiate ourselves. As we became a Workday partner, the fear was that we would build a practice and the large SIs would swoop in to hire them away. This is why hiring the right people and building a sustainable, employee friendly culture was, and is still, critical.

Our first acquisition (a Workday consultancy in Australia) was also an interesting milestone. Integrating them into what was then a North American-centric business and making them feel a part of the Collaborative family took real work.

At 500+ employees, I no longer knew each employee, which was a very weird feeling. We needed ways to stay in touch with each other and keep engagement high. So we launched the Collabie Convos series (intimate video calls with 15-20 employees) to discuss a variety of topics. We also put a lot more emphasis on developing the people in the firm to become leaders and great ambassadors of our culture. It cannot just be the senior leadership team who sets the tone for the culture.

You’re a huge advocate of culture and inclusivity. What is the key to scaling culture as the company grows, expands and evolves?

It starts with formalizing and promoting your core values. In the early days, it’s about defining and discovering those values as a founding team. As we got larger, it became very important that every employee around the world knew what our core values were and why we had them. We reinforced them daily and worked them into our processes. They weren’t just words or phrases on a wall in an office.

Selecting and developing the right leaders within your practices is also critical, and should constantly be reviewed. These are the leaders that new hires will look to, even more than the executive team. Do you have the right leaders? Do they exemplify our core values? Did we promote people into areas they cannot handle and would be better suited as individual contributors? We, as leaders, cannot be afraid to ask these questions and make adjustments along the way.

When it comes to inclusivity, it simply needs to be a priority – a focus from the top down. I’d also highly encourage instituting a buddy and/or mentoring program to indoctrinate people into the company and to ensure that they have someone to help navigate their careers within the company.

Keeping employees engaged is never easy, but it can be even more challenging during rapid growth and downturns. What are some things leaders can do to keep engagement high throughout a company’s lifecycle?

The first thing is to survey your employees, but just as importantly, do something with the results. Show your employees that what they told you is valued and, if it needs work, that it’s being addressed. I am a big believer that surveys are anonymous and people understand that improvement is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. For trust to flourish, leaders need to be vulnerable and transparent. Talk to your people more often than you think, through a variety of mechanisms. Use video as much as possible when communicating important things (as opposed to a flat email that no one really reads).