Practical ideas to boost your business success!
Sharon Claffey Kaliouby is currently VP, North America at Learning Pool, a significant player in the field of digital learning. Sharon is a results-driven, performance consultant and works globally increasing revenue and business results. She’s won numerous awards for learning in the world of Learning and Development including 2018 Learning Professional of the year. She’s hugely approachable and enthusiastic, highly connected and is a strong advocate for raising the profile and status of women in learning.
Practical ideas to boost your business success!
Sharon Claffey Kaliouby is currently VP, North America at Learning Pool, a significant player in the field of digital learning. Sharon is a results-driven, performance consultant and works globally increasing revenue and business results. She’s won numerous awards for learning in the world of Learning and Development including 2018 Learning Professional of the year. She’s hugely approachable and enthusiastic, highly connected and is a strong advocate for raising the profile and status of women in learning.
Welcome to the Stellar Labs podcast. Future learning today. At Stellar labs, our mission is to bust the technology skills crunch with effective, measurable engaging training. We consult on design and deliver the technical and people skills and competencies you need in business. In these podcasts, you'll hear from industry experts and practitioners from the worlds of technology and training. They'll share their experience, insights and inspiration and their visions for the future with you. Keep listening to start your future learning, here today.
Stella:Hello, I'm Stella Collins, Chief Learning Officer at Stellar Labs. Today's podcast episode was recorded live at the Learning Technologies Conference 2020. Sharon Claffey Kaliouby has a new role as VP North America at"Learning Pool". She's an award-winning expert in the business of Ellen D. She's also a passionate advocate of Women In Learning and that's what she's been talking to me about at Learning Technologies. Sharon, it's really lovely to have you here. How are you?
Sharon:Oh, thank you. I'm doing wonderful. Thank you so much.
Stella:Great! So Sharon, these podcasts are just an opportunity to talk about things we're passionate about, talking about things we're interested in. And I know you've been really influential in the Women In Learning movement. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about, you know, what you're doing, what you've found, what we can expect for the future.
Sharon:Oh, super. So I'd say#WomenInLearning really started around the mid to late 2000, 2010-ish or so. I personally got involved at WIL in 2013 i n the States. And from that, quite a bit of discussion was done on the statistics of where women are at in the industry. You go to a lot of events, speak to a lot of folks and they say there's a lot of women in this industry. However, in about 2015, Don Taylor had done statistics on where their roles are. Where do we have most of the population? Well, most of the population for men to women is there's two to three women coming into this industry to every one man. However, when you get to those senior layer roles as VP, CLO, Senior Executive roles, the numbers flip to two to three men to every one woman. So at that point, the importance of us talking about this topic, increasing awareness and then most recently saying we're going beyond the panel as we are today at the conference. We're doing workshops, we're creating strategies for empowerment and we're really trying to move the needle.
Stella:Excellent. And what's been your key takeaway so far from what you've done so far or been experiencing so far?
Sharon:We're not alone. Through the years doing the panels, men have been a key source to success. So in a way is this excluding men out of the conversation. At times there's been HBR articles stating that, when there's one woman at the top, they're not really promoted to bring up other ladies. So we're trying to shift that mindset, create great role modeling and really get the industry to take a hold of this so that individually we are pushing it further and creating greater equality. A last note is that this is not just to be nice. This is very profitable. There's strategic strategies in investment management that support this and illustrate that companies that are led or where you have women on boards or they have equal numbers, do financially better than companies that do not.
Stella:That's really interesting and I know men are really important for this. I was asking Andrew Jacobs(-> Stella, is this the correct name) yesterday if he'd be on this podcast and having only started the podcast at LT this week, his strapline was,"I will as soon as you've got the exact number of women on or at least equal numbers of women on the podcast as men". At that point, I just happened to have interviewed two men. So I was like,"but we will have women, Andrew". And he was like,"not until you've got that number of women". So I think I can go back and ask him now because we've now got probably more women that we've interviewed. But I thought that was a really strong and interesting stand from him that, it was an easy thing to do and it's a one man's stand but it was really impressive.
Sharon:I saw it even at Learning 2019, Nigel Paine had dr. Celine Mullins up on the main stage. If not for him and Don Taylor pulling it up there, this being the original Elliot Macy event years ago, I don't think we would have even had the amount of women up there. The numbers were lopsided, but it was really cool to see that it took someone influential like Nigel to get a woman up on the main stage. Pretty cool.
Stella:It'd be great to have an influential woman up there influencing, getting people on the main stage. That would be really cool too.
Sharon:I'm sure there were, but yet not enough.
Stella:I'm just thinking a little bit about that. The financial benefits from having women. What do you think it is that maybe women do differently or maybe bring to the bring to the occasion?
Sharon:I don't even know if they do it differently because what they're doing differently, the way that we act, men and women are different. It just such a confusing question because we question ourselves. So that would even be a question that a man wouldn't even handle as coming their way. So I think what we're saying is try to be your authentic self without upsetting the applecart too much. If you do, just know that you may need to leave your current job company position in order to get where you need to go. And that's a scary thing that we're seeing. That there's greatest success in knowing that you're at the right place in your head, a place that values you. Another thing is partnering up and that's what we're doing better as well. The#WomenInLearning-group is now being co-founded with Kate Graham and we have at least eight to twelve women that we're saying,"Champion this, this is no one woman's initiative, but it is women that have to take it and make the change happen".
Stella:Yeah. And I think there is something that women particularly are quite good at: collaboration. You often see it that women will say,"I can help". We had a conversation last week with Jane Franklin who's a cybersecurity specialist and we were wanting her to participate on our advisory board. Now for various reasons she can't do that. But what could have been a sort of competitive competition turned into,"Well, I can't do that for you, but let's keep talking. Let's collaborate. Let's share, let's promote what each other do". So it turned out into a really positive conversation and I think that's something that I think I really value from working with other women as well as men. Some men are great at that too.
Sharon:Yeah. One thing though, that we've noted, is that women tend to stereotypically get along in the States better at school, better students. Now in school, in the States at least, if you collaborate, what is that called? Cheating. So women do not come out with the ability to say,"Hey, this is what it's all about. I want to cheat my way to the top." No. So I've noticed when I worked with young grads coming out of university to kind of retrain their mindset that it's okay to lean in, to ask for help to collaborate. I always found that incredibly interesting. Another neat observation was the fact that most of the women that were at the senior level had done some sort of sports in their life. And there was a Forbes article saying that 94% of C-suite women had all played a sport. Now, it doesn't mean you're Olympic level. It may just mean that you might have picked it up in your teens. You might've picked it up as a young child, but there's something about that that gives you maybe a grit and a resilience that if you don't have it, it just makes it a bit more difficult.
Stella:That was really interesting. The sport could be so many things, couldn't it? It could be that you learn to work in teams better. Are we talking team sports or any sports?
Sharon:I think it's any, because even as an individual sport athlete, the team part of it always thrilled me going to the club, going to meet and create relationships with people you want to tear apart on the fencing strip or on the field. I think another tactic that you gain from sports is keeping it on the field. And that is, if there's any confrontation, you let it sit there, you deal with it, you see who wins and then you respect your opponent when you leave.
Stella:That's a really interesting way of looking at it. I really liked that, Sharon. Also you talked about grit, resilience. Maybe that's because sport does make you physically stronger. And I have a very strong belief that physical strength and mental can can go together.
Sharon:I think they are. And I'd say if you hadn't done sport, now is not too late to pick it up. I became a new learner going back and trying out a new sport: pickleball. Being really bad at something and having to learn as people in L&D is quite the education and seeing how that goes about is a real nice lesson, too. So pick up a sport now, even if you haven't done one before.
Stella:And I guess I''d say, also pick up a language because I'm trying to learn Flemish at the moment and it's a great lesson. But oh my goodness, this is what it feels like to be kind of level 101. The other day I was having a conversation with a very helpful young lady and I got through kind of about three questions and then I was like, I've completely run out of vocabulary now.
Sharon:Oh my gosh. That's great!
Stella:So Sharon, it's been really, really interesting to talk to you. Thank you very much for joining us today and I look forward to hearing what's happening with women in learning and I think we're off to a session later on at lunchtime.
Sharon:Yes, I can hardly wait. Thanks so much. Take care. Bye bye.
Stella:Thank you for listening to today's podcast. Please share it with your friends and colleagues and visit our website stellarlabs.eu to learn more about what we do and how we do it. Tune in to the next episode.