In this episode, we focus on learning leadership with an interview with Tracy Salters, the Director of Global Learning and Development at American Airlines. With a learner population of between 135,000 and 150,000 learners globally, Tracy’s team of 22 learning professionals are responsible for managing programs across multiple disciplines and topics.
The conversation explores the focus on culture, and how the learning team gathers information and outcomes data to understand the needs of the organization. The conversation also highlights a new managers’ learning program which went “viral” within the company, growing beyond the program’s initial scope and reach, driven by internal champions who recognized and advocated for its value and impact.
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Episode Transcript
Scott Rutherford
Hello and welcome to the AXIOM Insights Learning and Development Podcast. I’m Scott Rutherford. This podcast series is about the people, processes, content and techniques that drive organizational performance through learning. This episode is the first of three episodes focusing on leadership in learning and development. And it’s a way to mark this podcast series’ first anniversary. Thank you very much for listening and subscribing.
So let’s jump into learning leadership with Tracy Salters. Tracy is the Director of Global Learning and Development at American Airlines the role he’s held for the past 12 years. And to start our conversation, I asked Tracy to describe his position at American Airlines, and to talk about the career path that brought him there.
Tracy Salters
I have the pleasure of having responsibility for our talent planning, learning solutions and leadership development processes at American. So that means I encompass all of those things related to the planning and development of our talent pipeline. The learning solutions, platforms cover all of our digital and platform based solutions, curated programs that we have available electronically, our compliance programs and things of that nature, our leadership development cadre of programs, our programmatic facilitated programs for leadership and professional development, both for our people-leader population, our non-people-leader population, as well as professional development programming. Those things that follow within our talent planning segment are things like performance management, succession planning, talent review processes, and we support our people business partners, who support then the leaders within the business and implementing those activities. So we build programs, solutions, initiatives, strategies, research and support tools that really support the leadership and operational activities for our talent across the globe.
Scott Rutherford
Wow. So that’s three pillars, which are each substantial. Give me a sense of how large the organization is that you leave to manage those three pillars and, and what’s the size and scope of your learner population?
Tracy Salters
I learner population is roughly and it varies, you know, in the count, because we have the vast majority of our organization and our team members who are unionized. So when we when we do a count, we tend to put in a range of anywhere from 135,000 to 150,000 team members, some of whom are unionized, some of whom are not union. When we look at my team, my team currently is at 22 headcount. We’re currently staffed, we have some open positions that we’re filling. So really, anybody listening to the podcast, if you have people who are interested in the airline industry in this talent, development, leadership development space, send them my way, definitely.
Scott Rutherford
I think having open roles is still the name of the game. And while we’re on that topic, actually, I wanted to ask you how you saw the role of your team, your group, in talent retention across the across the business, not just in your own team?
Tracy Salters
Well, you know, that’s a great question. And it’s one that I and members of my team get really excited about because we see ourselves the tools that we create, and the activities in which we engage as being purveyors of culture and driving engagement through the acquisition of skills, knowledge and information. We really look at the activities in which we engage as those which allow our team members to expand their scope, their awareness of how they grow their careers within the organization.
You know, many people look to grow vertically, going to advancing into the next role, whereas we look and recognize that much of the development occurs laterally. So we try to position and equip our team members with understanding how to guide their careers, what skills, what tools are requisite to allowing that to happen, and ensuring that we can engage them by infusing cultural messages that attract, retain, engage them as they go through that process of acquiring skills.
Scott Rutherford
So on the on the topic of culture, I think it’s fascinating because you American Airlines is a global complex organization. You have, as you mentioned, union, non union; you have people ranging from office environment to on the tarmac, at airports and in the air and everything in between your, that your, your organization has a lot of people, a lot of places, and a lot of very, very different roles and types of roles. So how do you approach building a company culture that brings all of those people together?
Tracy Salters
Well, I will say that it’s, it’s challenging, but a part of the challenge is what also breeds the excitement. Because you look not only for the idea of a unity of purpose, you know, for us, we focus on the idea of caring for people along life’s journey. So that opportunity to interact, you know, with our customers with the flying public with our passengers, and those that support them in the idea that we’re relationship business. So we focus in on those opportunities to interact with and engage with those passengers, some who might be engaging with us, because they’re heading to a family wedding, or to some other family gathering, you know, some who are just taking the opportunity, especially now post pandemic, you know, to take a vacation, to travel to see the world, sending kids off to college. So we have the opportunity to interact with people as they are engaging in those elements that make life, life. And we seek to add value in that regard.
But it is a challenge when you’re looking at the diversity of experiences, the diversity of approaches and the things that initiate those opportunities to travel. So we seek to embrace and interact with that also in diverse ways, ensuring that we have a diverse population of talent within the organization who bring with them diverse perspectives on how they might engage and how maybe they might want to be engaged with, so that we can present that sort of positive yet diverse perspective and face as we’re caring for people along life’s journey.
Scott Rutherford
So just thinking about that diverse global audience, I wanted to get down maybe a little bit into the into the weeds of the learning and development programs that you support, I guess this probably would be mostly in the leadership development, but in the learning solutions areas, but really, it’s about programs and delivery. And I want to talk with you a little bit about both. First, how do you determine and how do you make decisions about the programs that you offer? How do you identify learning need? Again, while managing I imagine a very diverse set of needs that would request that would that would come into your team?
Tracy Salters
Well, we regularly poll and assess our learning audiences to determine and to inquire about areas of need, that they have. We regularly conduct needs analyses around the expectations, the desires, the interests, the needs of our learning population. And we also monitor and apply metrics against programs that we roll out to determine how effectively those things are meeting the needs.
So we are fairly fundamental in applying Kirkpatrick model of measurement and effectiveness in learning design. So we design with that end in mind, we develop and curate content with that end in mind, and then we monitor how effectively that content delivers and impart skills to the learning population.
So we’re very engaged in that regard. We utilize our ongoing learning needs analysis with our learning population to determine what are things that we’re offering that are actually meeting their needs? What are things that we’re not offering, that they may be desirous of, and how might those things best be delivered to them? So in addition to looking at content information from the needs analysis, we also look at modalities because we know that you know, given the nature of our business, we have a highly mobile population that not only has a need for ongoing skill development, but needs to have that delivered in a variety of different ways. So we look for how we can identify focus in and intensify the level of focus in specific content areas but then offer a variety of modalities in which that content can be delivered.
Scott Rutherford
With the with the combination of using structured measurement, you said Kirkpatrick, and surveys to understand what’s working across the learner audience. And I imagine there must be some delivery experimentation that happens along the way to trying to find the most effective modalities to reach to reach your learners. What have you discovered along the way? Are there any learnings or advice you would offer? Based on your journey and your process?
Tracy Salters
Well, I mean, probably the best and most effective piece of advice that I can offer is that rarely does one size fit all, we are constantly challenged with ensuring that we can provide the right level of content to the right audiences at the right time. So that just in time sort of factor, you know, as always a component of how we design and deliver things. There is an aesthetic that is required within the design, not only in ensuring that you have governance around best practices and learning and delivery, but that you’re also creating an engaging and sometimes somewhat nuanced slant to meet the needs of the diverse audiences.
So, whether we’re looking at things that can be offered and delivered directly to your mobile phone, or things that you can deliver in a variety of different web applications that can be self-directed, or those things that are, are offered real-time with a facilitated journey via a digital platform or an in person platform. We’re always looking for different modalities. And in some cases, we test content and a variety of different modalities to see which one is more or less effective. And we find differences by functional groups, by different audience levels by different regional applications. And then we try to determine the best one that we want to invest in and continue to curate and promote within the organization.
Scott Rutherford
So you develop your own guidelines, as you as you do those tests. Can you give me an example of one that you found that worked maybe that you didn’t expect to?
Tracy Salters
That’s interesting, because that there’s probably several they come up in that way.
But I’ll you know, take, for example, there was a program that we worked on, that was really focused on delivering effective performance and feedback conversations. And it was designed initially for a first level new leader audience now to ensure I mean, because at that level, you know, you’re overwhelmed, you know, just the enormity of the task of leading people, leading teams, you’re new into the role, you know, that you have to provide direction and clarity and setting goals. But you also have to provide feedback. So that’s often a daunting task.
So we developed a set of programs to provide a cultural model for delivering feedback, understanding the context, infusing culture, and then putting a four-step feedback model in place that those new leaders could seek to use to enhance their feedback process.
It was designed for that frontline audience. What we found was that the frontline audience members were so enamored with it, that they told their leaders, who told their leaders, who told their leaders, and so we had literally to expand the program offering because we had so many leaders beyond the frontline leader level, who were saying, “hey, I need this,” or, “my team members told me I need this, so I need to learn more about this.”
So it was really surprising because this was delivered in a distributed fashion. So we had a single facilitator who could have anywhere from, say 80 to 120 participants, you know, on the line, we went through scenarios, we provided some opportunity for some skill practice. In the course of the workshop, it was a hit. Literally, it went from us offering this once a quarter to them once a month to now I think by the end of this year, we will have offered if not every week than every other week, this same program, because the audience set grew so dramatically because they saw that this was something critical to driving their effectiveness. And the modality fit. So that was the big piece. It wasn’t just about the content. It was also about the modality.
Scott Rutherford
I love the idea also that it becomes viral – maybe that’s the wrong word to use post-pandemic – but viral in the social sense. And that in that was picked up and you ended up with, it sounds like, internal champions for this.
Tracy Salters
Absolutely. I mean, we had participants who literally reached out so we’d have maybe a first line, you know, new supervisor, you know, in one of our regional airport hubs, who after participating in the program who literally went out and made it her business to ensure that every new supervisor went through this program.
And they typically, they’d be slated to go at different points in their journey. But it was so profound and impactful for her that she literally went to her boss and said, “Hey, all of your new leaders need this.” And they made it so.
And, you know, again, it’s always great when you operate in this space, that you have a pull for your product and services, you know, quite often we find ourselves having to push things, you know, out into the organization, and they’re going, ‘we don’t have time for this, we don’t have space for this.’ But when you can get that level of pull, you know that you have something that’s impacting not only their process effectiveness, but the culture impact that it makes to ensure or to know that you have leaders across the board consistently applying a process. That’s very powerful.
Scott Rutherford
Right, and it sounds like, and sometimes we talk about the learning function sort of existing in a cyclical fashion inside an organization, right? We have – there’s the learning programs that are created, they’re executed and delivered. And then they’re measured, and there’s follow up, and that closes the loop. And the follow up creates demand again, and you end up with a virtuous cycle, right?
Sounds like that’s happening in your example, in the demand for the learning, which is a building block of a learning culture. Everyone talks about the difficult-to-attain goal of building a learning culture. I wanted to get your thoughts on how that cycle of feedback – how does that cycle of feedback, help you when you’re talking about outcomes and impact to your colleagues to the senior most senior levels of the organization? The folks who are making the ultimate budget decisions? How does that work?
Tracy Salters
You just said the key word in that, ‘budget’ decisions. I have not come across anyone who operates in this space who is immune to the constraints of budget. But I think when you design with the end in mind, and you incorporate metrics into the design, then you’re better positioned to address you know, the budgetary demands for whether it’s additional headcount or additional resources to support design, development, evaluation, whether it’s about being able to make more programmatic offerings, when you can look at a program, discretely identify the skills that are being enhanced and affected and influenced within the program, you can monitor the pre-skill capability of the learner audience as well as post-program and then ongoing in their implementation and activation of those skills, you can monitor and then get some bottom-line dollarized impact that you can then factor into and deliver information to those decision makers, you know, to help them make more effective decisions about the impact of learning in the organization. And that’s really what we do. So that’s, that’s a part of our accountability. It’s a part of our aim. It’s not always easy, because there are some things that are very difficult to measure, and difficult to get discrete measures that you can cut apart from other influencing agents within the organization. But we try to do our best to identify that for our leaders so that they can make effective decisions.
Scott Rutherford
In my conversation with Tracy we also touched on his career path and the roles that he held before his current position as global head of learning for American Airlines. I was specifically interested to learn from him how he approached onboarding himself, that is to say, what steps he took as he assumed the leadership role. Here’s what he said.
Tracy Salters
First, I did not start In my career in the airline industry, nor did I start my career in the learning space, I started actually in manufacturing operations within PepsiCo. So my first job was making chips. And I always joke with people that if you want to talk about, you know, the amount of air in the bag, talk to me, because that was a part of my job initially, was, you know, really kind of creating quantifiable metrics to determine how much air needed to go into the bag at the same amount of time as a product, so that you had a really full looking back, but only a certain amount of products.
So, you know, I focused in on metrics, on quality, on process controls, early in my career. And I’ve continued to leverage that. I got into the learning and development space largely because I was training members of my team on process controls and process quality, that led me to creating some learning tools to support them and others in other locations. And it just stuck, I fell in love with the process.
And I had the opportunity to deliver that within the corporate setting, then as an external consultant, you know, and working across a number of different industries, incorporating operational processes for learning design, for talent, planning and strategy for really creating overall organizational talent plans and mechanisms to drive the development of talent, operating as an executive coach during my consultative practices as well, really getting inside, what are the skills that drive and support the development of people so that they can then deliver against the goals of the organization.
And I think that is very critical for those who are operating or seek to operate in the learning space that you have to understand, what is the organization trying to accomplish? Now, what is it that people need to be able to do effectively to ensure that that happens? And it’s almost a reverse engineering sort of design process. Because you then look at, okay, where are the type of roles that you need? How many people are in those roles? What skills do does it require for them to be effective? What learning? Do they have to have coming in the door? And what things do you support? And what cultures do you espouse, as a part of that learning, I never separate learning and culture because that really is the fuel that drives engagement.
And as I’ve looked at those things, over the course of my career, I have yet to find a day that I don’t continue to be curious and fascinated by the combination of skills and practices that helped to drive that. So for me, I came into the role, not because my initial focus was on talent planning, but I had a level of curiosity about, how do you make these things work to drive and to enhance the effectiveness of the organization. What that has distilled into is focus on the talent, focus on the skills that the talent needs to be effective, focus in on how you can impart that to a very diverse, very curious, very driven population within the organization that is very focused on wanting to continue to grow and be successful, but has a variety of different ways in which they want to make that happen.
So you have to be attuned to the idea of not just resting on your laurels and having one approach, but continuing to develop a multiplicity of approaches so as to drive against the individual aspirations, as well as the organizational goals.
Scott Rutherford
I love what you’re saying about being curious, because I think that is the core of so many things in – asking the question, okay, why is this happening? What, not only what am I seeing, but why is it happening and starting to break that down? And, you know, breaking it down into perhaps more addressable smaller pieces? Okay. There’s the big why, break that down into its component parts and then address the parts.
Tracy Salters
Interesting that you say it that way. Because I talk with my team a lot about, okay, let’s identify the big rocks, you know, and the big rocks, we want to make sure they become our North Star. They give us a sense of, of focus, a sense of purpose, and we know, okay, we need to go that way.
Now, there may be a variety of different things that are along the way that are little rocks, that if we grab them all, we actually get to another big rock. And you’ve got to be focused in that way with that sense of purpose and focus a level of curiosity about why does that exist? Why is that a problem? What are the possible resolution points and how can we move that forward. So, I do agree that that level of curiosity is important. But also, the curiosity with focus and purpose, you know, is really critical to really driving effectiveness.
Scott Rutherford
My thanks to Tracy Salters. If there’s a topic or a guest you’d like to suggest for a future episode of this podcast, please let me know. You can contact me through the AXIOM Learning Solutions website at axiomlearningsolutions.com. This podcast is a production of AXIOM Learning Solutions. AXIOM is learning services company that provides learning teams with the people and resources needed to accomplish virtually any learning project or objective from on-demand learning professionals who will work alongside your team to complete learning content or project outsourcing. If you’d like to discuss how AXIOM can support your learning goals, please contact us at axiomlearningsolutions.com, and thanks again for listening to the AXIOM Insights Podcast.