Here’s this week’s edition of our Coworking series. Each week, we chat 1:1 with an HR Brew reader. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.
Joey Spivey joined Wellabe last summer as its senior learning and development (L&D) specialist, leading the insurance company’s L&D as a team of one. Spivey said a tiny learning team is not unique in HR, but “as I keep progressing to new and exciting roles, I find my team getting smaller and smaller.” He said right now is an interesting time to be in L&D, especially with the roll out of automation and generative AI tools to make learning more scalable.
Spivey said the aspects of talent development he’s drawn to the most are the opportunities to help his colleagues realize their interests and potential through learning.
“It can be…ensuring that if [an employee has] a real interest in the specific area, or field, or platform, or whatever it is, that you have done your work as a talent development function to make sure you got a culture, system and programs that allow that person to go on that path of self-discovery,” he told HR Brew.
What’s the best change you’ve made at work?
Launching a three-tiered mentoring program focused on leadership development, career navigation, and peer connection.
There was a great need and desire for just connection, just coffee-chat coworker connections. We knew that there would be value in letting people jump into a pool and randomly pairing them with someone else in the organization to foster a little bit of humanity and potential collaboration between these different isolated pockets of this organization.
Then we thought about…the prototypical kind of mentoring: I’m an early- to mid-career professional; I want to pair with a more senior career professional, and let them help me chart my path through the organization.
There [were also] a lot of those early-career first-level leaders that didn’t necessarily know how to be leaders. They—like a lot of people—were really effective individual contributors, and because of that, were given the reins of a team right as if those two skill sets are the same, when in reality, they are wildly different. So, we figured there’s a lot of programming we need to do to address that.
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What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
That talent development equals training. Training is a very narrow slice of the talent development pie. Something that I’ve had to be really intentional about and work on in terms of my own skill development, but also in being able to communicate my value add to an organization…is that I am not just a content farm. I am not someone that you just hand a PowerPoint to…and I spit it out to an audience or I package it up into an elearning and ship it out to whoever you’d like me to. That’s [only] a part of the gig.
What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
Watching people discover their value, and find meaningful opportunities to contribute to that value.
What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
The focus on coaching as a critical development tactic. I think coaching becoming a more center-stage component of employee (and especially leader) development will help address a lack of consistent performance feedback, self-awareness, and vulnerability that can render even the best-intentioned people ineffective in their roles.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?
Pre-hiring psychometric assessments [aka] “personality tests.” These are heavily marketed to HR teams…but those teams are often woefully unprepared to use a pre-hire personality test as a talent acquisition tool. This can lead to a dangerous, and potentially illegal, overreliance on information that reinforces biases and inequities in organizations and their talent attraction processes.