JetBlue's Mike Barger Takes the Role of Chief Learning Officer to New Heights
Mike Barger was a TOPGUN Navy flight
instructor before he joined the start-up team that founded JetBlue
in 1999. They created a new breed of airline known for both low-cost
and high-quality service. Barger flew the company's first Airbus
plane to the United States from France. He later created JetBlue
University, which he continues to lead today. His role has evolved
from training pilots to providing education and development across
the entire workforce.
"Learning Leaders are no longer simply defining
and acting on the training needs of organizations. Today, these strategic
leaders are supporting the needs of their parent organizationss through
partnerships with business unit leaders in ways never before seen in
corporate America."
He
now holds the title of Chief Learning Officer (CLO) and has been a
pioneer in defining the new and increasingly important role of the
CLO. He also is one of the founding board members and part of the initial
class of the new Executive
Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership. The program, established
by the Wharton School and Penn's Graduate School of Education (GSE),
fills an unmet need in providing the combination of educational and business
knowledge critical to the success of learning leaders.
Barger spoke with Wharton@Work recently about the role of the CLO, the relationship between learning and strategy, and the new program.
Why is learning leadership becoming more important?
Learning leaders are no longer simply defining and acting on the training needs of organizations. Today, these strategic leaders are supporting the needs of their parent organizations through partnerships with business unit leaders in ways never before seen in corporate America. These partnerships allow the learning function to help operational leaders define individual or workforce performance gaps and then create learning experiences to improve the effectiveness of both teams and individual contributors. The customer-facing employee is moving from a transactional worker to a knowledge worker. As a traveler, when you go to the airport today, you want as little to do with an employee as possible. You book online, go to a kiosk to print your boarding pass, drop off your bag, and go to your gate. Most of the time you are happy with that, but when something doesn't work right, you want a problem solver, a knowledge worker, not a transactional worker.
How did the position of Chief Learning Officer evolve? How is your role continuing to change?
The first task of the learning function at JetBlue was to create a pilot-training program. As our airline began the certification process to carry passengers, we discovered that we didn't have the resources to create flight-attendant or customer-service training, so we took on these responsibilities as well. The role of Chief Learning Officer just evolved out of a need, rather than as a result of reading an article about a corporate university or a "CLO."
Over the last 10 to 15 years, the Chief Information Officer was the role that was starting to build succession candidates for the CEO, due to the connection of the CIO to the technology requirements of the business. As I look at the landscape of corporate leaders today, the CLO seems to be evolving as an individual who knows a great deal about what should be going on out there on the front lines, and the realities of what is actually going on out there. While CLOs may not have the technical background of the CIO or the business background of senior finance leaders, they are immersed in the complexities of the day-to-day corporate operations. More and more, these learning leaders are coming to understand a great deal about how their business works. A significant number of dollars are being dedicated to finding solutions to organizational performance problems. As performance improvement is becoming a core competency of today's learning leader, this trend seems to be adding value to the role of the CLO.
Just recently, I have been given the opportunity to run a new "balanced scorecard" (BSC) implementation at JetBlue. This will be JetBlue's first attempt at such an endeavor. It is interesting that the senior leadership asked me to be the BSC champion because the feeling was that I had an exceptionally close connection to how this company works at many levels and across business unit boundaries. Five or ten years ago, it was very unlikely to find a learning leader playing such a critical organizational role. I think this speaks volumes to the evolution of the position and the expectations senior leaders have of the CLO of today. Wharton and GSE at Penn are excited about the evolving role that these learning leaders are playing in organizations. We are not typically looked upon as the chief of training any more, but rather, as strategic human-capital managers and performance engineers.
JetBlue founder David Neeleman once said that the airline looks "to bring humanity back to air travel." What are the implications of that philosophy for training and development?
To achieve our vision, the first thing we have to do is to find the right people. Therefore, the recruitment and onboarding efforts are the first critical step. At JetBlue, the learning function and HR (a.k.a. the People Department at JetBlue) are peer departments that work together in organizational talent development. The learning function is tied to the COO, not the HR leader. This is good in that it is very closely tied to the needs and goals of the operation. Once we find and hire great people who can support the vision, the learning function not only delivers the necessary technical skills, but we are the cultural torches for the organization. We are the first cultural exposure that our new crewmembers get when they begin their careers at JetBlue.
JetBlue University is the only purely centralized learning function in the airline industry, and it touches every member of JetBlue. We have about 180 faculty members, a large percentage of whom come directly from our operation. Thus, we have been able to identify great operational doers and have attempted to turn them into exceptional educators through our faculty development program. We also continue to stay closely connected to the JetBlue operation by taking off our "JetBlue U" hats and going out and working on the front lines. Ultimately, this is where JetBlue makes its mark on the service industry – on the front lines, face to face with our customers. This approach to staying connected with our business has been exceptionally effective at ensuring our alignment with the various business units we support.
Service has become a point of differentiation for airlines, but in the current environment companies are stripping down service and amenities to cut costs. How do you balance training and superior service with cost pressures?
There has been a lot of cost-cutting in our industry. I teach an airline economics course at JetBlue U and have delivered it at over 500 orientations in nine years. We do this to help people understand the nature of the airline business and the impact of both internal and external factors on our potential success. Three years ago, jet fuel was about 85 cents a gallon. Last week it was over $2.50 per gallon. When we expect to use over half a billion gallons of jet fuel in a year, this is a significant problem. Yes, we continue to deal with a significant cost challenge. Am I faced with trying to trim my training budget? Absolutely. At the same time, I've never been asked to make a bad short-term decision at the expense of the long-term needs of our organization. Especially in the tough times, JetBlue U adds a great deal of value. For this reason, we continue to receive the funding and support we need to give our crewmembers the tools they need to succeed.
I would also add that there are certain benefits we derive from the cost constraints. We are constantly asked to find areas of greater efficiency and to seek out innovative approaches to solving performance problems. It is not uncommon to see instructors from one discipline teaching courses to students in other disciplines. For example, we have flight attendant instructors teach pilots about crew coordination. This optimizes the use of the faculty but also improves communications across work groups. This breaking down of departmental walls and improving CRM – which in our industry is "crewmember resource management" – is critical to safety and team effectiveness onboard our aircraft.
How do you demonstrate the bottom-line impact of your learning initiatives?
Some people will point to ROI [return on investment] from learning. While I would never suggest that we as learning leaders should stop trying to demonstrate the value we add, I find that ROI doesn't work particularly well to this end. I think learning people spend too much energy trying to justify their own existence or the value they add to the organization. A better answer than ROI, in my mind, starts with better partnerships with business unit leaders. This allows us to look at their objectives and find out how to help them succeed by building programs to close performance gaps. If we can help business unit leaders define their improvement opportunities and subsequently calculate the value of measurable improvement, then it is possible to build a compelling argument for the value added of an initiative that leads to improvement. Using this approach to better define the value of the learning function, we can leverage the support we receive from our business unit leaders when we sit down at the budget table to lock in our funding. Ultimately, to continue to receive funding – especially during tough financial times – we have to be able to build a compelling argument for our existence. We have to stop always trying to be the conductors of the train and become more comfortable taking on a supporting role in the creation of improved organizational performance.
The incidents with stranded planes during stormy weather in February 2007 led to changes in compensation and other policies at JetBlue. Did they also have an impact on training and development?
We got into trouble in the first place because we were committed to continuing to operate as long as we could do so safely. Other carriers were much more conservative and cancelled flights. Unfortunately, while this meant that many of our customers made it to their destinations, many others were stuck on our airplanes in the terrible weather. Some of our passengers were stuck on aircraft for a long time. Believe me, this was not fun for anyone. I spent six days at JFK apologizing to customers and handing out hundreds of business cards. They were the worst six days of my life – and I was in Desert Storm.
We had different consulting groups come in and identify what went wrong. When we peeled back the onion, there were, in fact, a number of little gaps in training. But the main thing we learned from that experience was that we didn't have the right systems in place to give people the information they needed. Our crewmembers were great at doing their jobs but they didn't have the information to communicate well with customers. We have come a long way from that experience and our customers have accepted our sincere apology for letting them down.
What have you learned from being in the inaugural class of the Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership?
I have the unique pleasure of being on the advisory board and in the first class. We are now about halfway through the program and it is offering exactly what I had hoped – a rounding-out opportunity. A large percentage of my classmates are already corporate learning leaders, but one interesting thing about the CLO career path is that we all come from someplace different. It is not like the CFO who typically works up through finance, the CIO who comes up through IT, or the COO who comes from the operation. Some CLOs were trainers, some were operators, and some were finance people. One of the key challenges in this kind of program is to take an incredibly diverse group of learning leaders and provide a program that rounds out their experience. Not many of us come from the finance side and so the program creates a mini-MBA in the context of the learning function. The first modules of the program addressed the CLO as strategic leader. We had a lot of discussions about setting corporate strategy, and how to know if the strategy is working, which I have found very useful in my work at JetBlue.
I’d like to think that this program had its beginnings a few years ago as a result of the discussions I had with my good friend Doug Lynch (vice dean at Penn's Graduate School of Education) about the challenge of developing learning leaders and the lack of a formalized educational program for this strategic corporate leader. Since then, the folks at Wharton and the GSE have done a fantastic job with faculty, content, and program execution. I couldn't be happier with any aspect of the program, and I look forward to remaining an active supporter and participant in this endeavor well after my doctoral work is complete.
