Securing the Future

<em>Security services company AlliedBarton revitalized its employee development program to drive leadership and ensure success in a time of rapid growth.</em><br /><br />Things have changed quite a bit since Bill Whitmore left his job as a policeman in 1981 and started as director of security at The Spectrum, the now-closed home of Philadelphia&rsquo;s 76ers basketball team and hockey&rsquo;s Flyers.<br /><br />For one, he&rsquo;s now chairman, president and CEO of AlliedBarton Security Services, the successor to that company he started his career with 29 years ago. But more significantly, the nature of the security services business has changed.<br /><br />AlliedBarton Security Services provides security officers for a range of venues, from office buildings and shopping malls to hospitals and high-security petrochemical plants. The company has doubled in size four times in the past decade through acquisitions and organic expansion, growing from a regional player in the mid-Atlantic states into a $1.6 billion company with more than 50,000 security officers nationwide.<br /><br />&ldquo;As our senior team strategically looked at this business, we realized almost every security company was pulling from the same general pool of employees,&rdquo; Whitmore said. &ldquo;In order for us to do well, we really felt we had to focus on the training and development of employees at every level of this company from the day they got here.&rdquo;<br /><br /><strong>Promoting Leadership and Purpose</strong><br />AlliedBarton&rsquo;s growth and sustained success point to an effective approach to people management, but company leaders said it needed a more sophisticated approach that better leveraged the company&rsquo;s raw talent.<br /><br />&ldquo;It was a little bit of a Darwinian approach to people development in that there was just innate, very good talent, but there really wasn&rsquo;t a thoughtful, systematic developmental process in place,&rdquo; said Jim Gillece, AlliedBarton&rsquo;s senior vice president and chief people officer.<br /><br />&ldquo;We had managers who were working to lead groups and sizes of groups where they never had those experiences in the past and had to grow into their clothes, as far as leadership and leadership development goes,&rdquo; he said.<br /><br />AlliedBarton provides leadership development to multiple levels of employees, from front-line security officers to middle managers and executives, beginning as early as recruitment, when they&rsquo;re introduced to the company&rsquo;s leadership philosophy, &ldquo;dare to be great.&rdquo; By focusing on leadership at all levels, the company aims to improve customer service and help employees see the importance of what they do.<br /><br />Developing employees can be good for the company&rsquo;s growth and lead to better service to clients, but it is also good for the community. Many of the company&rsquo;s employees come from poor backgrounds and lack significant educational opportunities. Whitmore called developing these employees the company&rsquo;s &ldquo;higher calling.&rdquo;<br /><br />&ldquo;If we don&rsquo;t train and develop and give hope for our people to succeed and do better and show them that we care about them, I think we&rsquo;ve failed,&rdquo; Whitmore said. &ldquo;We&rsquo;ve been a very successful company and I do believe that&rsquo;s at the core of it.&rdquo;<br /><br /><strong>Delivering on Business Needs</strong><br />With the philosophy of leadership at all levels articulated, AlliedBarton turned to revitalizing its development program to deliver on that purpose. The company had made many learning investments on the front line with security officers in the past, but hadn&rsquo;t done targeted investment at the leadership level.<br />&ldquo;If we can further improve our leadership development and train our managers to be better bosses, our retention will continue to improve and, more importantly, our customer service levels will continue to improve, which creates client retention,&rdquo; said Gillece. &ldquo;So it&rsquo;s a fairly easy formula for us to see.&rdquo;<br /><br />Rich Cordivari, vice president of learning and development, leads the company&rsquo;s team of 125 learning professionals, who deliver services to employees in more than 100 operating units. To start, they launched AlliedBarton Edge, the company&rsquo;s next-generation learning program, in January 2009 to replace the company&rsquo;s old online program, the AlliedBarton Academy.<br /><br />&ldquo;We&rsquo;re much larger than we were in the past, so the platform we were using just couldn&rsquo;t support an employee base of 50,000-plus,&rdquo; Cordivari said.<br />Cordivari said the new program allows employees to get information on demand in a portable and convenient format. Initial plans were to launch between 25 and 35 programs, similar to the number offered on the old Academy program, but the new platform enabled more rapid expansion.<br /><br />&ldquo;We were able to design, develop, program and launch 150 new courses on the AlliedBarton Edge during calendar year 2009, and we&rsquo;re adding them almost monthly,&rdquo; Cordivari said.<br /><br />Adoption picked up rapidly, too. Employees completed 25,000 courses annually on the old Academy program. With Edge, completions spiked to more than 200,000 within the first 10 months.<br /><br />&ldquo;While online training has been adopted in a way that I find very gratifying, traditional classroom, face-to-face personal training will never go away,&rdquo; Cordivari said. &ldquo;Having the advantage of being able to deliver things online for broad issues and then have very talented trainers address site-specific, state-specific, industry-specific issues in face-to-face classroom environments is the way we&rsquo;re able to ensure the quality and consistency.&rdquo;<br /><br />The AlliedBarton learning department trains employees in more than 350 topics based on their business, client- or industry-specific needs and Edge includes tracks from security officer training to management, leadership and sales development.<br /><br />Security officers receive on-boarding and skills training, but they are also able to access management training when they complete a certain number of prerequisites in order to enable career growth. The same applies to moving from manager to leader. The company bought Harvard Manage Mentor courses for a group of managers two years ago and has since expanded it and opened it up further in 2010. <br /><br />&ldquo;Every one of my direct reports has an objective as part of their bonus this year to take 15 online [Harvard] courses,&rdquo; Whitmore said, adding that this includes him as well. Despite objections from some that the CEO shouldn&rsquo;t be spending his valuable time taking online courses, Whitmore said it&rsquo;s vitally important that everyone participate: &ldquo;If I don&rsquo;t hold myself accountable to it, how can I hold anybody else accountable?&rdquo;<br /><br /><strong>Measuring Success</strong><br />AlliedBarton holds managers accountable for development, but also for developing their people. When employees are up for promotion, company leaders look at how they have trained and developed their staff. This focus on internal development leads to high retention.<br /><br />Cordivari estimated employee turnover at 30 to 40 percent in an industry with turnover sometimes as high as 200 to 300 percent.<br /><br />The ultimate goal is to continue to grow by developing employees, finding leaders within the company and providing them with the development experiences they need. <br /><br />&ldquo;The next leaders of our company are out there, maybe standing a post or sitting a midnight shift, and 10 years from now I&rsquo;d love nothing more than &hellip; having them sit in a position of additional authority, saying they&rsquo;ve done pretty well by AlliedBarton,&rdquo; Cordivari said.<br /><br />Gillece said AlliedBarton has made progress, but there&rsquo;s significant work to be done to promote the idea that everyone within the organization, regardless of their role, is a leader in some way. <br /><br />&ldquo;We are very much an ex-military, ex-law enforcement organization, and so everyone thinks of their boss, their supervisor, as the leader, but we really want to get a message out to the organization that everybody is a leader,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Daily, we have security officers saving lives on the front line.&rdquo;<br /><br />Leadership is the theme that brings the human capital pieces together and is the enabler of the strategy for growth going forward.<br /><br />&ldquo;From a recruitment and succession planning process, we understand what the gaps are at certain levels of leadership.&rdquo; Gillece said. &ldquo;From our [review] process, we understand, by level, what gaps there are, and we coordinate that with our learning and development group. It&rsquo;s really a coordinated process that we think will yield a much stronger leadership brand to our clients.&rdquo;<br /><br />While drawing the direct line between learning and development and business results is difficult, company leaders see the fruits of their investment in development in other ways. <br /><br />&ldquo;I look at the results our company has attained by following this strategy,&rdquo; Whitmore said. &ldquo;I look at the fact that not only anecdotally but through branding and surveys, our customer base comes back and says when you hire AlliedBarton, you&rsquo;re hiring them for their learning and development systems.&rdquo;