Video production: Andrew Kennedy Lewis
To achieve a true culture of learning, never underestimate the power of top-line executive sponsorship, says Allison Horn, managing director of learning and leadership development at Accenture.
Read the full transcript of Horn’s interview below:
Accenture is a large organization of about 460,000 people, and we are a learning organization through and through. We have senior executive support all the way to the top of our board that recognizes that learning is directly connected to individual growth, which is directly connected to organizational growth. So everything we do at Accenture is about growing our people so that we can grow our business, help our clients grow, and bring us into what we call “the new,” which is what’s one to three years out ahead of us.
The advice that I would give to other learning leaders trying to build a successful learning culture is to never underestimate the power of top-line executive sponsorship. We’re extremely fortunate at Accenture that our entire C-suite including our board, our board and our C-suite, are learners themselves. They’re passionate about learners, they’re curious individuals. They really set the tone, both with the words they use and the investments they make, but also with the role modeling that they do. Our C-suite is a group of continuous, extreme learners themselves and that is incredibly important for us as we set the tone across the rest of the culture, the expectations, as well as the opportunities for all 460,000 of our people to become extreme learners themselves.
