VF Corp.'s Ron Lawrence: Conduit Between Learning and Human Capital Management

Lawrence said he and his team are focused on fully leveraging workforce intelligence and VF’s data-driven human capital management work, and they are trying to use technology wherever possible so that managers and associates can use self-service learning outlets as needed. The company’s future learning forays will vary according to an individual’s position, level in the organization and geographic location, among other things.

“If I had to boil it down I would say we’re obsessed with two things,” Lawrence said. “One is innovation. We’re spending more and more of our resources teaching tools and practices tied to creativity and innovation in product development, supply chain and reinventing the customer experience. The second training obsession is how we field a high-performance team, developing managers’ abilities to assess their associates’ performance, communicate and give them really good feedback, especially really tough messages about inadequate performance. Those two thematic drivers will underlie a lot of training and development efforts.”

NAME: Ron Lawrence
TITLE: Vice President, Organizational Development
COMPANY: VF Corp.

SUCCESSES:

• VF has excellent retention rates among its high performers and rising talent as a result
of extensive talent development and robust performance management practices.
• VF believes in and utilizes a “leaders teach leadership” approach. For example, in the VF Leadership Institute, a weeklong, biannual program for rising leaders across the global enterprise, teams compete on a business case program judged by the CEO and other corporate officers. This program was profiled in a BusinessWeek article in October 2006.
• VF created an innovative talent development program called EMC2, a leadership mentoring program. EMC2 stands for Executive Mentoring Cohort 2 (the first cohort was a pilot), and is the company’s formal mentoring initiative. It pairs senior and junior leaders together on a monthly basis.