'Enable employees to empower themselves'

At Moët Hennessy, learning is part of the day-to-day engagement with the job, said Sarah Herring, regional head of learning and development Asia Pacific.

“Learning is an ongoing appetite for gaining and exploring curiosity and possibilities,” she told HRD.

When immersive learning experiences are part of the job, employees will feel a sense of agency and see their role and the possibilities ahead from a new perspective, Herring said.

“Organisations that separate learning or use learning as an event tend to not have sticky learning, because it is not something that provides contextual relevance for an individual,” she said.

Herring comes from a background of neuroscience, with a focus on neuro education and positive psychology.

“You don’t empower someone to be a learner – you enable them to empower themselves,” she explained. “That’s something that’s done from an internal basis.”

Learning and development where retention is key

Herring will be speaking as part of a panel discussion “Empowering managers to foster a self-driven learning culture” at HRD’s Learning and Development Summit 2024 in Sydney on 30 October.

“I look at evidence-based applications of learning,” she said. “We don’t just take a program, teach it to a manager and then a manager teaches it – there is evidence to show that doesn’t work. What we do is enable our employees to be self-driven learners.”

When immersive learning experiences are encountered on the job, employees are empowered from an autonomy perspective, a competency perspective and a relational perspective to engage.

“That means the learning transfer is higher, the application is higher and the ability to grow within their role is higher, which means we have more cross-learning and more innovation happening,” she said.

‘Learning isn’t about modules’

The alternative approach to learning, where a worker attends a course and then goes back to doing the same thing they’ve always done, isn’t on Herring’s agenda.

“We have to rethink what learning is,” she said. “Learning isn’t about modules; it’s about capability building.”

Managers at Moët Hennessy oversee distribution in 27 countries across 13 different markets, with all the different regulations, policies and legal and marketing requirements.

“There is a lot of nuance required for each of those different countries and markets,” Herring said. “We really rely on our managers to enable our team members to explore and apply their expertise to do their jobs really well.”

Moët Hennessy is part of the LVMH group, which includes luxury brands Louis Vuitton, Dior, Bulgari, Tiffany and others.

Focus on career development

Traditional courses make up about 10% of L&D at Moët Hennessy, with short-term assignments, projects and “working in working circles” making the remainder. Employees are enabled to build capability and identify opportunities and roles they want to explore, and the skills they will need to get there.

“It’s all driven from the individual,” Herring said. “It’s not driven from the manager.”

A worker will be assessed on reaching a project goal based on conversations with a manager, a project lead and a mentor. This “open feedback loop” – part of an internal platform called Rise – allows for continuous renewal of ambitions.

“After they’ve completed that project they’ll seek feedback, reflect on the success of it, and then they'll either completely reinvent that goal or build on it further,” she said. “It’s more around: ‘Can they demonstrate that capability, can they embed that capability, and can they build on that capability?’ Because that’s where we see learning retention stick the most.”

The initiative has been running 18 months and Herring has noticed a difference, with a shift to “jungle gym” careers where people can build capability beyond what they thought possible. “People are more engaged, there is higher innovation and more psychological safety from our engagement surveys,” she said.

Learning and Development Summit 2024

At the HRD Learning and Development Summit 2024 on 30 October, Herring will join the panel discussion “Empowering managers to foster a self-driven learning culture”. The session will cover strategies that managers can use to drive engagement, inclusion and participation, embedding learning into their organisation’s day-to-day operations. 

• Providing managers with resources like facilitation guides and on-demand learning 
• Addressing the challenge of empowering managers to take responsibility for their teams’ learning rather than outsourcing it
• Overcoming the difficulty of shifting priorities from operational tasks to people development 

Register for HRD’s Learning and Development Summit 2024 here.