Building a Learning Culture at Merrill Lynch: Strategies and Innovations
Discover how Merrill Lynch fostered a learning culture through innovative programs, customized tools, and strategic leadership development under Stan O'Neill.
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How to Promote a Learning Culture By Roseanna DeMaria, Founder of DeMaria Group CLO at NYU SCPS
Added on 09/28/2024
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Speaker 1: How did you promote learning culture within all these organizations when you were at Merrill Lynch? How did you promote that culture? When I was brought to Merrill Lynch to do this job, Stan O'Neill had taken over, and he was looking to build an even better Merrill Lynch. So my mission was to execute his view on talent, and his view on talent was that of a meritocracy. And he basically infused his leadership team with people that in his mind fit into that learning organization. He allowed his head of HR to hire someone that had a very unconventional background. I didn't come in as some academics do in the area or someone with a lifelong HR career. He brought in a business person who had a, as you can tell, a strong point of view on what this meant. Merrill Lynch University that we built was the very first time Merrill had a program for managers to go from start to finish. And by the way, it was online with three onsites throughout the course of the year. Everything we did, that online program, we used an excellent learning tool called Harvard Managed Mentor, and we had Harvard Managed Mentor customize the simulations to Merrill-based simulations. So we were applying the business essential learnings in Merrill simulations throughout. That was an application tool that we used to pull through learning. We created a content management system that allowed our bankers and our business people to take their ideas, put something together, and then use it in the pitch for clients. We used an assessment tool globally that allowed us to look at cultural differences. So if we were going to make a pitch in Asia, we would assess the team we were putting together to do that pitch in Asia to see if they were a cultural fit. And if they weren't, we would educate them on where the issues were to maximize the sale. We were putting some science behind the art of learning and development. And in everything we did, it was premised on applying the learning. We launched a firm-wide talent review process that looked at each leader's strategic thinking, business results, personal leadership, and interpersonal leadership. And every leader, we identified the top 200 in Merrill. And then we created leadership development programs for them to go. I have great respect for Harvard Business School, and they were all action learning. So I would sit down with the faculty ahead of time and profile my leaders that were going. And they would be putting together – we would put the curriculum together jointly. And then the cohorts that I sent were cohorts that had to work together across the firm to create one firm and then present to their leaders when they came back. We were always solving problems. So all of that architecture was built around a business need.

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