L&D, leadership and building culture

Former Chief Learning Officer of Boeing and IBM, Guillermo Miranda, talks about selling to L&D, attracting top talent and building culture.

Welcome to the Emerge Product-Market Fit Academy series, where we bring you practical insights and advice from accomplished operators and founders in edtech. This series is dedicated to helping early stage edtech founders navigate the challenging path to achieving product-market fit.

Guillermo Miranda is one of the most experienced senior executives in the Talent Management and Learning & Development (L&D) space. He currently balances his time between advising unicorns such as BetterUp and Beamery, and early stage startups, like FutureFit AI, WISQ and CareerKarma.

Most recently he was Boeing’s Chief Learning Officer and Vice President of Leadership Development. Before joining Boeing in February 2021, he was IBM’s Global Head of CSR and President of the IBM Foundation. He has previously held roles as IBM’s Chief Learning Officer, the first People and Talent Head for the newly chartered IBM Digital Business Group, and Chief Human Resources Officer of the InterAmerican Development Bank Group.

Drawing from Guillermo’s wealth of experience with L&D, we’ll share the top challenges for L&D right now — and what they are looking for in solutions. We’ll also cover actionable insight on how to acquire, retain and optimise talent while intentionally building a company culture.

Guillermo Miranda, ex Chief Learning Officer at Boeing and IBM, Venture Partner at Emerge

In this article we cover:

1. Current opportunities in L&D
2. How to sell to L&D or HR leaders
3. How to win at talent — acquiring, retaining, and optimising
4. The importance of culture and how to build it

CURRENT OPPORTUNITIES IN L&D

Guillermo outlines three areas he considers ripe for innovation in L&D. Firstly, he emphasises the critical need for flawless User Experience (UX), particularly as L&D transitions from traditional training-focused systems to a more dynamic and integrated business outcome-oriented approach.

“We come from a space where the focus was on the administrators. The platforms were designed and created for the administrator to push activities onto learners. But then as we evolved, L&D became a multimodal experience. Multimodal can be very patchy or it can be flawless, as with many of our consumer experiences. That’s a clear area of opportunity: flawless UX experiences in the flow of work. The important thing, for the learner, is you see something cohesive, integrated, easy.

Startups like Kinkfolk for knowledge workers or Beekeeper for frontline employees, are anchoring their core value proposition on the ‘ease of use’ of their functionalities and user interface experience”

Secondly, Guillermo underscores the power of data, pointing to the shift from using data for the sake of reporting statistics to enabling data to be used for actionable insights — where he sees space for startups to support companies in learning from their data and using it to inform future opportunities. Thirdly, he sees immense potential in the emergence of hybrid learning coaches, AI-driven companions supporting users in their learning journey, thereby democratising personalised learning experiences.

However, the biggest white space he has observed, which he sees as having largely untapped potential, is for an integrator — an entity orchestrating harmonious experiences across the entire talent lifecycle.

“Companies have worked to optimise pieces of the employee talent lifecycle, but I am yet to see a real integrator behind that can help to create this seamless experience for the user and also to facilitate the whole ecosystem orchestration - a big challenge for CLOs.”

HOW TO SELL TO L&D OR HR LEADERS

Dos

Selling into L&D and HR can be a challenge for many founders. Guillermo shares a four-step framework for this process:

• Know your market: research the market well enough to know if you have clear product-fit alignment. Know whether your product is solving a pressing pain point for them — one that they are willing to pay for.
• Identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): understand which companies are closest to your perfect customer profile. Only focus companies that are your ICP, where there is a clear fit between their pain point and your product.
• Understand company dynamics: understand the dynamic of the companies that fit your ICP: what they do, how they create value, what gaps they have that your product fills, and where you can help them.
• Research stakeholders: know who your buyer would be at those companies. Remember, that it is not always the most obvious stakeholders. Instead of going down the traditional route of HR, Guillermo has seen companies succeed by approaching business units instead, such as the CIO or the CMO.

“A great real life example are the Engineering and Product teams in tech and financial services companies, because usually the central HR and Talent teams are spread too thin across many concurrent priorities. Startups focused on productivity and collaboration do great deals with the leaders of those teams.”

Don’ts

Avoid generic one-size-fits-all approaches in selling to L&D or HR leaders. Instead, Guillermo advocates understanding, and where necessary adapting to, companies’ unique cultures and requirements. Additionally, he highlights the two most common mistakes he sees founders make:

• Don’t sell functionalities, sell outcomes: The biggest mistake Guillermo has witnessed founders make is trying to sell functionalities instead of outcomes.

“If you are going to buy a car, you have several options in the market. The desired outcome is not to enjoy all the features on your dashboard. The desired outcome is transportation. We need to think the same way when we are selling to companies. You have to sell the outcome, you cannot sell functionalities. The functionalities will help and make your product more relevant, but start with the outcome and then go back into how you get into that outcome.”

• Don’t lead with technical jargon: instead, understand and align with the business language of your target customers.

“If I don’t understand the language of the business of that industry, I use my technical jargon, but then nobody is listening on the other side. They disconnect, and they are just pleasantly smiling until the meeting is finished. As a founder, you need to learn the language of the type of business that you are selling into.”

HOW TO WIN AT TALENT — ACQUIRING, RETAINING, AND OPTIMISING

In the dynamic landscape of early-stage startups, founders know that attracting and retaining top talent is crucial for success. Guillermo shares valuable insights into not only attracting talent but also optimising and retaining it as a startup progresses.

Attracting top talent

In the competitive world of early-stage startups, high-quality talent is in high demand. Guillermo shares four important principles to make your company more attractive to top talent:

• Autonomy and ownership: foster a culture that values autonomy, allowing team members the freedom to take ownership of their work. This empowerment creates the sense of responsibility and innovative thinking that top talent values.
• Open communication: establish an environment where open communication is paramount. A transparent culture — free from fear of disagreement — enhances collaboration, strengthens team bonds, and facilitates the exchange of ideas.
• Coaching and empowerment: cultivate a coaching-centric culture where founders empower team members to find solutions independently. This approach not only builds a sense of ownership but also encourages a proactive and self-sufficient mindset.
• Flexibility in work: whilst in-person team time is important, founders should also recognise the value placed by talent on flexibility in work arrangements. Whether through hybrid or remote options, providing flexibility empowers individuals to manage their work in a way that suits their needs, contributing to a balanced and accommodating work environment — and attracting a larger pool of high-quality talent.

Optimising and retaining top talent

Attracting top talent is only half the battle. As startups progress from seed to Series A, from Series A to Series B, and so on, Guillermo underscores the importance of maintaining a focus on optimising and retaining your talent through three key points:

• Role clarity: despite the dynamic nature of startups, maintaining role clarity, particularly during specific tasks or sprints, is crucial. Understanding each team member’s role ensures alignment and efficiency within the evolving organisation.
• Mindset alignment: build a cohesive culture by aligning the team on how you are creating value in the market and how you are differentiated — and returning to this when overcoming challenges. A shared understanding prevents conflicts arising from differing perspectives on the company’s core mission.
• Enabling teams: founders must continually enable their teams by providing necessary resources, tools, and skill development opportunities. Clear communication and consistent support are fundamental in being able to optimise and retain high performing teams.

By strategically attracting top talent through a culture of autonomy and communication, founders can focus on optimising and retaining this talent as the startup progresses, allowing for teams to scale and grow in independence.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CULTURE AND HOW TO BUILD IT

In exploring the dynamics of organisational culture, Guillermo shares insights into how culture is both established and maintained within a company. He defines culture as “the things that naturally happen without supervision”. Culture is the observable day-to-day behaviour of a company — a reflection of consistent actions aligned with intentional values.

Guillermo acknowledges the difficulty for founders wanting to translate their core values into concrete leadership standards. For him, it’s not just a matter of discussing ethics or integrity or writing them as company values on the wall. It’s about consistently embodying those principles.

“You have to walk the talk and have consistent behaviour that aligns with the standards that you are trying to push into your organisation — it is the only way that things get percolated and it is how you build credibility as a founder.”

Guillermo stresses the need for intentionality in shaping culture, urging founders to reflect on their decisions and openly discuss the values they want to instil. Culture exists, whether or not a founder actively creates it but by intentionally establishing culture, companies can avoid leaving it to chance and ensure it reflects their core principles.

“A great example of intentional culture is Twilio (a cloud communications unicorn that went public in 2016); as part of the emphasis on ‘tech-led innovation’, every new hire needs to learn how to code — even if they work in areas unrelated to the technology or product teams. So, as part of the onboarding journey, each new employee learns the basics of coding and must develop an app using the company’s API to be presented and discussed with other employees.”

Intentional culture is not always easy. Sometimes founders realise that they have prioritised other aspects over culture and have unintentionally nurtured a set of team dynamics that does not align with the values they find important. In this case, Guillermo recommends a reflective process to course correct whereby founders must start by acknowledging the current state, discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the status quo, and actively involve the entire organisation in making necessary adjustments. He underscores that culture is a collective effort and inclusive participation is crucial for successful changes.

When it comes to culture, the biggest dichotomy Guillermo sees with founders is an overemphasis on future aspirations at the expense of the present.

“Being aspirational is okay, but being only aspirational is not okay. You create culture every day, so live in the present and be clear about today. Aspirations don’t build cultures alone.”

SUMMARY

In this article, Guillermo Miranda, a seasoned executive in the L&D space, shares insights into current white spaces in L&D where he sees space for startups to innovate. He highlights practical advice on how to sell to L&D, emphasising market understanding and the importance of aligning products with specific needs. Guillermo also offers strategies for winning at talent in early-stage startups, focusing on attracting, optimising and retaining top talent. In exploring the importance of culture, he stresses the importance of consistent behaviour aligned with intentional values — especially in the earliest days of company building.

Emerge is a global pre-seed fund backed by 100+ of the world’s best edtech operators. Our vision is to democratise access to opportunity — by being a catalytic partner for early-stage edtech founders. If that’s you, get in touch and submit your deck on our website.

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