Why L&D Fails (And How to Fix It) with Fidelma Butler
episode
“HR Heretics” | How CPOs, CHROs, Founders, and Boards Build High Performing Companies
21 min
2 speakers
8 chapters
transcribed 17 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
For today's Essential Heretics 101 feature, Couchbase CPO Fidelma Butler discusses building leadership frameworks, embedding learning and workflows, and solving career development's promotion fixation.
What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of HR Heretics. Today we have Fidelma Butler on.
What is the overall problem with L&D that the episode introduces?
Fidelma, you are the chief people officer at Couchbase. You had a long stint at Zendesk. Welcome to the show.
Great. Thank you so much. I'm delighted to be here with Kelly and Nellan.
So we met at dinner a couple of weeks ago. And then we caught up after and we were talking about a couple of things, L and D and engagement. And friend of the pod, David Hanrahan, was on maybe last month and was like, look, I'm just starting a new cheap people officer gig. I'm actually thinking a lot about LND. I haven't seen it done super well. If anybody has ideas, let me know. And so that's the genesis for this conversation, which I tend to agree with David. I have not seen L and D done very well anywhere. I think when money was free, it was really easy to just throw dollars at the problem. You know, Google has more classes than God for their employees. How do you think about it, given Couchbase is a much different operation than some of the larger tech companies?
How did Couchbase start building a modern L&D function from scratch?
Yeah, look, I think I would start with saying that. L and D being done well is just so tailored and nuanced to The size and scale of the organization and the challenges that you're trying to solve. I actually know David very well. David actually hired me into Zendesk and then relocated me to the United States a few years ago. So he and I have spent a lot of time in the past talking about this particular topic. I think for me coming into Couchbase, the beauty of it in one way and the challenge was that there really was no learning and development happening. So this was about two and a quarter years ago, about 800 employees and post-IPOs. So public company with decent headcount and very, very little learning and development happening formally throughout the organization.
It was a space that just really hadn't been invested in. And I I mean that in terms of dollars or time. And for me, those leaders are the most critical part of learning and development. My team, any HR team, right, it's only ever gonna be so big. We're never gonna have all of the dollars that we need for the resources that we perhaps think that we should have. And so for me, the people leaders are the extension of the people team. So I always want to focus there. So step one for us at Couchbase was let's define what does good leadership mean here in this organization and then design some programming. On the back of that. And now we're actually talking about what what does the next phase look like?
Okay, so I I like the idea of basically saying like, you know, what is good leadership and what is top performance look like here?
Mm-hmm.
How did you figure out the definition of good leadership? 'Cause I think every company at some point runs into this problem, which is like, I want great leaders, and it's like, well
What three‑way framework does Fidelma use to define good leadership?
Like that means something different to everybody. Like Elon thinks about leaders one way versus, you know, Larry at Google. So how did you guys go about defining in that process?
Yeah. So I actually was very, very fortunate to bring a director of learning and development with me from a previous organization. And so very quickly she and I started having conversations with the CEO as to when we have a solid leader in this organization, somebody who's performing above what we would expect, what is it that they're bringing to the table and what are they doing differently? And we would collate these anecdotes that we were also hearing across the organization of people showing up particularly well in A particular example or t stories of maybe people who didn't work out and what did that entail? And very quickly we realized that we could ground it all in some language that she and I had actually been using elsewhere at the highest level and then adjust it for couch base below that.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:03–0:22
2
What is the overall problem with L&D that the episode introduces?
0:22–1:21
3
How did Couchbase start building a modern L&D function from scratch?
1:21–3:03
4
What three‑way framework does Fidelma use to define good leadership?
3:03–5:50
5
How can L&D meet people where they are instead of staying in theoretical land?
5:50–8:28
6
Why does embedding L&D directly into the day‑to‑day job matter?
8:28–9:17
7
What makes the “leaders teaching leaders” model effective at Couchbase?
9:17–17:43
8
Why do career‑development programs often feel like a checkbox exercise?
17:43–21:46
Speakers
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