Meet longtime CLO Advisory Board member David DeFilippo, principal of DeFilippo Leadership Inc. and an executive coach at Harvard Business School.
by Elizabeth Loutfi-Hipchen
February 18, 2021
Chief Learning Officer recently sat down with David DeFilippo, principal of DeFilippo Leadership Inc. and an executive coach at Harvard Business School. DeFilippo has been in senior talent management and development for more than 25 years, and has previously served in numerous learning leader roles, including CLO for BNY Mellon and also for Suffolk Construction.
Chief Learning Officer: where’s your hometown?
I’m a Boston guy now, and my hometown was Dedham, Massachusetts.
CLO: What was your first official job in learning and development?
My first job out of college was as a high school teacher, coach and dorm parent, which was all learning and development skills in the classroom and outside of the classroom.
CLO: What lessons did you learn in 2020 that you’ve taken with you into 2021?
Besides making sure we have lots of toilet paper and other supplies in the house stockpiled, I’d say my lessons are these: 2020 has forced all of us to both design and implement learning solutions in new ways. It has also forced us to throw out old assumptions about in-person classroom training, and things that we were probably really wedded to. The takeaways I have from that are a couple of things: Designing learning solutions in a systematic multi-modality-way is more important now than ever, right? Those are things that we believed and we sort of did before, but now it’s essential.
And second, the role of the people manager is much more important now that we’re working in this virtual way because of skill reinforcement. Also, the whole idea of caring and supporting employees from being isolated and also having to work in a new way.
CLO: You’ve spent your life professionally, developing, coaching, mentoring others — can you share what your own professional development looks like?
At this point in my career, I really focus on three things. One is networking with colleagues. I learn a lot by talking with people and seeing what they’re up to. For example, Kevin Wilde and I talk probably once every two months. Second is writing articles, like my CLO column. To me, that’s a form of professional development because I’ll have the seedling of an idea in my head, and I have to figure out if it makes sense. So I have to do some research, I have to talk to some people, I have to think it through in an organized way. I’ve enjoyed that for that developmental reason. The other one is teaching. I teach in my practice, and I also teach a little bit with you guys with the CLO Accelerator Program. I always feel like having to teach something and articulate a point of view and a best practice is also good development for myself, because I have to make sure that what I’m saying will be credible and will be meaningful to other folks.
CLO: How do you enjoy spending your time outside of work?
My wife [and] our dogs, we do a lot of hiking. And we enjoy the performing arts. We do three things primarily: We spend a lot of time in music venues where the Boston Symphony plays, and we are into theater. We spend a lot of time watching dance, too. Probably the most famous dance festival in the country is out in the Berkshires, called Jacob’s Pillow. It’s a national landmark, and it’s very, very cool. I’d also call it spiritual because it’s really uplifting. That one circles back to education. My wife and I sponsor usually two students every summer to Jacob’s Pillow who are aspiring dancers. Both my wife and I have spent our careers in education, and we feel like it’s important to give back, particularly in the arts when a lot of these younger people couldn’t afford to attend a program like that.
CLO: What book, either audio or physical, or podcast has gotten you through this past year and the pandemic?
I read this column every day from The Boston Globe called “Fast Forward,” [it’s a] summary of the news. It’s kind of edgy and funny. I find [the author’s] perspective to be a good one.
CLO: In your opinion, what are some components of a robust L&D program?
There are four things that I think are really important. The first is what I’ll call organizational alignment or business alignment. Not all L&D is done for businesses, but if you’re working in a nonprofit you still want to have alignment. Number two, you use content and use models and so forth that are evidence-based; that you’re not making stuff up. The third element is a systematic learning design which kind of goes back to my earlier example about pre-work session application on the job. The fourth is measurement. To ensure you’re aligned with the organization, you want to have some measures that can tell you at the end of the program, or maybe even the end of an annual cycle.
CLO: What advice do you have for CLOs and learning leaders as they take on 2021?
It’s going to be both general advice and also 2021 advice. For earlier stage learning leaders, I think it’s really important to spend time in an aligned management role. At some point in your career, do a rotation and supervise frontline employees. I say that so that you could have, as a learning leader or learning professional, a perspective of what happens when you’re close to the product or close to the client. I think that’s invaluable. I did that, not knowing I was going to become a learning professional. I did it when I worked at UPS, I ran a call center and I had to supervise a bunch of people and interact with customers. And it’s really instructive to the way I think about designing learning solutions. The second point I would make would be to know the drivers of your organization’s performance. Do you know how your firm makes money? Do you know what your clients want? Do you know the financials of the business or the financials of a nonprofit? It’s things like reading the annual report, attending earnings calls. I’ve done things like interview the CFO to ask them questions and really understand the business. And then third, learning professionals, or any professional for that matter, but especially learning professionals, really need to master their craft. Invest in your development and their development a little bit at a time. Do one thing a year so that at the end of 10 years, you have this portfolio of learnings that serves you as a learning professional and continues to keep you relevant. As learning people, we have to be lifelong learners. The biggest mistake we can make is to not pick up new tools, or keep our tools sharp while we are the role models in the sense of skill development in our organizations.
And then my specific point for 2021, while the context has changed, the fundamentals have remained the same, [such as] the idea of the employee life cycle. How do you bring people into an organization? How do you develop them while they’re at the organization, and how do you do important things like measure and assess your talent? Those things should never change. They probably have to happen differently because of the space that we’re in.
ALSO READ: DeFilippo’s column, “On the Front Line.”
This article has been edited for brevity.